What Prayer Promises

What Prayer Promises



It seems that a lot of religious types like to tell others that they should pray, as if prayer is a duty. I know that I, for one, can become lazy and forgetful, and sometimes I need a kick in the pants to get me back on my knees.

But prayer is less a duty than a gift. And what we usually need is not a scolding, but a reminder of the promise of prayer and the many gifts that God can lavish upon us through prayer.

The Best Gift of All

First things first. With prayer come a lot of gifts: faith, hope, courage, wisdom, and so on (more on that in a bit). But the key gift of prayer is God himself. If prayer is a conversation, it's about a relationship with Godand a relationship with God is less about things he can give us and more about getting to know God.



This is at the bull's eye of the Christian faith. Some people think Christianity is a set of morals or a certain way to worship or a philosophy of life. That's partly true, but primarily it's about experiencing God.

Let's do a quick Idiot's Guide to the Bible: Because of sin, people are alienated from God and cannot experience him truly or fully. Jesus, the Son of God, died and rose to new life to forgive people and make it possible for them to experience God again, in this life and forever.

That's basically it. And though we can experience God in a variety of ways, such as sitting in the woods or contemplating the stars, prayerconversing with Godis one of the most direct ways God has given us.

People experience God in prayer in a number of ways. Let's look at four and illustrate them with prayers that are found in Psalms, the prayer book of the Bible.

Gratitude

One of my college roommates was a religious skepticand a stubborn one, at that. We spent more than a few nights, sometimes going deep into the morning hours, debating theology and philosophy.

One 3 a.m. as we concluded another long philosophical debate about the existence of God, he said, "The only time I'm tempted to believe in God is when I'm in love."

That's because, I believe, he was looking for someone to thank.

Though we can be manifestly selfish a great deal of the time, there are moments when we're overwhelmed with the goodness of life. Maybe you have just taken in the sweeping vistas of the Grand Canyon, or studied a rose up close for 10 minutes. Maybe you've enjoyed a delightful meal with friends, or have just made love with your spouse. Perhaps you've just escaped some crisis, or maybe a child or a spouse has come through an operation. Whatever the cause, you're flooded with joy and a sense of deep appreciation, and you have this urge to say, "Thank you."


It's not enough just to "be thankful." This is the sort of drivel textbooks feed children these days when they discuss Thanksgiving. One of my kid's history books said the Pilgrims celebrated the first Thanksgiving because they "were thankful." Uh, not quite. They wanted to say "Thank you,'' and, being devout Christians, they wanted to say it to someone in particularand it wasn't the Indians (though they were invited to say thanks as well). When the human heart is thankful, it wants to say "Thank you."

The interesting thing when we express our gratitude to God is this: We don't run out of gratitudeinstead, we're filled with even more gratitude and joy. That's why the Psalms are littered with prayers of thanksgiving. One example, from Psalm 138, will do for now:

I will give thanks, O Lord, with all my heart;I will sing your praises before the gods.I bow before your holy Temple as I worship,I will give thanks to your namefor your unfailing love and faithfulness.

Even some of the Psalms that begin with desperate pleas ("Lord, help!") end with a note of thanksgiving ("Nevertheless, Lord, I will praise you!"). More on the Psalms later.

Transcendence

This large word expresses a large idea: To experience transcendence is to experience something that goes beyond (transcends) what we can see, feel, hear, smell, or touch.

Several beer commercials on TV have recently focused on people at the beach or at a barbecue, playing, laughing, generally having a good time, with a beer in hand. Then someone says, "It doesn't get any better than this." Sometimes life just life is pretty darn nice (even without beer).

But then there are other times when life boxes us in. It seems small, petty, and pointless. And that's when we say, "Is that all there is?"

Well, no, it isn't. There is something, someone, who transcends this world, one whose Spirit is in the world but not of it, one who can enlarge the soul, expand the mind, and help us experience something beyond this world the Uncreated, the Infinite, the Immortal. One of the great mysteries of prayer is that we can experience this someone who cannot be adequately described, thought of, or imagined.

It would be a pretty dumb thing to say that we can experience the inaccessible, if it weren't for the fact that people have done so for thousands of years. The Psalmist refers to this experience when he writes:

Come, let us sing to the Lord!Let us give a joyous shout to the rock of our salvation. . . .For the Lord is a great God,the great king above all gods.He owns the depths of the earth,

and even the mightiest mountains are his.The sea belongs to him, for he made it.His hands formed the dry land, too.Come, let us worship and bow down.Let us kneel before the Lord, our maker.


He's struggling to sing about the great God he has experienced, greater than his mind can fathom. One of my favorite hymns, which is titled by its first line, expresses it this way:

Immortal, invisible, God only wise,In light inaccessible hid from our eyes,Most blessed, most glorious, the ancient of days,Almighty, victorious, thy great name we praise.

Forgiveness

Modern psychology has taught us that we sometimes feel guilty about things we have no business feeling guilty about. Some have run with that insight and have concluded that a healthy human being shouldn't experience guilt at all. Wrong! Emotionally healthy people should feel guilt when they've done something wrong.

This is especially true when we turn to God in prayer. God is good, holy, and infinitely perfect in love. We, however, are not good, nor are we holy or very perfect in love. Healthy people feel bad about that. As one prayer, used in many liturgies, puts it, "We confess that we have sinned against you, in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done and by what we have left undone." That about sums it up and that's guilt.

Some people, though, feel so guilty, they can't find the courage to face God. So, they stop praying. I was a youth pastor for a number of years, and in one church, one young man had a habit of drinking on Saturday night. Then he'd skip church the next day, he said, because he felt guilty coming to church.

I understand the feeling, but he didn't understand that one of the best places to go when you're guilty is to prayer. In prayer, we can experience the forgiveness of God as we can nowhere else. More on this in later chapters, but for now, let me quote sections of perhaps the most joyful experience of forgiveness ever recorded: Psalm 103.

Praise the Lord, I tell myself,and never forget the good things he does for me.He forgives all my sins
and heals all my diseases. . . .The Lord is merciful and gracious,he is slow to get angry and full of unfailing love. . . .He has not punished us for all our sins,nor does he deal with us as we deserve. . . .He has removed our rebellious actsas far away from us as the east is from the west.

Love

This brings us to the essence of experiencing God: experiencing his love. This arises from a gradually increasing awareness that God loves not just the world, not just humankind, not just people God also loves me, an individual with a personality and memories like no other, a person with unique faults, special talents, particular sins, and even moments of unusual kindness.

The awareness of God's love grows as we meditate on the teachings of Jesus (a form of prayer we'll talk about later). In passages such as Matthew 18:1214. Though Jesus is speaking here specifically about children, biblical scholars recognize that the point applies to every human person:

"If a shepherd has 100 sheep and one wanders away and is lost, what will he do? Won't he leave the 99 others and go out into the hills to search for the lost one? And if he finds it, he will surely rejoice over it more than over the 99 that didn't wander away! In the same way, is it not my heavenly Father's will that even one of these little ones should perish?"

Or, take another saying: "Not even a sparrow, worth only half a penny, can fall to the ground without your Father knowing it. And the very hairs on your head are all numbered. So don't be afraid; you are more valuable to him than a whole flock of sparrows" (Matthew 10:2930).

Don't think you can squeeze out of this: God cares about you even if he can't number the hairs on your head because you don't have any. (Believe me, I know this more and more everyday.)

Anyway, you get the idea. No wonder the Psalms are full of praise to God for his goodness and love to us:

Shout with joy to the Lord, O earth,Worship the Lord with gladness.Come before him, singing with joy . . .!

For the Lord is good.His unfailing love continues forever,and his faithfulness continues to each generation.Psalm 100

It Changes Us

We are changed by the people we come to know usually for the better. I'm a different and mostly better person after having lived with my wife for these 25 years. I don't lose my temper as often; I'm a much better listener; I'm more sensitive to other's needs; I even eat my vegetables now.


I don't know that experiencing God will help you like vegetables, but knowing God does have a way of changing a person at the very core and in a number of ways.

You Understand Yourself Better

Socrates knew what he was talking about when he said, "Know yourself." All improvement in the character of our lives begins with self-knowledge. What Socrates didn't see was that you can know yourself better by knowing God.

This only makes sense. If you know the creator of something, you'll know a lot more about the things he or she has created. If you understand, for instance, that a fiction writer lost her father when she was a child, you'll understand better why in so many of her novels a father figure plays an important role.

Likewise, if you understand the being who created you, you'll better understand yourself. As the author of Genesis put it, "God created people in his own image; God patterned them after himself" (Genesis 1:27).

Theologians debate (as usual) exactly what this means, though they all agree that it has nothing to do with looks. But there is something central to our nature that is very much like God's nature. The better we understand the original, then the better we'll understand the image.

Wisdom

According to the Bible, a wise person is someone with "street smarts." It's not someone who spouts off important-sounding phrases about the meaning of life, but someone who knows what to do and what to say in all sorts of situations.

What exactly do you say to your boss when he asks you to do something you think is immoral? How do you figure out which college to go to? How do you handle your neighbor who leaves his garbage cans on your lawn?

This is the stuff of life, and we need wisdom to handle such situations. Prayer can help us grow in wisdom.

This doesn't mean that God will tell us exactly how to handle each situation that puzzles us. It does mean that, in prayer, we'll gain insights into ourselves and the situation we face. And those insights will help us gain "life smarts."

Courage and Hope

We'll cover these topics together because they go together in real life: We're more likely to have courage if we have hope. And life has a way of assaulting us so that we need regular doses of both.

Sometimes it's the big things that knock the wind out of us: A friend is battling colon cancer; a neighbor woman finds herself alone after 19 years of marriage because her husband left her; you discover your teenager is taking drugs; you've been fired.

Then again, sometimes it's lesser things that overwhelm us: a coworker who is a constant irritant, a bad back that throbs, a dead-end job.

Optimistic self-talk, will power, and gritting one's teeth will only get you so far. (Well, actually, they usually don't get me very far at all.) We quickly run out of resources to deal with these things and, almost instinctually, turn to God for courage to see us through and to work things for the good.

Building Character

To handle life's challenges and enjoy life's blessings, we need to be better people. You're never going to be able to help others unless you learn love and self-control. You're not going to be able to handle stress unless you get some peace into your heart. You're not going to be able to fully enjoy marriage or friendship unless you learn faithfulness. And on it goes.

Many places in the Bible summarize the most essential traits human beings need to possess and the way they can grow in them. One of my favorites is found in a letter the apostle (an apostle is "one who is sent out," such as the apostles who were sent by Jesus to spread his message) Paul wrote to the Galatians. He not only lists the traits, but he says that these come from an intimate acquaintance with God's spirit: "When the Holy Spirit controls our lives, he will produce his kind of fruit in us: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control" (Galatians 5:2223).

You can't get any better than this.


It Changes Other Things

It has been said, "Prayer changes things? No! Prayer changes people, and people change things."

Don't believe it at least, not all of it.

Yeah, most of the time it's me who needs changing. If a coworker is driving me crazy because he pops into my office and wastes my time with his drivel about his pet iguana, I've got to change a few things. I may need to learn more patience. I may need to become more assertive and tell him to get back to work. I may need to learn to like iguanas.

When I pray, "Lord, help good old Pete not to come into my office so much," God may make it plain to me that I'm the one who needs to do something. In fact, most of the time, that's exactly what God will do.

But that's not the case all the time. Sometimes God really will change Pete. He may help Pete understand that he's being a bore, maybe by planting a thought in his head or by having someone else yell at him.

Other people say that prayer doesn't change circumstances, but only people.

Don't believe that, either. Sure, it doesn't happen every day, but once in a while God changes circumstances regardless of people. This is called a miracle.

When I pastored a small church, we would invite people during worship to announce prayer requests before we prayed. Most weeks, people requested prayers for someone's flu or operation. Once in a while, we'd hear really bad news, like the week that one woman mentioned that her brother had inoperable cancer.

As I did every week, I prayed that God would heal all those who were sick, recognizing in my own mind that most of the time God heals people through doctors and medicine. I didn't have a whole lot of faith or hope about this woman's brother.

About a month later, before the Sunday service was about to begin, this woman told me before the service that her brother had gone in for a check-up and that the cancer had disappeared.


I said, "How wonderful!" but inside I was shocked and disappointed that I, a minister of the gospel, was shocked when God acted like God and that the prayer worked.

The fact is, many people have such stories to tell. God does, in fact, heal people miraculously it’s not an everyday thing, as some will lead you to believe. But neither should you throw in your lot with the skeptics. A reasonable person has to look at all the stories of healing and say, well, it may not happen all the time, but once in a while God does indeed change circumstances.

Does Prayer Change God's Mind?

Here's one more saying to think about: "Prayer does not change God, but changes him who prays." That's a philosopher speaking, one whom I happen to like: Sfren Kierkegaard. I think he's mostly right mostly, that is.


Here's the deal according to Kierkegaard and others: God knows everything that's going to happen ahead of time. God has a perfect will. No puny human being is going to get the infinitely wise and perfect God to change his mind and do something stupid. Nor is God going to change the future he has mapped out because some poor Harry in Bismarck, South Dakota, needs some help.

But here's the deal according to Jesus (a "philosopher" with a tad bigger following than old Sfren): "You parents if your children ask for a loaf of bread, do you give them a stone instead? Or if they ask for a fish, do you give them a snake? Of course not! If you sinful people know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give good gifts to those who ask him" (Matthew 7:911).

Jesus assumes that prayer doesn't just change only us it also makes a difference in what God does.


If you know any classic Christian theology, you know that what I've just said borders on dumb. God is supposed to be "immutable “that is, unchanging. That's because, as I said, he's got a perfect will that doesn't need changing. We change because we're not perfect; when a better idea comes our way, we say, "Good idea. Never thought of that." Then we abandon the old way. God, on the other hand, never says, "Good idea. I never thought of that." He already has thought of it, believe me.

But then we have this Jesus fellow who seems to know God better than anyone saying that if we ask God for things, it makes a difference in what he does.

Major mystery time! Here's one way to think about this ultimately unsolvable problem:

God will not change his mind about some things, no matter how hard we pray. If we ask God, "Help me to rob this bank," or "I'd like you to give me the strength to kill my boss," he's not going to do it. He's never going to change his mind about things like that.

There are other things God is going to do whether we pray or not. No need to pray, "Lord, I pray that the sun will rise tomorrow morning," or "Lord, I really hope gravity continues working all day."

But apparently there are things that God doesn't have a definite plan about, and these things he leaves open-ended. He'll do them if we pray for them; he won't do them if we don't pray. It's not so much a matter of changing his eternal, wise plan it's actually part of his eternal, wise plan that we get to decide some stuff.

Here's how Presbyterian theologian Donald Bloesch put it: "God's ultimate will is unchanging, but the way in which he chooses to realize this will is dependent on the prayers of his children. He wants us as covenant partners, not as automons or slaves."

That's how it works with my kids and me. Some things I'll never permit, no matter what ("Dad, can we each have TVs in our rooms?"). Some things I'll do whether they ask for it or not I'm going to pay the mortgage every month. But with some things, I'm open. For instance, I want my kids to try to play an instrument for a few years, but I really don't care which ones they play. I might direct them toward piano because I like it best and if they don't say anything, they'll end up playing piano. But if one of them says, "Dad, I'd like to play the flute," that's fine. Otherwise, they're going to get piano lessons.

So, no, prayer doesn't change God or his perfect will. But part of his perfect will is that we learn how to use our own wills wisely. That's one of the things prayer is for. In some cases, it helps us determine God's perfect will and align our wills with his. The well-known archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple, put it this way: "God is perfect love and perfect wisdom. We do not pray in order to change his will, but to bring our wills into harmony with his."


In other cases, prayer gives us the wisdom and courage to shape our lives within God's larger will. One of the lifelong learning curves of prayer is to learn to distinguish when we should just accept God's will and when we should keep pleading for him to do what we think seems to be best. As one famous prayer, called the Serenity Prayer (said to be authored by theologian Reinhold Niebuhr) puts it, "Lord, grant me the serenity to change the things I can, to accept the things I cannot, and the wisdom to know the difference."