Last week in our glorious small group, a question came up regarding prayer. Do we pray for God's will to be done, do we pray for our own desires, or something of both?
I think that there's a couple of extremes on a continuum when it comes to our desires and prayer. On the one extreme, some folks pray that God's will be done as a smokescreen: they don't really trust that God is interested in hearing their requests or that he'll grant them, so the "your will be done" prayer is a way of avoiding genuine interaction with God. This would seem to defeat the purpose of prayer. If you related to your parents like that, it would be unhealthy. Similarly in this case with God. To be too afraid to lay your genuine, heart-felt requests before the Lord is symptomatic of a deeper issue of distrust and lack of freedom and the intimacy that I think God wants for us.
On the other extreme is the person who goes to God with an ultimatum: do this, or I refuse to believe in you/trust you/whatever. Throughout the gospels the demand for a sign or a miracle is used as a proof of shallow faith. Jesus hardly ever grants such requests.
It would seem that the best way to approach this tension is to hit somewhere in the middle. We genuinely and with reckless abandon come to God with our desires, our hopes, our dreams, our goals. In the process of praying those things up to the Lord, we submit them to Him. That's a real submission. Not a "fill out a card and submit it in the mail" kind of submission. A real submission, a full giving over of all our desires to the Lord. We lay out all that we want and in the end we entrust those things to God.
A pastor I once heard challenged us to take a good look at our prayers to see our idols. The things that we pray for the most might be the places where we are most tempted to worship something apart from God: family, success in a business or ministry context, etc. This is, I think, an interesting challenge worth considering on a regular basis.
I think that what's happening in prayer is so much more about the process of transformation than it is about outcomes. Outcomes matter. But who we're becoming in the midst of those outcomes, both the ones that we want and the ones that we don't, matters infinitely more. And so we must pray to the Lord with all our heart for the things that we want...and then leave those things there before him, allowing him to sort through all our jumbled motives, desires, fears and hopes so that he might purify those things and in the process purify us.
5 comments:
This is interesting Alex. Something I've been dealing with / thinking about lately.
We have some friends who recently lost a child at birth. And then less than 6 months later, she was pregnant and started bleeding. I just kept thinking "what do I pray?" I prayed that she would not miscarry. I prayed for God to protect the baby. To spare them this added grief. She miscarried.
I wonder ... is it so much about WHAT we pray as about HOW we respond when our prayers aren't answered the way we think they should be ? Is God really God in all circumstances ? Or only in the good ones ? He is the Same. Yesterday. Today. Forever. It's circumstances, and me, that change.
Just thinking out loud ...
~Bon
Does John condemn the sign-wanters or just the Synoptics?
In any case, a great post. So many things come down to balance, don't they? Makes it hard for me to plead my case on the few things I want to say are polarized! ;o)
great thoughts, bon. the issues in our small group related a good bit to health/medical issues as well. i think that there's just no easy way around people miscarrying twice--happened to us once and that was hard enough. wouldn't God want this as much or more than I would? that seems to be a no-brainer.
I think you're definitely right-on, though, about the issue of our response. Given that God doesn't always answer our prayers as we want him to, how do we deal with that?
Ashleigh, it's definitely in John...because that was the passage we were studying when the issue came up! See John 2, the religious leaders demanding a sign to see Jesus' authority to clear out the temple.
Yeah, oops... see, this is why you should do your homework.
John talks a lot more about signs showing who Jesus is! But apparently you're still not supposed to ask for one...
How to deal with it indeed ... I think that is the heart of the issue!
Just to clarify. Our friends only miscarried once. The first baby was carried to term. She went into labor naturally.
I think our human brains have this need to understand everything.(mine does anyway !) But we can't. For me, it's reconciling what I can't understand with who I know God is. Or leaving it unreconciled and just standing on WHO GOD IS.
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