As mentioned in previous articles, much of my personal focus
in prayer is about deepening my relationship with God. I wish to cultivate an attitude of prayer
that sustains me throughout the day, whether I am preaching or doing chores or
sitting in an intentional time of prayer.
I don’t spend as much time as I used to asking for God’s action or
attention. I spend most of the time seeking
to sit in that loving presence.
Yet
there are a number of different traditions around prayer that do involve
seeking answers to problems and concerns.
People might think of Jesus’ words in the Sermon on the Mount. “Ask and it will be given to you; seek, and
you will find; knock, and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches
finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened. ”(Matthew 7:7-8) Another example is Abraham arguing with God
about the demise of Sodom in Genesis 18.
Abraham questions God about the justice of destroying the good along
with the evil in wiping out the whole city.
He gets God to agree to spare the city for the sake of fifty righteous
people and eventually talks God down to ten.
What,
then, should be our expectations of the power of prayer? Here I think we enter the realm of the
anecdote. I have heard stories of people
who have seen God’s intervention in response to their prayer or the prayers of
others. I have heard stories of people
who struggle when it seems that the answer to their prayer is, “No,” or “Not
yet.” There does not seem to be a
definite rule where the answer to prayer comes as the one praying expects.
Prayer
should not be a matter of sending our wish list to God, assuming that we have
some sort of power over God. While Jesus
does say, “Ask and it will be given to you,” he also seems to indicate in the
Lord’s Prayer that a deeper faith might limit the things that we are asking
for. In Lord’s Prayer we don’t pray for
healing or better relationships or world peace.
We pray that God’s will be done.
We pray for bread for the day (to have enough, not more than
enough). We pray for forgiveness and the
avoidance of temptation.
I
would suggest that the Lord’s Prayer and Jesus’ other teaching on prayer are
about challenging us to become God’s intervention in the world. We pray for world peace so that we might be
people who seek peace in the world. We
pray for an end to hunger so that we might work God’s will and share so that
none would be hungry. We pray for
healing and reconciliation so that we might be a source of healing and
reconciliation for the world.
I do
not write this to take away anyone’s hope in the miraculous. However, it has been my experience that often
the miraculous involves the miracle of other people open to being part of God’s
miracle. When we embrace our part in God’s
will and our role in God’s kingdom, miracles happen. The hungry are fed; the sick are healed; the
poor receive good news.
In
prayer God changes the world by changing who we are. Every encounter with the love of God has an
effect and we are not the same people as before. Prayer helps us grow into our role as the
children of God; as saints of God.
Prayer takes us into the depths of God’s love and sends us as God’s good
news for the world.
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