2 The Path and the By-Paths
2 
The Path and the By-Paths
Teach me your way, O LORD,
that I may walk in your truth;
unite my heart to fear your name. . . .
Lead me in the path of your commandments,
for I delight in it.
Sheep farms are common in Britain, and that means that walkers in the English countryside become of necessity quite familiar with two kinds of trails. At the outset, they may look similar, but the outcome of following them is very different. A proper path takes you to a destination. It may be circuitous and it may lead you uphill, but it will certainly take you around the bog, and it will not walk you straight into the wall of a cliff. The second sort of trail, on the other hand, doesn’t lead anywhere, at least not anywhere good. It may at first look as well traveled as the proper path, but its shape was carved by the feet of sheep on their way to lunch, not by human shoes walking on an errand, and it is set to peter out. Sheep paths are like that. Once you are on such a trail you cannot tell where you will wind up; perhaps it will just be in the company of squirrels. You move along thinking, maybe, that you are taking a shortcut and that it is going to be easy traveling, but you eventually find that your advance is blocked, the trail runs out and you can’t get any farther. You are in fact on a by-path that has led you off track. By-paths might well display the sign: “Dead End, No Through Road,” for that is the truth about them. Now, as in walking trails, there are by-paths in life and in prayer, and some Christians get onto them and find themselves stuck. In this chapter we will take note of how that happens so that we may by God’s grace make sure that it doesn’t happen to us.
The image of the by-path appears in a vivid episode in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, and it is helpful to travel with Christian (who of course represents ourselves) through these pages of Bunyan’s powerful allegory to see how much damage following a by-path can do in one’s attempt to live a Christian life. Christian and Hopeful have been walking along a path beside a river, and it has been very pleasant. They drink the sparkling water and eat luscious fruit drooping from trees watered by the river. Even the leaves taste wonderful. Shimmering through the trees is a sunny meadow laced with lilies and they lie down to sleep in perfect contentment. But after a nap they know they must travel on, and the path they have followed now bends away from the river alongside which they had hoped to continue. This is how Bunyan narrates what happened next:
The way from the river was rough, and their feet tender by reason of their travels; so the souls of the pilgrims were much discouraged because of the way (Num. 21:4). Wherefore, still as they went on, they wished for a better way.
Now, a little before them, there was on the left hand of the road a meadow, and a stile to go over into it, and that meadow is called By-path Meadow. Then said Christian to his fellow,
CHR. If this meadow lieth along by our wayside, let’s go over into it.
Then he went to the stile to see and, behold, a path lay along by the way on the other side of the fence.
CHR. It is according to my wish; here is the easiest going. Come, good Hopeful, and let’s go over.
When they were gone over, and were got into the path, they found it very easy for their feet. . . .
[And so they went on for quite some time until] night came on, and it grew very dark . . . and now it began to rain, and thunder, and lightning in a most dreadful manner. And the water [of the river] rose amain. Then Hopeful groaned in himself saying:
HOPE. Oh, that I had kept on my way!
CHR. Who could have thought that this path should have led us out of the way? . . .
By this time the waters were greatly risen, by reason of which the way of going back was very dangerous. (Then I thought that it is easier going out of the way when we are in than going in when we are out.) Yet they adventured to go back; but it was so dark, and the flood was so high that in their going back they had like to have been drowned nine or ten times.
Neither could they, with all the skill they had, get again to the stile that night.
So they slept under a tree, and Giant Despair caught them next morning and incarcerated them in Doubting Castle. Doubt, leading to hopelessness and despair, is what Bunyan here pictures as the result of taking a by-path and going out of the right way.
Bunyan portrays by-paths as a threat to the larger Christian life, as indeed they are (more of that in a moment). The present point is that the danger and frustration of by-paths seems to apply in very specific ways to prayer. As we struggle to become men and women of prayer, we need to be wary of trails, however well worn, that lead us away from true praying. Along these by-paths weeds sprout in all directions, sending our attention off into fruitless and often painful distractions. We hope in this chapter to clear the ground for the life of prayer by getting rid of some of those weeds. True praying is an activity built on a theology, so we cannot look at either the work of prayer or the study of prayer in isolation from each other. We need to detect the ways and attitudes and beliefs in regard to prayer that undercut the reality of praying. Though praying ought to be a means of grace and of fulfillment to the heart, it doesn’t always operate as such. Why not? Perhaps because we’re doing it wrong.
AUTHENTIC PATHS
Counterfeits are always best identified by comparison with the genuine article. So before we look too closely at by-paths, we need to take a careful look at the authentic path of prayer. This covers three things. We distinguish them, though they belong together, because people tend to pray with any one of these in mind, often to the exclusion of the other two. Yet true praying involves a grasp of all three and is itself the fruit of taking all three to heart.
1. The authentic path of prayer follows instruction from Scripture. You see the word way used in Psalm 27:11 where the psalmist prays, “Teach me your way, O LORD, and lead me on a level path.” “Teach me your way”; that is a plea for instruction. If we want to pray rightly, we must take instruction from God through his Word, the Scriptures. His path for us in prayer, as in the rest of our living, is not one we know by instinct but is a learned way, one he teaches. If we want to walk the true path, we will diligently receive that instruction and heed it. Otherwise, our calling on God will truly, and sadly, be by-path praying.
Where then in Scripture do we find our instruction? Do we really need to ask? Precepts and promises about praying abound in both Testaments. So do examples of authentic praying, among them no less than 150 psalms, all of which are models of praise and thanksgiving or of petition and intercession or of meditations that should lead straight into one of these modes of addressing God. But how many in our day have taken these prayer models seriously to heart? Not using the Psalter and the great prayers of the Bible narrative as patterns for our own praying is one reason why, when we pray, we stumble and fumble so badly.
2. The authentic path of prayer expresses a God-taught commitment to a way of life. This is the way of living in accordance with the teaching that Scripture presents. We learn in the book of Acts that the believers’ path of godliness in those first Christian years was called “the Way.” Once you put faith in Jesus Christ and began to live as his disciple, following his teachings, you were on “the Way” (Acts 9:2; 19:9, 23; 24:14, 22). So in Psalm 16:11, for instance, the psalmist says, “You made known to me the path of life.” That is, you made known to me the way of responsive, grateful obedience, the way that I am going now. (The whole psalm celebrates the fact that David is now on track, by the grace of God.) “You made known to me the path of life,” and so my hope and my prospects have become gloriously clear. “In your presence there is fullness of joy; / at your right hand are pleasures forevermore.” That is the happy state to which the authentic path leads, a happiness that I begin to enjoy from the time I take my first steps on that true path, by my personal repentance of sin and faith in Christ as my sin-bearing Savior. As the path to life is embracing God’s instruction, so the path of life is living according to that instruction, daily following “the Way.” If our praying is authentic, it will reflect throughout the fact that this is the constant direction of our life. If not, it will truly and sadly be by-path praying.
3. The authentic path of prayer requires purity of heart as we pray. This means a great deal more than might at first appear. In contemporary society, when we speak of the heart in the metaphorical sense, not as the body’s blood pump but as an aspect of our selfhood, we are likely to be thinking of either a flood of emotional intensity (“I love you with all my heart”) or a flow of robust enthusiasm (“his heart is in what he is doing”), and not of anything more. But in the consistent Bible view the heart is nothing less than the taproot of the self, the deep source of our character and purposes, of our attitudes and responses, of our self-image and self-projection, in short, of the total human being that each of us is. The Bible—which means, God, as revealed in the Bible—looks at us from a unitary perspective, and we are, according to the God’s-eye view of us, good or bad according to our heart quality. Says Jesus: “What comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this defiles a person. For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander” (Mt 15:18-19, emphasis added). A bad-hearted person is like a bad tree producing bad fruit (Mt 12:33-35).
Conversely, in the parable of the sower, the seed sown in the good soil represents “those who, hearing the word, hold it fast in an honest and good heart, and bear fruit with patience” (Lk 8:15, emphasis added). We today assess people from the outside in grading them mainly by their skills, and we label them good people, despite their moral lapses, as long as they use their skills to do what we recognize as a good job. (Think of how we talk about frontline politicians, sports stars, entertainers, film actors and those who succeed in business.) God, however, assesses everyone from the inside out, measuring us entirely by the state of our hearts. It is with God’s method of assessment, which digs so much deeper than ours, that we must all finally come to terms, as now we explore the nature of authentic prayer.
Authentic praying, as previously said, requires of us purity of heart. Now what is that? If in everyday speech we refer to pure hearts, we are likely only to be identifying some people as not inclined, as others are, to sexual shenanigans or to the underhand exploitation of others for personal advancement or to cruel abuse of them for some perverted self-gratification. But Kierkegaard put his finger on the deep truth of the matter when he titled one of his books Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing. Jesus spelled out that truth when he said, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment” (Mt 22:37-38, emphasis added). Heart, soul and mind here are words of overlapping meaning, almost synonyms; Jesus is saying, as did Deuteronomy 6:5, which he is echoing, that we are to love our God with everything we have got. And in saying this he is effectively defining for us the purity of heart of which he had elsewhere said: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God” (Mt 5:8). Purity of heart is indeed a matter of willing one thing, namely to live every day of one’s life loving God.
How then should we spell out the dimensions of purity of heart? It is a matter of saying and meaning what originally the psalmist said: “Whom have I in heaven but you? / And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you” (Ps 73:25)—nothing, that is, that I would not consent to lose if adhering to God required it. Thus, it is a matter of wanting and valuing “fellowship . . . with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ” (1 Jn 1:3) more than I want or value anything else in this world. Again, it is a matter of developing, as Jonathan Edwards developed, “a God-entranced vision of all things,” so that the thought of everything being God’s property and in God’s hands, and of God as in reality doing all things well, despite short-term appearances, brings unending joy. And it is a matter of making knowing and loving and pleasing and praising God my life task, and of seeking to lead others into the same God-glorifying life pattern. This is the motivational attitude that is reflected and expressed in all authentic prayer. Without it our calling on God, however regular and orderly, will truly and sadly be by-path praying.
But if that is so, who dare pray? Who of us dare think of ourselves as pure-hearted according to the above analysis? The answer is: every regenerate Christian, every born-again believer, without a single exception. For in the new birth God re-creates our disordered, egocentric, anti-God, anti-moral hearts in such a way that the personal disposition we have described and which we see perfectly embodied and expressed in the Lord Jesus’ earthly life and ministry, has now become our personal disposition at the deepest level, natural and normal to us in the sense that we only know joy, peace, and contentment as we act out what we now find our heart prompting us to do. And what is that? To behave in a Christlike way, forming habits of loving and serving God and neighbor, and resisting the promptings of sin in our spiritual system as it urges us to leave undone the active loving service that is now natural and normal to us, and to do what is now unnatural and abnormal to us, namely disobey God and go our way rather than his, just as we did before our hearts were changed. Many Christians, it seems, do not appreciate what has happened to them in their new birth and are careless about obeying and pleasing God; many more have desperate struggles against longstanding sinful habits that in effect have become addictions to unrighteousness, and they often lose the battles they fight, and there are many who evidently think it does not matter whether one strives to perfect holiness of life or not. But it does!—for without a purpose of holiness (purity of heart, that is)—there can be no authentic praying.
Praying that is really praying, then, presupposes an all-around commitment to Christian living—“love that issues from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith,” as Paul expressed it to Timothy (1 Tim 1:5). By-paths in praying result primarily from lack of clear-headedness about this, as we have begun to see and will see more fully before this chapter ends. But as medical students need and are given a thorough grounding in physiology, that is the study of all aspects of the body’s healthy functioning, before being introduced to pathology, the study of how and why and when the body malfunctions, so we propose to lay out a further, fuller picture of the path of Christian living before we say any more about Christian pathology, in other words by-path phenomena in both living and praying. This is the picture of what Scripture calls the walk and what we propose to set forth as the hike.
THE HIKE
J. I. has been a Christian for over sixty years, and in his youth he did a lot of hiking. Carolyn is not quite such a lengthy veteran in faith, but she too has hiked over a wide variety of terrain both spiritually and geographically. We speak from our own experiences, therefore, as we develop this illustration.
Hiking is walking over open country with its ups and downs, the clear spaces and tricky spots, forests and cliffs, the rough and the smooth. In rough country, hiking will have you clambering over rocks and scrambling under brush acquiring various scrapes and scratches along the way, but in smooth meadowland you can stride out with no more damage than an occasional foot blister. Our point is that the spiritual path of a Christian living for God is something like a hike in its various stages with its varied challenges.
To guide our thinking about what constitutes normal Christian experience we turn again to John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, which provides a series of most illuminating pictures of stages in the Christian’s long walk home.
J. I. has read this small book at least once a year for more than half a century because he finds it a classic above all other classics on the Christian life. Pilgrim’s Progress (both parts) pictures the journey of life from the beginning of spiritual awareness right through to glory. Bunyan calls this journey a pilgrimage, but it could equally be called a hike. There is a constantly changing path, and Christian and his friends have to hike it. This hike, as Bunyan records it, divides into a number of separate episodes, each with its own motif. And each section ends with a little lyric. Granted, the lyric is mere doggerel, but Bunyan was very good at doggerel, and the spiritual message of these bits of semi-poetry is very telling—even to readers four hundred years later.
In the first section of the hike the person called Christian seeks and finds converting grace. Early in the book, having learned in the House of the Interpreter some initial truths about the real Christian life, he comes to the cross and finds his burden of guilt gone from his back. As he looks at the cross, he is conscious of being a new man in Christ; he takes three leaps for joy and goes on singing as follows:
Thus far did I come, laden with my sin;
Nor could aught ease the grief that I was in,
Till I came hither: what a place is this!
Must here be the beginning of my bliss?
Must here the burden fall from off my back?
Must here the strings that bound it to me crack?
Blest cross! Blest sepulcher! Blest rather be
The Man that there was put to shame for me!
Singing as he goes, and refusing to be daunted by the steepness of the hill Difficulty, Christian soon comes to House Beautiful, which is a picture of the church and its fellowship. There he learns many things that he needs to know. He goes on from there and conflict becomes the theme of the next episode. He fights successfully with the Devil, called Apollyon (that is, Destroyer), and soon thereafter travels through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, where all kinds of depressing, despairing thoughts crowd in upon him, and he wonders if he’ll ever get through. But he resolutely makes his way through these two forms of conflict and eventually comes out of the Valley of the Shadow, and this is the song that he sings at that point.
O world of wonders (I can say no less),
That I should be preserved in that distress
That I have met with here! Oh, blessed be
That hand that from it hath delivered me!
Dangers in darkness, devils, Hell, and sin,
Did compass me while I this vale was in;
Yea, snares, and pits, and traps, and nets did lie
My path about, that worthless, silly I
Might have been caught, entangled, and cast down:
But since I live, let Jesus wear the crown!
The theme changes in the next section. Companionship is the motif here. Christian catches up with Faithful, and they share their stories. Very soon Christian will lose Faithful, but then he will find another companion, a man named Hopeful, and they will travel the rest of their journey together. Living in fellowship and being sustained thereby is the thought behind each of these accounts of Christian’s companions.
Every believer needs at least one fellow Christian with whom to walk closely, in full and frank openness about the ongoing experiences of both parties. Some speak of this as an accountability relationship, each one looking after the other spiritually and being quite intentional about it. In an accountability relationship, you pray for each other, you inquire of each other and care for each other, you speak honestly of your own spiritual challenges and shortcomings, and you strengthen each other’s resolve to follow Christ. There is much to be said for the classic form of spiritual direction, in which the director’s care for the counselee is a one-way street, but there is, we think, even more to be said for the Puritan Bunyanesque idea of the “bosom friendship,” in which the care is mutual. And certainly, as Bunyan depicts it and as experience confirms, the Christian life is so incessantly taxing that all believers need all the counsel, help and encouragement that they can get today just as believers did in the Puritan age, 350 years ago. Faithful sings this song:
The trials that those men do meet withal,
That are obedient to the heavenly call,
Are manifold, and suited to the flesh,
And come, and come, and come again afresh:
That now, or sometime else, we by them may
Be taken, overcome and cast away.
Oh, let the pilgrims, let the pilgrims then
Be vigilant and quit themselves like men.
Plenty of rough stuff breaks surface in this little song! And it is significant that Faithful sings of pilgrims in the plural; they are traveling together—which, as we said, is a great means of grace. But Faithful does not last long. He gets martyred in Vanity Fair, which represents the cruelty of the world to Christian people. Yet martyrdom for fidelity is in truth a spiritual victory, an overcoming of the world that thinks it has overcome its victim. A heavenly chariot takes Faithful straight to the Celestial City. As Christian, having escaped Vanity Fair, goes on, this is the song he sings.
Well, Faithful, thou hast faithfully professed,
Unto thy Lord, with whom thou shalt be blest,
When faithless ones, with all their vain delights,
Are crying out under their hellish plights;
Sing, Faithful, sing, and let thy name survive,
For though they killed thee, thou art yet alive.
Yes, it is doggerel, but surely those last two lines are supremely thrilling doggerel. They proclaim the blessed hope of all Christ’s redeemed people: “For though they killed thee, thou art yet alive.”
Next, Christian—having linked up with Hopeful—passes through a long episode where the evil of moral and spiritual compromise is explored first through contact with a misleading man, an unprincipled worldling named By-ends from the City of Fair Speech, and some of his friends, and then through Demas, a silver miner who has a passion for worldly wealth. (Second Timothy 4:10 is being echoed here.) Both By-ends and Demas want Christian and Hopeful to join with them in what they are doing, but the pilgrims refuse and shake them off, and once again there is a little song Christian sings to mark the end of that episode.
By-ends and silver Demas both agree;
One calls, the other runs, that he may be
A sharer in his lucre; so these two
Take up in this world, and no further go.
Spiritually, By-ends and Demas have got stuck, and the implication is that they never get to the Celestial City. But on go the pilgrims, and the curtain rises on a new episode, where the theme is carelessness leading to collapse. That is the reality pictured in the story of Bypath Meadow and Giant Despair, at which we have already looked. The pilgrims finally escape Despair by using the “Key called Promise” to open all the doors and gates of Doubting Castle, and are able to move forward again along the true path, though somewhat scarred by their experience. As they go on together they sing this song.
Out of the way we went, and then we found
What ’twas to tread upon forbidden ground:
And let them that come after have a care,
Lest heedlessness make them, as we, to fare,
Lest they for trespassing his prisoners are,
Whose castle’s Doubting and whose name’s Despair.
We, Bunyan’s readers, have now been warned! Failures in faithfulness dissolve assurance both of personal salvation and of the truth of the gospel itself. Finally the pilgrims face the crossing of Jordan, in other words dying, something for which all of us must prepare. Life is going to stop, and we must be ready for it to stop whenever and in whatever way in the providence of God that happens. Here Bunyan paints in verse the glory to which Christian and Hopeful finally come. This time the pilgrims do not themselves sing the doggerel, but Bunyan prints it in his margin on their behalf, and this is how it goes.
Now, now look how the holy pilgrims ride.
Clouds are their chariots, angels are their guide.
Who would not here for him all hazards run,
That thus provides for his when this world’s done.
Authentic prayer, we said, issues from the authentically Christian heart of a born-again believer leading the authentic Christian life. Viewed from the outside the authentic Christian life is a many-sided affair, involving moral integrity, self-discipline, self-sacrifice, a quest for wisdom and much more. Viewed from the inside, however, it is essentially heart religion, first to last, a quest for more of God and more of life, both here and hereafter; and Bunyan’s dramatizing of its trials and triumphs seems to us to ring as true today as ever it did—to be, in other words, totally realistic by biblical standards for any and every age. Neither the grace of God, nor the malice of Satan, nor the ways Christians are tempted to leave the right path, nor the way heart-to-heart fellowship refreshes, reenergizes, encourages and keeps us steady (to look no further) are any different now from what they were then. Bunyan’s seventeenth-century idiom may strike us as quaint, but Bunyan’s seventeenth-century wisdom strikes us as—well, simply wise. The life of trials and triumphs, dangers and deliverances that he describes is the hike on which all Christians have set out, and it constitutes the path from which so many by-paths beckon, on which so many pressures have to be resisted if we are not to go astray. Understanding this is basic to understanding what makes praying real, so let us explore the picture of the hike a bit further.
We are building up a picture of the Christian life in three stages. This procedure is comparable to painting a picture in the most literal sense. A painter is likely to start by laying down greens and blues, then blend in reds and golds, and finally add tints of pink and orange. Only at the end of the process does the full picture emerge. Presenting the Christian life as a hike, with ups and downs, rough and smooth, easy places and hard ones, and a glorious home awaiting us at journey’s end, is the green-and-blue stage: the colors are more bold, perhaps, than warm. Now we turn to celebrating the fact that God is with us in faithfulness throughout our journey: reds and golds, bright, warm colors here. Then we will complete our picture by saying more of the love of the “best friend,” our Lord Jesus Christ, who is at our side throughout our journey. That will be the adding of pink and orange, the brightest colors of all, completing the picture.
THE GOOD COMPANIONS
J. B. Priestley wrote a once-famous novel titled The Good Companions. J. I. remembers receiving a copy as a prize at school. We now borrow Priestley’s title and apply it to the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. All Christians hike in company with the holy Three—the Father beckoning us forward, the Son walking with us, alongside us always as he promised (see Mt 28:20), and the Spirit indwelling us to give clarity of thought and strength of heart, joy, hope, and love. Good Companions they are indeed. Traveling with the Trinity means that day by day we seek to please our Triune God, and day by day we receive help and pleasure and all kinds of good things from our God. He—the he who is they—is holy and he calls us to holiness, showing us the way and strengthening us to walk in it faithfully. When we speak about the three persons who are the one God as God above us (the Father), God within us (the Holy Spirit) and God beside us (the Lord Jesus), we are telling it like it is.
Now this holy triune God is pledged to Christians as a husband is pledged to his wife. That pledge is of total faithfulness within a bond that will not be broken. In the biblical teaching on marriage, a good husband expresses this faithfulness in loving care, in providing for his wife’s needs, and in constant enriching of their relationship. Such is the ideal. This is also how the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit care for us. Faithfulness to the covenant, loving oversight, providing what we really need and enriching our mutual relationship as we move on together is the essence of the divine action. Yet at the same time this holy, husbandlike Triune God is a God who hides, in the simple sense that we cannot always see what he is doing. Things happen that surprise, bewilder and grieve us, and God does not always tell us why this or that has taken place. He only reiterates, “I am with you always” and promises to keep us going through whatever the trouble is. There’s a good deal in Scripture about God hiding himself in this sense, which we must not overlook.
The book of Psalms has often been described as Jesus’ hymn book and prayer book. It consists of 150 poignant outpourings of praise, petition, thankfulness, complaint, testimony, celebration, meditation and intercession: prose poems from David and others, people whose horizon of thought and vision was totally filled with God, whose lives were ventures of faith and hope all the way, and whose passion to know, see, exalt, and enjoy God was unlimited. The Psalter has been called the little Bible because, despite the temporary and typical aspects of the Old Testament era under which it was produced, it covers the whole range of the spiritual experience of God’s people in every age, ours as much as any. And though we Christians are ahead of the psalmists in our knowledge of God’s triunity and of salvation through our Savior Jesus Christ, the incarnate mediator, substitutionary sin-bearer and reigning Lord, the psalmists remain far ahead of us in the integrity and intensity of their devotion. Psalm 86 contains the noteworthy plea, “Unite my heart”—integrate it, focus it, purify it and harness it—“to fear your name,” followed by the equally noteworthy resolve, “I give thanks to you, O Lord my God, with my whole [united] heart, / and I will glorify your name forever” (vv. 11-12, emphasis added). The more we soak our souls in the psalms, the more we learn how great is the distance between us and these exemplars of mature pure-heartedness.
You would have thought these men would constantly enjoy God’s smile of approval, but no. A recurring complaint in the psalms from the lips of these people of God is that God is “hiding his face” from them, so that (this is the picture) his worshiper no longer senses God’s presence, and it looks and feels as if God’s regular care for the worshiper and for others in their current situation has simply stopped. “Why do you hide your face? / Why do you forget our affliction and oppression?” “Hide not your face from me. / Turn not your servant away in anger, / O you who have been my help.” “How long will you hide your face from me?” (Ps 44:24; 27:9; 13:1). This is not the place to explore what reasons, disciplinary and nurturing, God may have for hiding his face; the only point here is that sometimes he does it, even from exemplary believers. As it happened to the psalmists, no doubt it will happen to us too.
So we hike with our God. Sometimes we find that we are being taken through strange and unwelcome country. Sometimes despite our knowledge of the permanence of God’s covenant with us, we feel desolate and desperate. But if we are Christians, we are all the time being led. Our God is with us, he knows what he is doing, and you and I must learn to walk with him and trust him, even when we cannot feel that he is near. So, with this second layer of color applied to our painting, our image of the Christian life becomes more solid. And there is more.
HIKING WITH JESUS CHRIST
The third layer of our painting of the Christian life is something at which we have already hinted. Hiking with God is quite specifically hiking with Jesus Christ, our Savior who calls us his friends. Friendship is a key term for explaining the nature of the Christian life of fellowship with God. Fellowship today has become a rather colorless word. We Christians make a great deal of it, but actually it is not a vivid word any more, if ever it was one. The word friendship, however, has color and vividness and warmth. Human friendships are precious enough, but this friendship is announced by no less a person than Christ himself. The Lord Jesus said to his first disciples, “No longer do I call you servants, . . . but I have called you friends” (Jn 15:15). Jesus used the term friends having just told them, “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lays down his life for his friends” (Jn 15:13). He wanted them to understand that on the cross he was serving and saving them—his friends. Them alone? No—all believers, which means us too.
The thought of friendship between God and believers was not new when Jesus spoke those words. Abraham, Israel’s patriarch in the Old Testament, was called “a friend of God” (Jas 2:23, echoing 2 Chron 20:7; Is 41:8) and the New Testament cites him as a model for faith. Clearly God values friendship with his people and builds that friendship on their faith. So we must take the category of friendship seriously and think of the Lord Jesus specifically as the special friend in whose company we make our progress as pilgrims and travelers. We speak of the three persons of the triune Godhead as our good companions on our journey, but now we are zooming in on the One who is to be the direct focus of all of our grateful attention and expectation—Jesus Christ our self-appointed friend. Jesus promises each of us his personal presence as long as life shall last—and beyond.
The apostle Paul is the supreme model of the Christ-centeredness in which the Christian’s friendship with the Lord, responding to the Lord’s declared friendship with us who believe, finds expression: “To me to live is Christ” and to “gain Christ and be found in him” is his goal (Phil 1:21; 3:8-9). “Christ . . . lives in me,” said Paul, and Paul himself lives “by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” (Gal 2:20). It is with Christ that he pleads for healing of the thorn in his flesh, and it is Christ who tells him, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor 12:9). And it was of Christ that he was speaking when he wrote:
At my first defense [in Rome] no one came to stand by me, but all deserted me. . . . But the Lord stood by me and strengthened me, so that through me the message might be fully proclaimed and all the Gentiles might hear it. So I was rescued from the lion’s mouth. The Lord will rescue me from every evil deed and bring me safely into his heavenly kingdom. To him be the glory forever and ever. Amen. (2 Tim 4:16-18)
Evidently what Paul means is that, standing unexpectedly alone in court, he prayed to Jesus for help and then found he had a telling answer ready for every question asked, so that he was dismissed with respect. Reliance for help is of course one of the privileges of friendship. It is clear that Paul hiked with Christ all of the time, in gratitude and dependence and with hope, and he found his Savior to be a trusty friend indeed. In this Paul serves as a model for us.
Some today have had little experience of real, deep friendship, so let us think for a moment of what friendship means at its best. It has been said that a friend is a push when you have stopped, a word when you are lonely, a guide when you are searching, a smile when you are sad and a song when you are glad; a friend is one who walks in when the rest of the world walks out. Friendship is more than mere acquaintanceship, however genial; it is a bond of intimacy built out of mutual trust, truthfulness, care and accountability. A human spiritual friend, writes James Houston, is “one who is loyal and has right motives, discretion, and patience in order to help his friend know God better. Since there is no end to the extent to which I can and do deceive myself, I need a spiritual guide to keep me honest. . . . A true friend in Christ will wake me up, help me to grow, and deepen my awareness of God.” When our Lord Jesus declares himself our heavenly friend, all this is implied and more. The privilege of his friendship is overwhelming—and the benefit is too.
With all that, we have now painted our full three-layered image of the Christian life. Within that frame it is possible to think about by-paths as we try to identify and then remove blockages from the main path of prayer. Having shown what constitutes authentic Christian living from an inner-life standpoint, we can now move on to explore the nature of the authentic Christian praying in which that life finds expression.
HELP!
It has been said, with much truth, that the single word help is the best ingredient of prayer. Whatever else it is, prayer is always, at least implicitly and usually explicitly, a cry for help, an honest expression of need, predicated on the thought, I can’t get on the way I am. A cry for help, with various adjuncts, is what prayer has always been throughout all the eras of human existence, in all the religions of which we have any knowledge, and is the formula for authentic Christian prayer as much as any other kind, as we will shortly see. But some other things need to be said before we get to that.
Here we need to draw a distinction. Some prayers for help emerge from ordinary human hearts, people praying as a result of general revelation, but other prayers for help come from believing Christian hearts and are based on God’s special revelation. “General revelation” is the phrase used for that awareness of God’s reality, which is inescapable and universal and comes through to everyone, although everywhere it gets falsified, to a greater or lesser degree, through the way it is processed in fallen minds and hearts. We hear about this in the first chapter of Romans, where Paul exposes the world’s need for the gospel of Christ.
He declares that “the wrath of God is revealed” to people who “suppress the truth” (Rom 1:18). God’s “eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made” (v. 20). This evidence of God’s character as revealed in his creation constitutes general revelation. All receive it, but fallen human beings refuse to accept it so as to worship God on the basis of it, and therefore “God gave them up” to their distorted notions and to their own faulty desires. As a result, they entered upon an accelerating downward spiral of sin with an ever-growing distance from God and a continued increase of guilt (vv. 24-32). If Paul were with us in the Western world today, he would diagnose our condition in exactly those terms.
Yet even those who have not acknowledged the general revelation of Romans 1 often have some inkling that there is “one above,” as people say, who has it in his power to help. That sense seems universal to the human race. When people are in trouble—Christians and others too, right down to the most primitive cultists—they turn to God in sincere, though self-centered, pleas for help in their time of need. Donald Bloesch writes about this in relation to what he calls “primitive prayer” in tribal religions. He notes that it is egocentric, since the petitioner primarily seeks divine aid to insure his or her own prosperity and protection, and that the motivation is twofold: gain and fear. Primitive people seek deliverance, not from sin but from misfortune and danger. Nor is it only primitive people who do this. The dictum that there are no atheists in the trenches points to the fact that just about everybody in trouble prays to whoever might be there to listen. They cry for help, thus verifying our basic definition of prayer. And sometimes, no doubt, they are helped as they asked to be. No limit can be set to God’s goodness in particular cases.
Christians, however, have received and believed special revelation.
This is the supernatural saving revelation from God that is set forth in Scripture and was embodied in Christ and is now proclaimed as the gospel of God. When we who believe the gospel pray for help, we have a God-given basis for our action. God, the promise-keeper, has declared that he will help his children, in his character as a prayer-answering God. There is no higher authority in matters of this kind than the Lord Jesus. Hear then some words from his Sermon on the Mount.
Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened. Or which one of you [his disciples, those who believe in him already], if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will you give him a serpent? [No, of course not.] If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him! (Mt 7:7-11)
We can expect God to give help as a father would when his child asks for help. The Bible’s picture of prayer is of asking the Father for help, asking him to supply the needs we express, and of Jesus giving us every encouragement to expect that our heavenly Father will do just that.
UNANSWERED PRAYER
In this connection it is important for us frankly to recognize that there is no such thing as unanswered prayer from a child of God. That, of course, is a tremendous thing to say, and some would hesitate to say it; yet Jesus’ words just quoted show that it would be sheer unbelief not to say it. But (and the but is rather significant) God, our heavenly Father, perfect as he is in wisdom, reserves the right to answer our pleas for help in the best way and at the best time. For example when Paul pleaded that his thorn in the flesh might be miraculously healed, and it wasn’t, the Lord Jesus said to him, so he tells us, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor 12:9). It was as if Jesus said, “You’re to carry on, Paul, as you are. I promise you that you’ll be kept going despite the thorn in your flesh. Your ministry won’t suffer, though you’ll live with the pain all your days. And that is truly my best answer to your prayer.” Paul’s comment as he narrates this to the Corinthians reveals a rare maturity: “Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses” (his pain and suffering), “so that the power of Christ may rest upon me.” Paul got the message and saw that the Lord Jesus had truly answered his prayer, although not in the way he had asked.
Could Paul’s way of praying for healing have been somehow faulty? Was Christ’s response, positive as it was, meant to teach him that he had not been serious enough or reverent enough or kingdom-centered enough in his three prayer sessions about the thorn? None of the above, surely. Paul’s motivation in his praying was certainly fear that his missionary ministry would suffer from his being physically disabled, and without doubt his praying was earnest, zealous and wholehearted, as all true prayer is. For God knows our hearts, and it is our hearts that he draws to himself in prayer. The “heart” means the center of our personal being. We can and should dare to put as much of our hearts as we know into our prayers, as we can be sure Paul did every time. When we read the psalms, we find that the psalmist is always intense and utterly uninhibited in the way that he expresses his thoughts, feelings, worries, love, worship, complaints, even hatreds. The kind of restraint that many associate with Western-type politeness and formality in church isn’t at all in order when we pray. No, the models of praying in the Psalter show that it is for us to dig down as deeply into our own hearts as we can and put all of our heart into our praying. So proper praying will be always earnest, enthusiastic, serious, passionate; it will be prayer from the warm heart and not just prayer from the cool head. But here is a caution. What ought to make us passionate is not just the pressure of our own needs but our passion for the glory of God. Then all of our petitions for particular things, like Paul’s for the healing of his thorn, are offered because we believe that it will bring glory to God for him to give what we are asking.
We must remind ourselves, however, that since our heavenly Father, who is as wise as he is loving, answers his children’s prayers in the best way, what he does or fails to do in our immediate situation may look and feel at first as if he is saying a flat no to us. This is because of our slowness to realize that what we asked for, good and proper as it seemed, may not have been God’s best. We are regularly less wise, more self-centered, even more pig-headed, and so less mature in our praying than we are aware, and again and again the divine answers are so crafted as to help us in these respects, where we have not realized our need for help, no less than in respect of the conscious need that prompted our petition in the first place.
Thus we may pray for the healing of loved ones, and God’s answer is to heal them by taking them to heaven, which was not the mode of healing that we had in mind, and we find ourselves resenting this because the desire to have the invalid back in full bodily health for our own benefit had been so strong within us when we prayed. When this happens we are not always quick to grasp God’s kindness. J. I. recalls a lady of perhaps seventy who told him she had given up on God because her Christian mother, aged ninety-one, had died, despite prayer for her recovery. Or we may pray, like Paul, for our own health to be restored and find, as Paul did, that God’s way for us is that, upheld by his grace, we should learn to live with our complaint, and unlike Paul we are reluctant to accept this because we so much covet the experience of being well again. Or we forget Agur’s wise prayer for “neither poverty nor riches; / . . . lest I be full and deny you / . . . or lest I be poor and steal” (Prov 30:8-9), and ask for wealth which never in fact comes, and we do not see that God is teaching us that we are better off as we are, and that contentment with a little and sustained reliance on our Father for daily bread are virtues of faith that it is his priority to strengthen in us through constant exercise.
In all of this our difficulties arise from our unawareness of the limits of our own spiritual wisdom, as well as our failure to realize that God does not limit himself by those limits of ours when he answers our prayers for help in time of need. When we pray, as now we can see, we must be submissive to our heavenly Father’s wisdom and will, just as Jesus was in Gethsemane when he prayed, “Not my will, but yours, be done” (Lk 22:42). And we must be patient in the way that so many of the psalms model patience with their pained question, “how long?” (see Ps 13:1-2; 74:10; 79:5; 80:4; 89:46). “Lord, how long? How long do I have to wait for you to do something about this need that I’m bringing to you? This grisly mess about which I’m praying for your help?” Jesus tells the story of the unjust judge to teach that his people ought always to pray and never to give up. In this parable, the poor widow had to keep bothering the judge in order to get the justice that she was entitled to. The message of her story is that when we pray we may find that God takes longer than we expected to move in answer to our prayers. The unjust judge in the story said in so many words, “All right, just because she bothers me so much I’m going to do what she asks.” But Jesus contrasts this lazy unjust judge with the righteous and just Father who loves us, and faithfully promotes our true interest. Jesus says in effect, “How much more will your heavenly Father answer your prayer not only in the best way but at the best time also, which may well mean your having to wait before he moves in response to your request.” God’s wisdom will appear in both how and when he answers his children’s prayers.
When we speak of unanswered prayer, we often mean not answered according to the terms of our asking. But to call that “unanswered” is misleading and irreverent. We have seen this in the case of Paul’s plea for his thorn to be taken away, and now look at the following.
He asked for strength that he might achieve;
he was made weak that he might obey.
He asked for health that he might do greater things;
he was given infirmity that he might do better things.
He asked for riches that he might be happy;
he was given poverty that he might be wise.
He asked for power that he might have the praise of men;
he was given weakness that he might feel the need of God.
He asked for all things that he might enjoy life;
he was given life that he might enjoy all things.
He has received nothing that he asked for, but all that he hoped for.
His prayer is answered.
We need to remember that we Christians (let alone others) are so mixed up and lacking in self-knowledge that we are not always aware what the real desires of our heart are. But when God answers prayer in his way, we are able again and again to say “Yes, I now realize that this satisfies me deep down, even more than the things I asked for would have done.” The person pictured in the lines above was being remade in true godliness, to glorify God by being the person he was becoming. God was not being cruel to him, nor was God ignoring his petitions. God answered his prayers by granting the desires of his heart, which turned out, after all, not to have been expressed in his original words.
PRAYER BY-PATHS
It is very satisfying at the end of a climb to look back and see where you have come in your ascent, so let’s do that before we go further. The ground we have covered in this chapter so far, and the point we have now reached, can be summed up thus. Authentic Christian prayer issues from authentic Christian living, and authentic Christian living, which we have pictured as our hike with the Trinity, expresses the converted and regenerate Christian heart. The regenerate Christian heart is the heart that is rooted in faith in our Lord Jesus Christ as our crucified sinbearer and risen Lord; it is repentant, in the sense of an actual turning from sin and self-centeredness to obedience, righteousness, and God-centeredness; has a driving desire to please and glorify our God; and a confident, childlike humility that honors God as our loving heavenly Father who can be trusted to answer all our prayers for help and for the relief of our needs, even though not always in the terms of our initial request. This understanding of the nature of Christian heart religion is the basis on which everything else in this book rests, and if readers have found the assimilating of it a demanding task, as a hill-climb is often a demanding task, this is no surprise. With all of that in mind we move on now to look at some of the by-paths of prayer, those tempting side trails that finally take us nowhere. These by-paths are matters of failing to act on existing information and so missing truths about God and ourselves that should shape our praying as a life activity.
At this point we need to remind ourselves that one chronic symptom of our fallenness is confused thinking, a muddle in the mind, whereby we kid ourselves as to what we do in fact believe. We tell ourselves that we do not believe things that deep down we cannot doubt, and conversely we believe things of which we are really not sure. Professed atheism, whereby we deny the reality of someone else’s God while ignoring inescapable inklings of God inside us, is a frequent instance of the former (the young C. S. Lewis is a case in point); and the professed embrace of the doctrine of a faithful, prayer-answering God, as presented in previous pages, is often an example of the latter. For again and again, when push comes to shove and our need for God to act is most urgent and we are most desperate for his help, and when the moment to pray has arrived, we find our hearts enmeshed in all sorts of doubts and uncertainties about the worthwhileness of praying, doubts that we thought we had long left behind us. Back they come—Satan sees to that—and they lead on to the first by-path we would mention, namely, petitioning God without deep-level certainty that he can be relied on to respond to our serious and specific calls to him to take action. Many who have prayed so are later found saying with bitterness: “Oh, yes, I prayed, but it didn’t do any good. Nothing came of it.” Perhaps they add: “I don’t believe in prayer any more, so these days I don’t pray at all.” Temptation, unrecognized and yielded to? A scoring shot by Satan? Yes, but we don’t help anyone off this by-path just by saying that. The confused thinking needs to be straightened out, and that is what we must now try to do.
It needs to be said with the greatest possible emphasis that God’s promises, including those that relate to prayer, are utterly trustworthy, and uncertainty as to whether he will keep them in our own case, uncertainty that will of course keep our prayer half-hearted if it does not stop us praying entirely, is unbelief, and unbelief is sin. The diffidence we have described is not the reverence and humility that it imagines itself to be; it is in fact the lapse that James, talking about prayer for wisdom, calls doublemindedness and condemns as an offense to God that invalidates the petition. “Ask in faith, with no doubting, for the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea that is driven and tossed by the wind. For that person must not suppose that he will receive anything from the Lord; he is a double-minded man, unstable in all his ways” (Jas 1:6-8; cf. Jas 4:8). Attitudinally, secret suspicion that praying will do no good is at the opposite extreme from the cry, “I believe; help my unbelief” (Mk 9:24), which expresses strong faith distressed that it is not stronger and more wholehearted still. Skeptical suspicion that after all God may not be concerned to care for me will become in experience a self-fulfilling prophecy. God is to be petitioned on the basis of full trust in his love and his promises.
It will be helpful here to lay out in order all the relevant facts about our sovereign God who undertakes to hear and answer Christians’ prayers. God is personal, plural (triune), purposeful and perfect. God calls us all to holiness, to worship and obedience, to trust as well as love Godward, and to love and good works manward. This is a picture of the truly God-centered, God-glorifying way of life. Believers who are answering this call may say, with John, “This is the confidence that we have toward him, that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us. And if we know that he hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have the requests that we have asked of him” (1 Jn 5:14-15; cf. Jesus’ own words, Jn 15:7, 16; 16:23-24). When Christians are morally and spiritually astray, however, it is likely to be a different story. “If I had cherished iniquity in my heart, / the Lord would not have listened” (Ps 66:18). “You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions” (Jas 4:3). Petition without devotion, seeking gifts from God though you are not living for God, will always be by-path praying.
The same applies to the praying of all who believe in God but are not Christians. Those who do not pray as disciples of Christ nonetheless beg someone they might term “the One above” to relieve their agonies, and God in mercy sometimes does so. But the double life of those who pray to him yet live for themselves does not honor him any more than does the praying of the double-minded Christian, and no one should infer that a person is fully in God’s favor from the fact that his or her prayer has been fully answered in a particular case. The fact remains that a reconciled relationship to God only becomes real through single-hearted faith in our Lord Jesus Christ.
God’s promise, however, entitles believers who are seeking God’s will in their own lives to expect answers to their petitions, and it is here that the problems arise. The basic reason why is that it is beyond us to track all of God’s answers to our prayers, since these do not always correspond in form to the original petitions. The prose-poem quoted earlier (pp. 58-59) shows this. God reserves the right to answer the prayer we should have made rather than the one we did make, in relation to a particular need. And we can be certain that there are many answers given, in the sense of things that would not have happened had Christians not prayed, which we simply fail to recognize for what they are. Part of the mystery—and it is indeed a mystery—of events that surround us is that, as we battle against rebel angelic forces, Satan’s hosts, God pursues an agenda that, when seen in retrospect “from heavenly Jerusalem’s towers,” as a great Welsh hymn puts it, will be discerned as God maximizing good in this fallen world by means of the battle itself. The thought is staggering, but the reality is certain. And in this battle the prayers of God’s people have a significance that to us is incalculable. “The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working,” writes James (Jas 5:16). It has been truly said that more things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of. As God’s maximizing of good is a long-term business that may involve unexpected shapings of situations and unanticipated experiences for us all, so it certainly involves some correlation between faithful Christian intercession, often necessarily unspecific on how God will give the blessings sought, and the things that actually happen.
On J. I.’s eleventh birthday, he hoped (and had let it be known that he hoped) that his parents would give him a full-size bicycle—but he received a typewriter instead. His first reaction was disappointment, but soon the typewriter proved to be a superb present, as his parents knew it would. On his thirteenth birthday he finally received a bicycle, and as he began to appreciate the weightiness of the reasons why the bicycle had not been given earlier, he came to discern that what he had experienced was outstandingly good parenting, though it had not felt like that at first. A head injury at age seven meant he would be an unusually vulnerable cyclist (this was before the days of crash helmets), which was why his parents planned not to let him cycle until it was absolutely necessary, and typing (four fingers, self-taught) at a secretary’s desk on Saturday afternoons had already, they knew, become a constant delight to him, so the gift of a typewriter of his own would be a sure-fire winner. In this series of gifts J. I. now sees a faint reflection of how God, all-wise regarding our present and future state and needs, and with his planned role for us as contributors to the world’s good always in his mind, goes about the answering of our prayers. (Regarding God’s planned role for his people, J. I. cannot forget that the head injury became a happy providence eleven years later, excluding him from conscripted military service so that he went to university at age eighteen and became a Christian there, which he thinks, would hardly have happened to him in the army.) To conclude that God is not answering our prayers unless he matches his answer precisely to the terms of our original request is another by-path; it does us no good to travel there.
A further by-path is too narrow a notion of prayer itself. This mistake takes more than one form. Some people think that petition is inappropriate, and their reason on the surface sounds quite respectful of God. Why not bring requests to God? “Because God already knows what we need,” they say—which of course he does. So the famous philosopher Immanuel Kant describes Christian petitionary prayer as “a superstitious illusion, for it is no more than a stated wish directed to a Being who needs no such information regarding the inner disposition of the wisher; therefore nothing is accomplished by it, and it discharges none of the duties to which as commands of God we are obligated; hence God is not really served.” Kant was one of the architects of the eighteenth-century rationalistic movement called the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment brought great progress in the areas of science, philosophy, logic, music, art, medicine. Yet, despite its name, it also brought much spiritual darkness into this world, and this is a case in point.
Granted, parents usually do know what their children need before their children ask. But nonetheless, for the building up of the parent-child relationship, they want the boy or the girl to come and tell them what they need. Then they do something about it in direct answer to the request for help. Two benefits are thus gained by a single action: real need is met, and a certainty is deepened in the child’s mind that he or she is loved by Dad and Mom. So it is with God. In response to prayer (which God invites) God gives the gift that he has known all along that his child needed. The child of God shows love and dependence on God by expectantly expressing needs to God. And God responds to the child he loves by granting those desires—or by giving something different if in his fatherly wisdom he knows that that is better, just as an ordinary human parent will not give the two-year-old the shiny, sharp object (scissors or knife) he wants to play with but will instead give him a better, because safer, toy. It is a by-path, leading away from the very nature of prayer, to assume that God’s knowledge makes petitionary prayer needless.
Another narrowing of prayer’s nature is to limit its scope. Some people seem to think petition and intercession for others is all that is needed, and they never get around to praise and thanks and celebration of God. These people miss much of the richness of fellowship with God in prayer as we see it in most of the biblical examples of praying. This weakness will be addressed throughout this book so there is no need to treat it at length here. Let the reader simply note that always to be making requests (“shopping-list” praying) is to ignore the many other forms of biblical praying, and this is one more impoverishing by-path.
Another by-path, much trodden today, is the pursuit of the idea that the best prayer is wordless. One source of this idea is the fact that when two people love each other there are times when they smilingly look at each other in silence, not needing to speak, simply enjoying their close rapport. A second source is the quite distinct belief, stemming from Asian religions and from gnostic and neo-Platonic aberrations among Christians, that God is to be realized and contemplated as an impersonal presence rather than a personal friend. Now it is certainly right to say that though prayer begins as words, it is not merely words; right to declare that when thoughts and words fail us, as they sometimes do, the Holy Spirit “intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words” (Rom 8:26); right to insist that there is a place for silence before God, listening and waiting, after we have spoken to him, while joy at God’s love invades the soul. But there is no place for an unmediated flight of “the alone to the alone,” bypassing Jesus Christ and the Bible in order to go straight to a noncognitive closeness to God in which the mind is emptied of all personal thoughts about him, and indeed of all thoughts whatsoever. This kind of New Age meditation (you can hardly call it prayer) proceeds along these lines at the present time, but New Age religion is essentially Hindu mysticism in Western dress, not Christianity. For Christians, however, wordless prayer is not the pinnacle of prayer achievement, but the periodic punctuation of verbal prayer, and we would be on a by-path if we rated it any differently.
One final by-path focuses on the effect of prayer. Some people suppose that when we pray, we are twisting God’s arm, as if we are somehow getting onto the throne of the universe, so that we can say to God “My will be done.” They think that because they are praying earnestly, whatever they ask for will happen, and that the only obstacle to it happening would be if they were not praying earnestly enough. That, however, is a superstitious and mistaken idea, a presumptuous interpretation of Matthew 7:7-11, John 15:7 and similar passages. When Jesus says to his disciples, “Ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you” (Jn 15:7), he qualifies his invitation by adding controls: they must be abiding in him and his words in them, the request must be “in his name,” that is, one that he endorses, and “according to his will,” that is, fitting in with the cosmic plan for the good of his people and others of which we spoke earlier (Jn 14:13; 15:16; 1 Jn 5:14). When we pray, it is not for us to suppose that we twist God’s arm or are in any way managing the situation. We aren’t. We should learn to think of our praying as less a means of getting from God what we want than as the means whereby God gives us the good things that he purposes to give but that we are not always in a fit condition to receive. God intends all along to give these good things, but he waits to be asked so that we will properly value the gift when it comes, and our hearts will be turned in gratitude and renewed trust to the One who gave. To imagine that our words move God to do something that otherwise he would not have cared to do, nor planned to do, is to misunderstand God’s purpose in inviting us to pray. It is no accident that Christians down the centuries have typically prayed on their knees. In the position of kneeling, the body reminds the mind that God (not the person praying) is in charge. To think otherwise is to stray along a prayer by-path. Joseph Hart (1712-1768) understood this truth and created a hymn to express it.
Prayer was appointed to convey
the blessings God designs to give.
Long as they live should Christians pray
for only while they pray they live.
If pain afflict or wrongs oppress,
if cares distract or fears dismay,
if guilt deject, if sin distress,
the remedy’s before thee, pray.
Depend on Christ, thou canst not fail.
Make all thy wants and wishes known.
Fear not, His merit must prevail.
Ask what thou wilt, it shall be done.
Prayer, like every aspect of the Christian life, should focus not on ourselves but on the staggering goodness of God. John Newton (1725-1807) said it well in words that are less familiar than his “Amazing Grace” but are nonetheless valuable reminders of God’s love; words, therefore, which we do well still to sing.
Behold the throne of grace.
The promise calls me near.
There Jesus shows a smiling face
and waits to answer prayer.
My soul, ask what thou wilt;
thou canst not be too bold.
Since his own blood for thee was spilt,
what else can he withhold?
Beyond thy utmost wants
His love and power can bless.
To praying souls he always grants
more than they can express.
Teach me to live by faith;
conform my will to thine.
Let me victorious be in death,
and then in glory shine.