Coming to Terms With Prayer
Posted July 31st, 2006I was four years old when I prayed fervently, every single night as I knelt by my bed, that our house would not burn down while I slept. The Lord answered my prayer, and the house did not burn down.
When I was 12, I prayed that the Lord would deliver me from nose cancer. I had read that a sunburn could give a person cancer. The report said that, since one’s nose sticks way out there into the summer sun’s rays, it is the spot on the body most susceptible to cancer.
So day after day I stared into the bathroom mirror, peering at my rosy, peeling nose. I became convinced that it was indeed getting smaller. It must be because of the cancer, I concluded. I felt okay otherwise, but I was sure I was dying.
So I prayed for the remainder of the long hot California summer about my nose cancer. I suffered in silence, not wanting my parents to worry. And once again the Lord answered my prayer; I did not die of nose cancer.
As life has continued, I have prayed about many things. Some of my later prayers have seemed less foolish than those prayers of my chronically worried youth. Some have been answered in the way I hoped. But others—including some uttered in near despair—apparently went unanswered.
Coming to terms with prayer is a challenge for many, including many Christians. Things just don’t always make sense.
I sometimes hear glowing reports by devout Christians about their “answered prayers.” Honestly, some of them do not encourage me at all. I understand now how foolish those “answered prayers” of my childhood were, and some of these others seem to fall into the same category.
Then there are my own “unanswered prayers”—some of them deeply disappointing. Put it all together and, I’ll be honest, I have been known to waver in my confidence. Maybe there are readers who can identify.
And what is one to make of these words of Jesus? “Whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours” (Mark 11:24 NIV).
Really? Whatever? Anything and everything? No exceptions? Just ask? That hasn’t been my experience. Is it because I haven’t believed hard enough? And by the way, why do we need to ask anyway? Doesn’t God already know about our needs? When we pray, are we supplying Him with new information?
I know I am not unique in asking these questions, and neither am I unique in discovering, despite the questions, that prayer can be a rich and satisfying experience with God.
A little common sense will show that Jesus’ words about prayer are not an unqualified blank check to everyone who aims a request into the sky and believes real hard. For that to be the case, God would be obliged to permanently suspend the laws of nature.
For example, what if God did answer the prayer of the sixth grader who, after completing a geography test, prayed, “Lord, please make St. Louis be the capital of Missouri.”
Or let’s imagine, on a more serious note, that President George W. Bush were to pray that hostilities in Iraq would end next week. The president is a Christian, and I’ll bet he’s praying about Iraq. If God is all-powerful, He could make Iraq peaceful with a simple thunderous snap of His omnipotent fingers. But the day-to-day practical evidence in the world is overwhelming: prayer does not work like that.
A review of relevant Scripture also makes it clear that Jesus was not issuing a blank check. In 1 John 3:22 we read something similar to Jesus’ words in the gospel of Mark. John says that, when we pray, believers can “receive from [God] anything we ask.” But notice, in the very same sentence John follows up with, “because we obey his commands and do what pleases him.” Further along in his letter John adds a further qualification: “This is the assurance we have in approaching God: that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us” (1 John 5:14 NIV, italics supplied).
And then in his letter to the Romans, Paul gets right down into the brutal reality of daily living: “We do not know what we ought to pray, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express” (Romans 8:26). That’s a pretty good description of my prayer life: not a triumphant series of bold requests and striking answers, but a realization that I don’t really know my way through life very well, and I surely do not always know what’s best, so I need to be with God—I just need to hang out in His presence.
Pastor John Brunt illustrates prayer by telling about a recent family visit, and time spent with his grandson. The toddler is just able to walk and talk, and is learning to discover his world. He grasps one of his grandpa’s big fingers and pulls him out to the backyard. The tike points to trees and shrubs and sprinklers and toys and bugs. They spend a long time together—much of the afternoon. Grandson tells grandfather many things in great detail, all of which grandfather already knows—except, of course, for those things that simply aren’t true at all. Grandfather receives no new information, and nothing at all is “accomplished” during the entire afternoon. Does that mean, asks Pastor Brunt, that the afternoon was useless?
Ultimately, prayer is about much more than getting “answers” from God. In its simplest and most profound sense, it is simply being with Him. Looked at in that way, those worried prayers of my childhood weren’t so foolish after all.
B.W.
August 14th, 2006 at 4:54 pm
I just read your editorial on the subject of answered prayer. The prayers that get answered are the sincere prayers. In the book “Christ’s Object Lessons,” Ellen White writes, "Not one sincere prayer is lost. Amid the anthems of the celestial choir, God hears the cries of the weakest of human beings. We pour out our heart's desire in our closets, we breathe a prayer as we walk by the way, and our words reach the throne of the Monarch of the universe. They may be inaudible to any human ear, but they cannot die away into silence, nor can they be lost through the activities of business that are going on. Nothing can drown the soul's desire. It rises above the din of the street, above the confusion of the multitude, to the heavenly courts. It is God to whom we are speaking, and our prayer is heard."
When you were four and twelve, your prayers were sincere. Who are you, in your supposedly enlightened state, to decide that there was not some lurking electrical problem in your childhood house that might have caused a fire, had not you been led by the Holy Spirit to pray for divine intervention? Sunburn does cause melanoma, often on noses. As you prayed for God to spare you from that particular malady, who is to say that there were not pre-cancerous cells present that would have later caused disfigurement or even death, had you not appealed to God for deliverance? On the other hand, your current "more enlightened" prayers may not be nearly so sincere!
I agree that the primary purpose of prayer is for fellowship and communion, not just to get things from God. On the other hand, God will do things in answer to prayer that He would not do if we didn't ask. God listens to more than just the words. He looks beyond what we think we need to what we really need, and He looks beyond our surface request to the desire behind the request. The desire is always answered, even though the details may vary.
Given that truth, there's no doubt that your childish prayers were answered. You were seeking peace and divine protection. You got it. You felt uneasy. You decided that fire and nose cancer were the dangers. Perhaps there were dangers you never dreamed of that God—in the Great Controversy between Christ and Satan—was able to protect you from, simply because you appealed your case to Him as best you understood. Even the kid who wanted St. Louis to be the capitol of Missouri, if his prayer was sincere, may have been really asking that God help him to pass his test or succeed in school. So even that prayer may have been answered.
True, not all prayers are answered at the time or in the way we expect. The Bible abounds with examples of sincere prayers (Mary and Martha's prayers for the healing of Lazarus, for example) that were not answered in the way the petitioners expected. But the Bible does not have a single example of a sincere prayer, no matter how awkwardly or foolishly expressed, to which God did not respond.
What is a sincere prayer? It is a prayer that rises from a heart that seeks God and His help. What is an insincere prayer? That would be like the formal prayers of the Pharisees, recited at the appropriate times and places, but with no heart desire backing up the words.
Sincere prayer gets answered. It's just that simple. True, God may not instantly send us the very thing for which we plead, any more than we always give our children exactly what they ask for. But He always answers. I memorized a poem when I was in grade school. It expresses well the reality of prayer:
December 2nd, 2006 at 9:48 pm
Prayer is simply communicating as with a friend.