The Problem with Prayer
We think it’s what it isn’t.
“If you ask for anything, it’s yours baby!”
We have selective hearing (or reading).
We hear what we want to hear and ignore the rest.
And then when it doesn’t work out as we assumed it must, we are angry, not at our own foolishness, but at God who didn’t actually agree to signing over this particular blank check to us in the first place.
“Well I prayed and God didn’t answer.”
Therefore, what?
“So, I’m going to do my own thing from now on.”
You mean continue doing what you have been doing?
“Right!”
You mean the things that got you into the mess you are in right now? The mess you prayed God would fix miraculously?
So stop already.
Understand first of all that when you are in an emotional excited state your ability to make rational decisions is impaired (to put it mildly).
Now I am definitely not knocking the idea of praying and asking for what you need. But understand. You are making a request, not a demand. God will answer you, but my experience has been that his answers never come in the way I expect. He is not my robot or my Santa Claus. Also, the longer you continue practicing prayer (because that is what it is, never perfect) the more your eyes begin to open allowing you to see and understand more about God and your own heart as well.
Now let’s take a moment and study a few passages that sound like that blank check we’ve been talking about.
You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide, so that whatever you ask the Father in my name, he may give it to you.
John 15:16 (ESV)
In that day you will ask nothing of me. Truly, truly, I say to you, whatever you ask of the Father in my name, he will give it to you.
John 16:23 (ESV)
All that is really necessary to understand what Jesus is saying is to understand the context.
Both are part of one long address Jesus gave to his disciples on the evening before his crucifixion. To read it from the beginning go back to the first verse of chapter 14.
First, Jesus is speaking specifically to his disciples.
Second, he is equipping them for a ministry that for most of them will end in martyrdom.
Third, they were to ask because they knew that it would be what Jesus would want them to ask for; that it was consistent with what they saw Jesus do and ask his Heavenly Father for. This is what asking “in Jesus’s name” means.
I can’t honestly say that it is Jesus’s will I have a bright red Ferrari. In fact I can’t quite fit it in with what I believe he has really called me to do.
Is there anything wrong with owning such a vehicle?
Not at all.
But it just may not be what is best for me.
I would much rather, at the end of the day, believe I have pleased God, than to drive any particular vehicle, which is here today and gone tomorrow.
Now before you go on your way today, I do want you to know that what Jesus told his disciples he meant for you as well.
In Chapter 17 he concludes his Last Supper message with a prayer, and in his prayer he mentions you.
I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me.
John 17:20-21 (ESV)
If you have come to believe Jesus’s words that were passed down to you through the corridors of time then you too can pray and ask Jesus’s Father for anything that is consistent with what Jesus represents and big things will happen.
Not because of you, but because God keeps his word.
That’s how it works.
You may not get a Ferrari, but whatever you receive will be because it brings glory and honor to your Heavenly Father. That’s the real purpose for prayer in the first place, according to Jesus.
