Do You Believe in Prayer?

Welcome back everyone to Term 3. A new term with new hopes.

Let us start off the term with a personal question – do you believe in the power of prayer? When someone is facing a challenge in their life, do you tell them that you will “think about them” or do you say you will “pray for them”? Is there a difference? The more important part – do you then do what you say or is the mere sentiment enough? After all, it was to make the person in the crisis feel better knowing that you were in their corner in their time of need – wasn’t it?

Have you ever thought about what God hears from humanity? Prayers, praise, curse, condemnation, denial, fear, angst, anger, grief…I guess the list goes on. What a cacophony of sounds must be raised up to the Holy Throne of God! So many requests, so many pleas, so many bargains being made. One might think of the scene in ‘Bruce Almighty’ where Jim Carey has a computer program that states the prayer with a ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ button to click. It makes the fulfilment of prayer a little arbitrary and trivial, but, in honesty, I think many of us would see it as black and white – either God answers our prayers, or he does not. I think there is probably a bit more to this.

So, what did Jesus say about prayer and how to get what we want? The Gospel of Matthew (7:7-11) contains these words:

Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For the one who asks always receives; the one who searches always finds; the one who knocks will always have the door opened to them. Is there a man among you who would hand his son a stone when he asked for bread? Or would hand him a snake when he asked for a fish? If you…know how to give your children what is good, how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask him!

Seems straightforward – ask, seek, knock. Then, in John’s Gospel (14:13-14), we get:

Whatever you ask for in my name I will do, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If you ask for anything in my name, I will do it.

So, why are not our prayers answered even when we follow the instructions of Jesus?

Let us say Bob and Jane are equally qualified go for a job. Both present well and have good interviews. Unfortunately, they both cannot be hired – there is only one position. Bob and Jane both pray fervently to God after the interview, pleading their case to the Almighty. That evening Jane gets the call to say she has been successful. Does this mean that she was more favoured by God and that Bob’s prayer was not heard? Did God look at their Church attendance and list of good deeds and decide that the weight of the matter sided in Jane’s favour? Whilst I do not know for certain (not knowing the mind of God), I would like to think that this is not the case – at least, not the full story. What I can tell you with some degree of confidence…God loves all His children and wants the best for them.

Sometimes we ask for the wrong thing. Look again at the passage from Matthew – would God hand us something he knew was a ‘snake’ for us even though we thought it was a ‘fish’? Have you ever bought something or received something that you thought you really wanted only to discover almost immediately that it was not for you after all? I know this all too well from personal experience.

Sometimes we receive an answer to our prayer in another way and it takes time for this revelation to dawn on us. I was a professional musician, trained at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, until one morning I picked up a cup of tea and the tendon in my right arm popped out of the sheath, ending my music career. How could God let this happen? Did we not have a good relationship? There were many wrong turns and winding roads from that day to now, but when I look back on all the successes and failures, some my fault, others not, I see the hand of God at every stage, guide me towards where I stand today. I am truly grateful (now, not then) for every joy and tear along the way. Sometimes it takes time and perspective to see the plan God has for us – we work on His time; He does not work on ours! (We all need to remember this one.)

I also think that sometimes we need to be taught about humility and acceptance. Other times, perhaps, just like a mortal parent, our heavenly Father does not give in to everything His impetuous children ask for. Then there is the case of ‘free will’ – one of our greatest blessings and greatest curses. How much do we blame on God that is caused by human will? Free will is a whole topic on its own for another time!

I think C.S. Lewis (the author of Alice in Wonderland) summed it all up perfectly when he mused that we would spend most of eternity thanking God for all the prayers he did not answer.

So, when Jesus asks us to pray in his name – to ask, seek and knock, what was he wanting from us? It is an invitation for us to reach out for help in a concrete way. A prayer ‘through Christ’ includes both the Father in heaven, but also the ‘body of Christ’ here on earth. A prayer in Jesus’ name is not an incantation, but an invitation into the covenant of love. In this way, when you ask you will receive, when you seek you will find, and when you knock the door will be open. What awaits you is not necessarily the fulfilment of your prayer as you expected but rather a blessing and the trust that our heart and our lives rest in God’s protection. This is a promise that we can be one in His love, faith, and grace.

Furthermore, we sometimes also need to be part of the solution and be active in our prayers. As Pope Francis said:

You pray for the hungry. Then you feed them. This is how prayer works.

Jesus supported this idea. Straight after teaching the disciples the ‘Our Father’, he told the parable of a man who knocks on his neighbour’s door in the middle of the night to ask for bread as his friend has just arrived. The man tells him to go away – it is too late; everyone is asleep and he is not getting up to give it to him. Jesus says:

I tell you, if the man does not get up and give it to him for friendship’s sake, persistence will be enough to make him get up and give his friend all he wants.

Would you answer the prayer of the neighbour who knocks on your door, who, in seeking a loaf to feed his guest, asks you for help? (Notice what I did there – ask, seek, knock). In this way we can play our role in the fulfillment of prayer in this world for others. In other words, there is nothing we should expect from God that we are not willing to do ourselves. This is what Jesus taught us when, in the Lord’s prayer, he said

…forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.

Dr Nathan Leber