"Please pray that I will get a new job...Prayers are requested for immediate healing of...Please pray I can find a new place to live...I've been praying for the same thing for ten years and nothing ever happens." Have you ever heard those phrases? I have. Now, there's nothing wrong with asking others to pray with us, and absolutely nothing wrong with praying! I wonder, though, when we talk about prayer in this way, if we really understand what prayer is?
As Westerners, we have the mindset (without thinking about it; that's what a mindset is) that everything must improve my life and make me happy in some way, or it's no good. Let's face it, we've done the same with prayer. We read in Philippians 4:6 "in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God" and presume that prayer is about telling God everything we need, expecting he will provide it.
If your child were to treat you that way, it would sound like "Daddy and Mommy, thank you for giving me breakfast this morning, and I need a bike and a sweater and a new video game and it's really, really important that we go to McDonald's for dinner tonight." And you'd be thinking "slow down a little, will ya?" But God is not a vending machine that dispenses our treats when we plug in the right words. (And Jesus said "your Father knows exactly what you need even before you ask him" in Matt. 6:8.)
The prayers of the Bible, especially in the Psalms, are much different -- lots of real complaints and requests, for sure, but when we read carefully, they show a process of deep surrender to the will of God. Robert Mulholland Jr. diagnoses prayer in Invitation to a Journey when he writes "our prayer tends to be a shopping list of things that need to be accomplished, an attempt to manipulate the symptoms of our lives without entering a deep, transforming relationship with God in the midst of what we think we need..." (105). Prayer, he reminds us, "is primarily relational, not functional." Henri Nouwen is quoted as saying "Prayer is the act by which we divest ourselves of all false belongings and become free to belong to God and God alone."
Prayer, then, is not trying to get God to do something for us, but is a process of surrendering ourselves to God for what he wants to do in us. That's a long and complex discussion, so we'll have to get back to it another week. But for now -- try just taking yourself to God without any pretense or any agenda, and spend time with him. Let me know how it goes, will you?
No comments:
Post a Comment