What I Write About

I write about the infinite number of intersections between every day life and the good news of the God who has come to get us.

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Why I Don't Believe in Prayer

A couple of weeks ago I posted some reflections from Psalm 20 called "Using, Not Trusting." There the psalmist talks about how they don't trust in their horses or chariots. They used them, but they weren't going to put their faith in them. Their faith was in the Lord.

In the post I applied this 'using but not trusting' principle to money. But the concept of using, not trusting, has continued to roll around in my head. The other day, it brought back one of the many glorious rants my systematic theology professor had, this one about prayer:
"Christians don't believe in prayer. Prayer is not what our hope or trust is about. Witches pray. Lots of people pray.

We believe in the one who is Lord over prayer, the God who hears our prayers and decides with perfect wisdom and power and grace and love and truth how to respond. But we don't believe in prayer. Our ability to pray is not what our hope is in. Our hope is in God. He hears our prayers and he uses them in his power and grace to affect change in our world. This is great and glorious. But let's not fool ourselves. Prayer is not the hope of our lives. Jesus is."
This was somewhat startling at the time. But now the truth of it is gloriously good news to me.

We are to use prayer, engage with it, appreciate it, be glad in it. But we are not to take pride in it, we are not to trust in our prayers to make things happen. It's not about us and our activities, the stuff that we can drum up or make happen--not even our prayers.

It's about God. This radical un-selfing is good news, if we let it do its' thing. Add prayer to money and employment/position on the growing list of things that we are to engage with or use but not trust in. I suspect for most of us there's some trusting of the wrong things going on in our lives.

"Some trust in horses, some trust in chariots, but we will trust in the name of the LORD our God."

2 comments:

Unknown said...

This reminds me of something we talked about in Pentateuch last quarter. Apparently, some scholars think "taking the name of the LORD in vain" originally referred to using the divine name as almost a "magic word" to guarantee a certain result.

I feel like an emphasis on the act of prayer itself rather than the God we pray to (who may or may not do what we want--or even seem to be listening in general) is really similar to that "magic word" idea--just because we speak our wishes doesn't call them into being.

Anyway, I thought it was an interesting twist on how we usually see that commandment that sort of related. :o)

Alex said...

good thoughts, ashleigh, and way to weigh in with your new-found cool seminary-type knowledge! you've gotten so much smarter in just a couple of quarters!

just kidding, thanks for chiming in here with a very relevant and thoughtful comment.