SHAPING THE FUTURE

Shaping the Future


It's time to get more specific now. Instead of looking at entire sections of the Bible to see how they can enhance prayer, for the next few chapters, we'll focus on some of the most well-known prayers of the Bible. This will help us see how dynamic and varied prayer can be, and it will teach us better how to pray through a variety of issues that most concern us.

We begin with one of the most common human concerns and one of the earliest biblical prayers. This concern has to do with the shape of the future: Is God's will set in stone? What role do we play in shaping our future? Do we simply submit to God's plan, or do we help shape it? This is something that a man named Abraham had to figure out. His encounter with God as recorded in Genesis 18 is one of the most humorous and instructive encounters in the Bible.


Subtle Arrival

The story begins innocently enough: "One day about noon, as Abraham was sitting at the entrance to his tent, he suddenly noticed three men standing nearby."


Abraham greeted his visitors and, with impeccable Middle Eastern manners, offered them hospitality: "Rest in the shade of this tree while my servants get some water to wash your feet," he said. "Let me prepare some food to refresh you. Please stay a while before continuing on your journey."

What Abraham didn't know at that moment was that he was entertaining the Lord. We readers are let in on the secret right away, though. The writer helps us understand right off that "the Lord appeared again to Abraham while he was camped near the oak grove belonging to Mamre" (about 17 miles south of Jerusalem). As the story unfolds, though, it becomes clearer to Abraham: "The men said" and "the Lord said" are used interchangeably, and we are given to understand that in some mysterious way, God appeared to Abraham through these Bedouin visitors.

This is a key point in prayer. Prayer is an encounter with God, and as such, it is not confined to those private moments when we are bowed in prayer. God will come to meet us at the oddest times in the middle of the day while we're daydreaming outside our tents and in the most mundane forms, such as through other people.


Early in college, I believed I had received a "call" to become a minister, so to get myself ready for ministry, I volunteered to help lead a variety of activities in my church becoming a sponsor for the junior high program, helping lead the college group, and so on. As the demands of the activities increased, and as my personal resources became depleted, I sank into discouragement. In anger and despair one day, I resigned all my church responsibilities and determined to do nothing more until I had clear direction from God.


A few months later, I was approached by some Christian friends at college, and out of the blue they asked if I would lead a Bible study held on campus. This came as a shock because I had only begun attending this Bible study and had made it a point to not get more involved than that. The timing, the request, and some inner sense convinced me then as it does today that God came to me in these friends and spoke to me.

The encounter, naturally, was ambiguous. No halos floated above my friends' heads, and their voices didn't boom majestically. But it was clear to me as I reflected and prayed about their request that this was nothing less than the voice of God to me. I tell this story not to say that I'm special, but only because it is so typical of many people's encounters with God. God does meet us outside of our prayer time, so all of life becomes material for prayer.

God's Chosen = Us!

Let's take up our story of Abraham again.

Then the men got up from their meal and started on toward Sodom. Abraham went with them part of the way.

"Should I hide my plan from Abraham?" the Lord asked. "For Abraham will become a great and mighty nation, and all the nations of the earth will be blessed through him. I have singled him out so that he will direct his sons and their families to keep the way of the Lord and do what is right and just."

First, note again the identification of these men with "the Lord." Second, note the special relationship of Abraham and God: Abraham is specially chosen of God to be a "blessing" to others, to be an instrument of God's love and grace.

"Why Abraham?" is the question that naturally arises, and a host of others soon follow. Rather than step into that theological minefield, let's take the long view: God's choosing Abraham was only the first step in his choosing all humankind, which according to Christian teachings, is what happened when Christ lived and died for us. For us today, the issue is not why Abraham was chosen, but why we are chosen to carry God's blessing to others.

Actually, even that is not the question: We're chosen because God is gracious. We certainly haven't done anything to deserve such a role in history. And yet, here we are.

This is, to say the least, a helpful perspective to enter into prayer with. We are not outsiders who must plead for an audience, but people who already have a special place in God's heart. We are sons and daughters, not strangers.

From time to time, children come knocking at my door, selling things such as peanut brittle or tickets to a pancake breakfast to raise money for Boy Scouts, Little League, or whatever. They usually make their pitch hesitantly, cautiously, without a lot of confidence that I'll buy from them.


When my youngest daughter approaches me about buying Girl Scout cookies, however, she's not only confident, but she almost demands that I buy them. The difference, of course, is that she is my daughter and has a special relationship with me. She feels free, therefore, to be more bold with me.


This is not unlike our relationship with God. We come as his children, and so we can be bold.

When God debated whether to let Abraham in on his divine plans, this isn't just telling of his particular relationship with Abraham. This is a literary device to show that God had the option of not letting Abrahamor us in on the deal. But biblical history shows that time and again he has let us in.

This is an illustration of the biblical belief that we can shape the future through our prayers which is what we come to next.

At a Board Meeting with God

The story continues:

So the Lord told Abraham, "I have heard that the people of Sodom and Gomorrah are extremely evil, and that everything they do is wicked. I am going down to see whether or not these reports are true."

The upshot, the writer suggests, is that God planned to destroy Sodom and Gomorrahand every last person in them. Abraham was horrified, and the ensuing dialogue has always struck me as one of the more humorous passages of the Bible.

Abraham reproached him and said, "Will you destroy both innocent and guilty alike? Suppose you find 50 innocent people there within the city will you still destroy it, and not spare it for their sakes? Surely you wouldn't do such a thing, destroying the innocent with the guilty exactly the same. Surely you wouldn't do that! Should the judge of all the earth do what is right?"

And the Lord replied, "If I find 50 innocent people in Sodom, I will spare the entire city for their sake."

Then Abraham spoke again. "Since I have begun, let me go on and speak further to my Lord, even though I am but dust and ashes. Suppose there are only 45? Will you destroy the city for lack of five?"

And the Lord said, "I will not destroy it if I find 45."

Then Abraham pressed his request further. "Suppose there are only 40?"

And the Lord replied, "I will not destroy it if there are 40."

"Please don't be angry, my Lord," Abraham pleaded. "Let me speak suppose only 30 are found?"

And the Lord replied, "I will not destroy it if there are 30."

Then Abraham said, "Since I have dared to speak to the Lord, let me continue suppose there are only 20?"

And the Lord said, "Then I will not destroy it for the sake of the 20."

Finally, Abraham said, "Lord, please do not get angry; I will speak but once more! Suppose only 10 are found there?"

And the Lord said, "For the sake of the 10, I will not destroy it."

Then the Lord went on his way when he had finished his conversation with Abraham, and Abraham returned to his tent.

This story illustrates God's "flexibility" regarding his will for the planet. (In fact, according to Genesis, God could not even find 10 faithful, so Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed.) Maybe we cannot alter God's plans completely, but like Abraham, we can influence it in significant ways. This means our own future what happens at our jobs, in our families, in our neighborhood, and even what happens in our nation.


One big difference between Abraham's story and ours is this: We often don't have a vivid conversation in which we see the future and its paths before us. Nor can we easily tell what exact difference our prayers make. It's like asking what would have happened if Ronald Reagan had not been elected president. We know what history was like with him as president, but we can only guess what it would have been like if Walter Mondale had been elected. At one level, we know that our one little vote didn't make a difference. At another level, every little vote for Ronald Reagan did.

At an even more profound level, my little prayer doesn't seem to make a difference, and yet it does. The biblical teaching is that it alters the future, though we cannot say exactly how the future would have been without our prayers. This is a rather sobering idea: God is not merely in the business of running the planet, but he invites us to help him run it. As such, he lets us in on his larger plan and then as we'll see in a moment allows us to help shape that plan.

This naturally changes the setting of prayer. Honest prayer will always be about my world and my personal concerns. But here we see that it is much larger than that. We are not only coming before a loving father with our personal needs in prayer, but we are also sitting in a board meeting in which our future and even the future of the planet is being discussed.

Thy Will Be Done My Way

This dialogue also illustrates another point: "Thy will be done" is the last prayer we pray, not the first. Ultimately, we're concerned about aligning our wills with God's, and when God seems intent on letting things take a certain course, we should submit as gracefully as we can. But in the meantime, we're free to argue, gripe, complain, wrestle, and fight with God. That is prayer at its most dynamic.

As we have noted again and again, prayer is conversation with God, the means of conducting a dynamic relationship and an honest relationship. Abraham questions the great Judge's very sense of justice and keeps pursuing him until he gets a satisfactory answer.

In his book Daring to Draw Near: People in Prayer, writer John White says this: "You cannot have a relationship with God without standing, at one time or another, precisely where Abraham stood." He goes on to explain his own dismay at various biblical incidents: one where God is said to have killed a man for simply touching the chest that held the Ten Commandments (2 Samuel 6:6).

"I remember kneeling on the boards of an old church hall, begging God to show me that he was not the God of 2 Samuel 6. How could I preach his saving mercy if he were in fact a petulant tyrant?

"I was frightened both by what I seemed to be seeing and by my own temerity in daring to judge the judge of the universe. Lord, how could you be like that? And his answer has always been to show me more of himself than I had seen before, so that my tears and perplexity gave way to awe and to worship."

True submission to God comes not by blindly and naively accepting whatever happens, but by working through your thoughts and emotions honestly and persistently with the one you both question and want to submit to.

At any rate, these are but some of the riches this dynamic prayer yields. It is well worth many a morning's meditation.