8. Helps in Prayer
Eight
Helps in Prayer
Let my prayer be counted as incense before thee” (Ps. 141:2, RSV).
“The four living creatures and the twenty-four elders fell down before the Lamb, each holding a harp, and with golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of the saints” (Rev. 5:8, RSV).
In these verses, our prayers are described as being like incense to God. All of our prayers are included, from the most eloquent ones to the most inarticulate groanings. What is incense good for? It appears to serve no practical purpose at all, and its smoke and fragrance soon dissipate. Our prayers are like that because they seem to accomplish little and they soon vanish, but God likes the smell of them.
Jesus prayed: He offered thanksgiving, He interceded for others, He made petitions. That the Son—coequal, coeternal, consubstantial with the Father—should need to come to the Father in prayer is a mystery. That we, God’s children, should be not only permitted but commanded to come is a mystery also. How does prayer work? Can we change the mind of a sovereign and omnipotent God? Does it matter when and how we utter our prayers?
We do not understand. We simply pray because this is how spiritual things have been set up. Just as the physical law of gravity causes the book to fall to the floor if I drop it, spiritual power is released through prayer. Generations of believers can testify that God meets us in prayer. He meets us because we invite Him to be with us, believing like children that our Father loves us. Our praying is not some kind of internal dialogue or an exercise in futility. God is listening.
Prayer Closets
Christians may pray anytime and anywhere, but we cannot well do without a special time and place to be alone with God each day. Although we are often advised to pray very early in the morning, most of us find that early morning is not an easy time to pray. I wonder if there is an easy time. The simple fact is that early morning is probably the only time when we can be fairly sure of not being interrupted, unless we are mothers of small children.
Where can we pray? The Lord advised us to go into our “closet” (Matt. 6:6, KJV), meaning any place apart from the eyes and the ears of others. Jesus went to the hills, to the wilderness, to a garden; His disciples to the seashore or to an upper room; Peter to a housetop. We may need to find a literal closet or a bathroom or a parked car. We may take a walk outdoors and pray. We may be confined to a wheelchair or a bed. But every day we must arrange a time and place to be alone with God, to talk to Him and to listen to Him.
When I stumble out of bed in the morning, put on a robe, and go into my study, words do not spring spontaneously to my lips, except perhaps, “Lord, here I am again to talk to you. It’s cold. I’m not feeling very spiritual. . . .” To help myself pray, I try to place myself consciously in the presence of God. Sometimes, I might look out my window to catch a glimpse of God’s creation. Everything out there is worshiping Him, every tree, every insect, the sky itself. All of heaven is worshiping as well, every hour of the day and night. Imagine! Here I am, a solitary individual, joining with the cherubim, seraphim, angels, archangels, and all of creation in praising our Creator and Sustainer.
Even with this in mind, praying is rarely easy for me. The apostle Paul said we “wrestle” in prayer, and that “our fight is not against any physical enemy: it is against organizations and powers that are spiritual. We are up against the unseen power that controls this dark world, and spiritual agents from the very headquarters of evil” (Eph. 6:12, Phillips). Seldom do we consider the nature of our opponent, and that is to his advantage. When we do recognize him for what he is, however, we have an inkling as to why prayer is so difficult. It’s the weapon that Unseen Power dreads most, and if he can get us to treat it casually, he can keep his hold.
As I grow old, I find that I am more conscious than ever of my need to pray, but at the same time it seems to become more of a struggle. It is harder to concentrate, for one thing. I seem to run short of words. Sometimes I feel the pressure of my undone tasks; there is so much to do. In an emergency, my words burst forth: “Oh God!” “Lord, help me!” During my ordinary quiet times, however, I tend to lapse into silence or to run through my prayer lists mechanically. It helps me to remember that I am here not only to pepper God with entreaties but also to adore Him. God is looking for worshipers. Will He always have to go to a church to find them, or might there be one here and there in an ordinary house, kneeling alone by a chair, simply loving Him?
When the Answer Is “No”
C. S. Lewis wrote, “Prayer is request. The essence of request, as distinct from compulsion, is that it may or may not be granted. And if an infinitely wise Being listens to the requests of finite and foolish creatures [that’s you and me], of course He will sometimes grant and sometimes refuse them.”* When I have been confronted with an outright denial of a request I have prayed, I have tried to understand the reasons.
Why does God say “no”?
1. For the sake of other people. Jesus prayed in Gethsemane, “If it be possible, let this cup pass.” God said “no” to His Son’s request, for the sake of you and me. We learn from that prayer that there are some perfectly good things that are outside the will of God. Although Jim Elliot had a wife and a baby and a mission station and a whole lot of people who needed him, when I prayed for his physical safety, the answer was “no.” God knew that, among other things, hundreds of people needed to be shaken up and that his wife’s path needed to be radically different than what we had planned. None of it would have happened had it not been for the deaths of Jim and the other four men.
2. Because He has something better. If I pray for what looks like an egg, God is not going to give me a scorpion. However, what looks like an egg to me is often a scorpion, so God says “no.” (Read Luke 11:12.) God may have something better for us, something beyond what we can imagine.
3. Because I am harboring sin. “If I had cherished sin in my heart, the Lord would not have listened” (Ps. 66:18, NIV). I may cry out to the Lord, but the heavens are like brass. He is “hiding His face” from me because of unrepented sin (see Mic. 3:4). Yet, “if our hearts do not condemn us, we have confidence before God; and we receive from him whatever we ask, because we keep his commandments and do what pleases him” (1 John 3:21–22, RSV). God is faithful to help us figure out what we are doing to stymie our prayers, and He gives us the grace to step free of it.
4. For reasons of His own that we do not need to know. “The secret things belong to the LORD our God” (Deut. 29:29, RSV). Down the road, we may understand better than we do now. Gladys Aylward, a little London parlor maid with no education and no money, believed that God had called her to China as a missionary. She weighed only about eighty pounds and stood about four feet, ten inches tall. When she was growing up, black-haired Gladys had wished fervently that God would give her the same long golden hair her friends had and that she would grow to be taller, as they were. But after a long solo trek by train across Europe, Russia, and Siberia, standing on the wharf in Shanghai, she looked around and realized that God had had His own reasons for creating her just as she was. “I looked around at all the people to whom Jehovah God had sent me. Every single one of them had black hair, and every single one of them had stopped growing when I did! And I said, ‘Lord God, You know what You are doing!’”
5. Because I am asking selfishly. I may not be asking for something that is in the will of God; I may be asking for the sake of my own glory. “You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions” (James 4:3, RSV). Of course, God knows that we often ask amiss through ignorance. His “no” shows that He is caring for us.
“We shall come one day to a heaven where we shall gratefully know that God’s great refusals were sometimes the true answers to our truest prayer,” wrote P. T. Forsyth.
The Power of the Written Prayer
As I mentioned in chapter five, I grew up in a family that put the highest value on spontaneous prayers. Eventually, after struggling with wandering thoughts, my prayer vocabulary limited by the urgency of my requests, my fatigue, or my inadequate grasp of God’s love, I realized that the feeling of inadequacy under which I often labored could be ameliorated by some of the “rote prayers” that I had earlier deplored. I saw that the Lord Himself had taught us one prayer that we all repeat word for word, “Our Father, who art in heaven . . .” As have many others before me, I discovered that the Bible is abounding in timeless, ready-made prayers.
For example, we can use the exact words of Ephesians 1:16–19 (RSV) to pray for someone:
I do not cease to give thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers, that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of him, having the eyes of your hearts enlightened, that you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power in us who believe, according to the working of his great might.
Nothing helps me more than the Book of Psalms. Here I find expression for my heartcries of praise, adoration, anguish, complaint, petition. It is immensely comforting to find that even David, the great king, bemoaned his loneliness; complained about his enemies and his pains, sorrow, and fears; and found ways to express praise that are far beyond my powers. I use his words and I am lifted out of myself to heights of adoration, even though I’m still the same ordinary woman alone in the same little room.
Also at the top of the list of things that have helped me in my private quiet times are the great old hymns, which express eloquently the things for which I want to pray but cannot find the words. Many hymns are prayers in themselves. I have most of them memorized, so I don’t have to get a hymnbook every time I need the words. Some of my favorite prayer-hymns are “O Worship the King.” “Teach Me Thy Way, O Lord,” “If Thou But Suffer God to Guide Thee.” “Praise, My Soul, the King of Heaven,” and “The Day Thou Gavest, Lord, Is Ended.”
Many people, and I am one of them, keep a prayer notebook. Families who gather to pray together sometimes maintain a family prayer notebook. My prayer notebook is not the same as my journal, which is where I record life events and truths God is showing me. For my prayer notebook, I use a little spiral notepad in which I record some of my bigger prayers with a date and a blank space after the prayer. Every now and then I go back and reread the last few pages. It is amazing and humbling to discover how many of those prayers I have forgotten—but God has answered. Of course I write His answer in the blank space, and I thank Him. (If I didn’t write down the prayers, I wouldn’t remember to thank Him.) It’s wonderfully faith-strengthening to go back over a whole year or so to review the prayers, which at the time might have been desperate ones. The answers are always so simple. God is not worried about my life, and I can trust Him with the whole business. My notebook reminds me that my wrestling can yield to peace and refreshment, even when I remain unable to predict the answers to my prayers.
I found an anonymous prayer in my mother’s little red prayer notebook, which was with her possessions after she died. She must have prayed it for me and my siblings and her grandchildren, as have I:
Father, our children keep.
We know not what is coming upon the earth.
Beneath the shadow of Thy heavenly wing,
O keep them, keep them, Thou who gavest them birth.
Father, draw nearer us.
Draw firmer around us Thy protecting arm.
O clasp our children closer to Thy side,
Uninjured in the day of earth’s alarm.
Then in Thy chambers hide,
O hide them and preserve them calm and safe
When sin abounds, and error flows abroad
And Satan tempts and human passions chafe.
O keep them undefiled,
Unspotted from a tempting world of sin,
That, clothed in white, through the bright city gates,
They may with us in triumph enter in.
I keep a collection of such prayers, written by others, to which I resort often when my own words fall short. I prefer ancient prayers such as the Te Deum (“To Thee, O God”), which was written originally in Latin. Such prayers carry me far above my own little list of concerns, circumscribed by my myopic spiritual vision.
We are just one voice in the whole collection of the heavenly creatures and all the rest of the church here on earth. There isn’t a minute of any hour when the church, the body of believers all over the world, is not praying. That thought encourages me tremendously as I try to bring my own feeble prayers before God.
Ours is a walk of faith, and the One to whom we pray is absolutely capable, faithful—and He loves to smell the incense of our prayers. Whether or not we see immediate answers, we can find His peace.
Te Deum Laudamus
We praise thee, O God: we acknowledge thee to be the Lord.
All the earth doth worship thee: the Father everlasting.
To thee all Angels cry aloud: the Heavens and all the Powers therein.
To thee Cherubim and Seraphim continually do cry,
Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of Sabaoth;
Heaven and earth are full of the Majesty of thy Glory.
The glorious company of the Apostles praise thee.
The goodly fellowship of the Prophets praise thee.
The noble army of Martyrs praise thee.
The holy Church throughout all the world doth acknowledge thee;
The Father of an infinite Majesty;
Thine honourable, true and only Son
Also the Holy Ghost, the Comforter.
Thou art the King of Glory, O Christ.
Thou art the everlasting Son of the Father.
When thou tookest upon to deliver man, thou didst not abhor the Virgin’s womb.
When thou hadst overcome the sharpness of death,
Thou didst open the Kingdom of Heaven to all believers.
Thou sittest at the right hand of God, in the Glory of the Father.
We believe that thou shalt come to be our Judge.
We therefore pray thee, help thy servants, whom thou hast redeemed with thy precious blood.
Make them to be numbered with thy Saints in glory everlasting.
O Lord, save thy people, and bless thine heritage.
Govern them, and lift them up for ever.
Day by day we magnify thee;
And we worship thy Name, ever world without end.
Vouchsafe, O Lord, to keep us this day without sin.
O Lord, have mercy upon us,
O Lord, let thy mercy lighten upon us, as our trust is in thee.
O Lord, in thee have I trusted; let me never be confounded.
(Attributed to Niceta of Remisiana, fourth-century bishop of what is now eastern Serbia)
*Lewis, C. S., “The Efficacy of Prayer,” in The World’s Last Night and Other Essays (New York City: Harcourt Brace, 1952).