6 Asking
6 
Asking
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.
Let thy merciful ears, O Lord, be open to the prayers of thy humble servants; and that they may obtain their petitions make them to ask such things as shall please thee; through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Martin Luther’s last written words were “We are all beggars. That is true.” Two days later he died. He was right, of course, in that final written testimony. If we think of ourselves or others as achievers, creators, reformers, innovators, movers and shakers, healers, educators, benefactors of society in any way at all, we are at the deepest level kidding ourselves. We have nothing and have never had anything that we have not received, nor have we done anything good apart from God who did it through us. In ourselves we are destitute, bankrupt and impotent, totally dependent on God at every point and in every respect. This is true, as Luther constantly insisted, with regard to the pardon of our sins and the justification of our persons (that is, God’s acceptance of us as righteous and acceptable, despite our ongoing sinfulness, by virtue of Christ’s cross). And it is equally true of life, health, food, clothing, a job, a home, a family, a car, a bank balance in the black and every other good thing that comes our way. So before God’s throne we are all beggars, and begging good gifts from God is what petitionary prayer is all about.
We ask God, as beggars, for what we need because he invites us to do so. Christians know this clearly, for God in Scripture is explicit about it, and the rest of mankind knows it also, after a fashion, through God’s natural, or general, revelation of himself as the universal Creator and Supplier. The very nature of prayers of petition emphasizes our true relationship with God. He is the provider; we the receivers. He is the master of the universe; we are small and though, from our own standpoint, we are important and are truly valued by God as his image-bearers, yet from another standpoint we have to acknowledge that we are quite unimportant subjects within that universe. God is the maker of all things; we are completely dependent on what he gives. Could he get on without us? Yes. Does this fact make his actual generosity to us more and more marvelous to contemplate? Yes again.
In February 2004, Britain’s BBC reported on a worldwide survey finding (among many other interesting bits of information) that almost 30 percent of the world’s atheists admit that they “sometimes pray.” While Christian believers might smugly ask “to whom, or what?” we can reasonably assume that petitions make up most of those prayers. The sense of dependence runs inherent in the human soul. Even those who doubt God’s reality come to him as “beggars,” by inner instinct, “just in case,” particularly when they are in trouble. And God in his kindness and grace is most forthcoming in inviting his own people to ask. But how are we to ask well when we pray? That is the subject of this rather lengthy chapter.
This book has so far been devoted to thinking through the believer’s relationship with God (our union and communion with him), in order to see how an appropriate relationship with him and an appropriate understanding of the Christian life can generate good praying. The problem we are addressing is what we feel to be the poor quality of our praying, and this was the place we had to begin in order to speak effectively to our need. Commitment to the real God in real faith for the living of the real Christian life, and within that frame to the disciplines of brooding and praising and being searched, is the launching place of real prayer, and will continue to be so every day of our lives. But at the core, where all people of prayer bend their knees, prayer is asking, begging God to supply felt needs. In a broad sense, asking is the essence of praying. Whatever else we do in religion builds around the activity of asking as its center. All books on prayer affirm this, all who ever pray feel this, and all religions whatever their view of God or gods, agree on this. It is precisely because asking prayer comes so naturally to us, however rudimentary or wrong our idea of God may be, that we have delayed this chapter until midway through the book. Granted, a three-year-old can understand asking from a heavenly Father as from an earthly father, and God blesses children who pray. No doubt about that! But for adults to practice the petitionary mode of prayer in a way that honors God and leads to the joy of seeing answers, more is needed. So, building on the foundations we have laid, we will now offer what seems to us to be the key truths about human asking and divine answering.
WESTMINSTER DOCTRINE
In 1647, a company of theological experts put together a teaching document meant to be used by parents to bring up their children in the understanding of the Christian faith. As was common in those days, when books were relatively expensive and often unavailable, this curriculum was set up to be memorized in rote form, by questions and answers. The Westminster Shorter Catechism consists of a series of 107 questions and answers that cover major tenets of the Christian faith. Ninety percent of the scholars who shaped this catechism were Anglican, but historical Anglicanism has never shown much interest in it, while the document has always been embraced by Presbyterians as one of their official statements (or standards) of Christian theology—and it is still used in many Presbyterian homes and churches to teach both children and adults the basic outline of their faith. J. I. is Anglican and Carolyn is Presbyterian, and both agree that the Westminster Shorter Catechism is a handy tool from which to learn fundamental truths about prayer. Any readers who are nervous about human documents taking the place of the divinely inspired Word of God may rest assured that the scholars who shaped the Westminster Shorter Catechism believed Scripture, drew from Scripture and created this document as a distilled understanding of what Scripture teaches on the various subjects addressed, adding reference texts so that readers could check the validity of what they had done. So, as we try to learn better praying, let us begin with words from this catechism as cited below.
What is prayer? Prayer is an offering up of our desires unto God, for things agreeable to his will, in the name of Christ, with confession of our sins, and thankful acknowledgment of his mercies. (Ps 62:8; 1 Jn 5:14; Jn 16:23; Ps 32:5-6; Phil 4:6)
What rule hath God given for our direction in prayer? The whole Word of God is of use to direct us in prayer; but the special rule of direction is that form of prayer which Christ taught his disciples, commonly called the Lord’s Prayer. (1 Jn 5:14; Mt 6:9-13; Lk 11:2-4)
Note the flow of thought in these two questions. Prayer asks God to fulfill desires. But the sinfulness of our twisted hearts leads to desires that are out of line with God’s will. So we need guidance as to what desires we should bring to God. Also, since God is great, reverent and respectful, courtesy is called for when we address him, so we need to know the proper way to present our desires to him. The Bible overall, and the Lord’s Prayer in particular, give us the guidance we need.
Think of young children in a family. They want something that the parent is happy to give them. A toddler will reach out and whine, “augh, augh.” The mother says cheerfully as she reaches for the carton, “Can you say, ‘Juice’? Can you say, ‘I want juice’?” And so she teaches the child two things. The first is, that juice is something she is very willing to give, the second is to present wants in ways not as socially unpleasing as a whined monosyllable, which, while fine for a toddler, no doubt would be more than a little obnoxious by age ten. We are children of God; we too need to learn to ask properly for things that God is ready to give. These two things together—what to ask for and how to do it—are what learning to pray prayers of petition is all about.
The next four questions and answers about prayer from the Westminster Shorter Catechism help to clarify these matters. They show us how we should shape our own praying, guided by the prayer that Christ taught his disciples.
What doth the preface of the Lord’s Prayer teach us? The preface of the Lord’s Prayer (which is, Our Father which art in heaven) teacheth us to draw near to God with all holy reverence and confidence, as children to a father, able and ready to help us; and that we should pray with and for others. (Rom 8:15; Lk 11:13; Acts 13:5; 1 Tim 2:1-2)
What do we pray for in the first petition? In the first petition (which is, Hallowed be thy name) we pray that God would enable us, and others, to glorify him in all that whereby he maketh himself known; and that he would dispose all things to his own glory. (Ps 67:2-3; 83:18)
What do we pray for in the second petition? In the second petition (which is Thy kingdom come) we pray that Satan’s kingdom may be destroyed; and that the kingdom of grace may be advanced, ourselves and others brought into it, and kept in it; and that the kingdom of glory may be hastened. (Ps 68:1; Rev 12:10-11; 2 Thess 3:1; Rom 10:1; Jn 17:9, 20; Rev 22:20)
What do we pray for in the third petition? In the third petition (which is, Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven) we pray that God, by his grace, would make us able and willing to know, obey and submit to his will in all things, as the angels do in heaven. (Ps 67; 119:36; Mt 26:39; Job 1:21; Ps 103:20-21)
Again, note the flow of thought, this time in the first half of the Lord’s Prayer, as the Catechism’s answers to these four questions bring it out. The prayer teaches us, first, how to invoke God (as our Father through Christ, a Father who in his transcendent awesomeness is not at all remote, and who truly loves his children); and, second, how to adjust to God (by seeing ourselves as here to glorify him and by learning as lovers of him to desire that we and every rational creature should fulfill that goal). This is the basic desire that must undergird and shape all the rest of the desires that we voice in our petitionary prayers.
Having got this far, we will not follow the Catechism further but offer our own answer to four questions that now naturally arise for praying people. First, what is it right to ask for? What is to be the scope and range of our petitions? Second, what should be the reason for our asking, that is, our motivation? Third, what is our warrant for expecting God to answer our prayers? On what basis do we make our petitions? Fourth, how does God answer prayers? What should we expect when we make our petitions? The rest of this chapter will be addressing these questions in order.
Before we move into them, however, a caveat is needed. If we envisage God as doing no more than passively listening to us as we ask him for things, we are wrong. Petitioning God is a two-way street. In the last chapter we noted how Psalm 139 views God’s constant searching of us as part of the reality of our relationship with him, whether we are aware of it at any particular moment or not. He is the one who searches hearts, and he never stops doing it. And we need to realize that when we ask him for things, laying before him our desires, hopes, dreams and goals, the distresses that we want him to handle for us and the needs we are begging him to meet, he is asking us questions about our asking: Why do you ask for this? How serious is the matter to you, and how deep does your concern go? Why do you think that what you are asking for is in line with my will? Would something other than the precise thing you now request satisfy you equally? Tell me. Human fathers, confronted with passionate but irresponsible requests, sometime find it necessary to quiz their children in this way, and it is the same with God. As we pray, awareness of these questions will arise, and if we really are serious—which, alas, not all people with prayer lists are—we know that they are questions not to be evaded as we talk to our heavenly Father. Petitioning God is thus a demanding business, as again and again God makes it part of his program for maturing us into thoughtful spiritual adults, and we must be ready for that.
WHAT SHOULD WE ASK FOR?
This question has to do with the substance of prayer. We have already had a formula answer from the Westminster Catechism: we ask for things that accord with God’s will and that we desire. In saying that, the catechism is picking up familiar thoughts from the New Testament. In his farewell discourse to the apostles Jesus spoke more than once of making requests to the Father in his name—with astounding promises attached:
Whatever you ask in my name, this I will do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If you ask me anything in my name, I will do it. (Jn 14:13-14)
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. (Jn 15:16)
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. (Jn 16:23)
These were words of great challenge and comfort to the disciples as they began to contemplate life without the bodily presence of their beloved Jesus. They are words of challenge and comfort for us all. But they raise questions.
What is the message here? Is Jesus giving his first disciples (and us with them) a blank check? An invitation to write in whatever amount, so to speak, for whatever we want or think we want—and God will make it happen? Only yielding to a reckless moment of greed (a possibility to which we are all, alas, more exposed than we like to think) would take us to such an interpretation, and clearly that is not what is meant. The thought from the text is that we should ask God for things that the Lord Jesus will also ask for on our behalf. We are to make requests to the Father that the Lord Jesus will back. Jesus will associate himself with us in our requests when our requests match what he wants for us. That is the meaning of asking in his name. Jesus looks forward to his disciples asking for things that can only become reality with his help and by his power, and that will make for his glory when they do. That is what it means to ask according to God’s will, the will of the Father which the Son knows and does. We, God’s adopted children, come to know his will through studying Scripture and brooding on its implications, and through directly seeking the Savior’s face in prayer.
The apostle John, who recorded the words of Jesus that we have just quoted, echoes their thought when he writes in his first letter (maybe after coming up against frustrated prayers engendered by selfish greed among those he served): “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). Him and he in this passage is the Son of God, our Lord Jesus Christ. Our confidence is to be directed toward him and centered in him. We are to aim at asking in accordance with his will (which, of course, is identical with the Father’s will), and when we do so ask we receive what we ask for. This matches Christ’s promise: “If you ask me anything in my name, I will do it,” It is plain, therefore, that our petitions may be addressed to both the Father and the Son, and if they match the one will of the two persons, the granting of each petition is guaranteed.
The idea of asking according to God’s will sounds simple and clear when first stated, but in practice discerning the parameters of the divine will in the wide range of situations about which we make requests to God is not easy. Bible readers soon realize that the personal will of our personal God, like yours and ours, is a complex reality, and merely drawing the classical and sound distinction between God’s will of command and his will of events does not get us very far in understanding it. The triune Lord, we see, has a moral character and what we call a value system, which his goals, plans and commands all reflect. His range of revealed purpose as he deals with this fallen world includes the producing of what is morally, spiritually, aesthetically and culturally good; making unbelievers godly through redemption, regeneration, sanctification, and glorification; advancing the kingdom of Christ worldwide; gathering and building up the one church of Christ in every place; maturing, enriching, and perfecting his adopted children in their relationship with himself; exposing and punishing evil; displaying the glory of his holy love, wisdom, truth, and justice, and of his unlimited cosmic and transcosmic powers, and eliciting praise for it all from angels and humans alike. All the specific acts of God in his sovereign ordering of world events and individual lives are means, one way or another, to the furthering of this array of ends, and into this frame of purposive divine action our petitionary prayers should fit, for then they too, in some way that is beyond our full understanding, will also be means toward these ends. How then are we to formulate petitions according to God’s will? The answer is twofold: by following the guidelines of, first, observed need and, second, inner inclination.
In asking God to meet observed needs, the second half of the Lord’s Prayer stands as a model. Here we pray for daily provision (“Give us each day our daily bread”—we need it), for daily pardon (“Forgive our sins”—we need that) and for daily protection (“Deliver us from evil”—we need that too, more than we know). And the plurals us and our are key words, which show that we are meant to make this prayer for other Christians besides ourselves. At this point further models appear, namely Paul’s prayers for the spiritual advance of Christians in the churches that, with two exceptions, he himself had planted and, without exception, now served. Prayer for spiritual advance, both our own and that of others, is always in order, for all of us always need to go further in life with God than we have yet gone. The positive that corresponds to the negative “deliver us from evil,” namely, (in substance) “make us more Christlike,” is spelled out here in language of breathtaking range and force.
For the church at Ephesus, Paul prays that
according to the riches of [the Father’s] glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. (Eph 3:16-19)
For the church at Colossae (not of his planting, though he had strong links with it), Paul prays that
you may be filled with the knowledge of [God’s] will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, so as to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God. May you be strengthened with all power, according to his glorious might, for all endurance and patience with joy, giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in light. (Col 1:9-12)
For the church at Philippi, Paul prays that “your love may abound more and more, with knowledge and all discernment, so that you may approve what is excellent, and so be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ, to the glory and praise of God” (Phil 1:9-11).
For the church at Thessalonica, Paul prays: “May the God of peace sanctify you completely, and may your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Thess 5:23).
What congregation, what Christian group—home meeting, parachurch organization, whatever—would not be supremely blessed to have God fulfill toward them the fullness of this multiaspect work of illuminating, transforming and preserving grace, as these prayers spell it out? Can we doubt that making any or all of these petitions to God for any Christians or Christian communities—our own congregations, for instance—is to ask for enrichment that God will be delighted to bestow? Enrichment, therefore, that is in accord with his will every time it is sought? Enrichment that meets the real, observable needs of all Christian individuals and communities all the time? When Christians echo and elaborate these thoughts in their prayers for each other, they are therefore entitled to expect their prayers to be answered.
Beyond this, however, questions still arise. When we pray for individuals who in one way or another are close to us—family, friends, mentors, leaders, Christian workers at home and abroad whom we support, and so on—we become specific in asking God to do certain particular things to meet their particular needs. Often that is exactly what the people concerned have asked us to do. But since many of the details of God’s plan are unknown to us, when we have told God what we would most like to see happen, some degree of uncertainty must remain as to whether or not we prayed according to his will. What to do then? Two things. First, we should lay before God, as part of our prayer, the reasons why we think that what we ask for is the best thing. Second, we should tell God that if he wills something different we know it will be better, and it is that (rather than the best we could think of) that we really want him to do. A word now about these two moves.
First, about giving God reasons. The Puritans used to speak rather grandly about using argument in prayer. By this they did not mean pressing God to fall in line with our own desires (“My will be done”); what they meant was telling God why what we have asked for seems to us to be for the best, in light of what we know God’s own goals to be (generating good, saving sinners, extending the kingdom and enriching the church of the Lord Jesus Christ, and glorifying himself by so revealing his transcendent triune glory that his rational creatures give him glory by their thanks and praise). Here, now, is a sample Puritan, Stephen Charnock, making the point in his own way:
Our praying . . . should consist of arguments for God’s glory and our happiness: not that arguments move God to do that which he is not willing of himself to do for us . . . as though the infinitely wise God needed information, or the infinitely loving God needed persuasion, but it is for strengthening our faith in him. All the prayers in the Scripture you will find to be reasoning with God, not a multitude of words heaped together; and the design of the promises is to furnish us with a strength of reason in this case: Dan 9:16, “Now according to all thy righteousness, I beseech thee, let thy anger and thy fury be turned away from thy city Jerusalem.” He [Daniel] pleads God’s righteousness in his promise of the set time of deliverance; after he had settled his heart in a full belief of the promise of deliverance, he shows God’s own words to him. The arguments [in this and all biblical prayers] you will find drawn from the covenant in general, or some promise in particular, or some attribute of God, or the glory of God.
Second, about embracing God’s will. Giving God reasons shows the boldness of humility; embracing God’s will shows the submissiveness of humility. In the former, faith engages with God’s wisdom; in the latter, it bows to his authority. What that means is most tellingly shown us by the account of Jesus praying in Gethsemane. Matthew records his words thus: “My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as you will. . . . My Father, if this cannot pass unless I drink it, your will be done” (Mt 26:39, 42). Mark has: “Abba, Father, all things are possible for you. Remove this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will” (Mk 14:36). Luke gives us: “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me. Nevertheless, not my will, but yours, be done” (Lk 22:42). These are interpretive renderings in Greek of what the eleven undoubtedly heard Jesus say in his home language, Aramaic. The “cup” was the atoning death for us that the Son was sent from heaven to endure. The prayer, even when it becomes two or three sentences in English, is a single unit of heartfelt, agonized expression, with the “amen” (so to speak) not coming until the Lord has affirmed the priority of his Father’s known will over the involuntary longing for release from the coming ordeal that he finds within himself. We walk in the footsteps of our Savior when we tell him and the Father that however much we find ourselves longing for something else, the Father’s will has priority for us; we do not want to receive what is not part of that will; we want our Father’s will and only his will, whether or not at the moment we know how much it involves
It is sometimes said that we should get our petitionary prayers from God himself, and that is true, in the same sense to which the foregoing paragraphs point. In each case we should ask ourselves what we see as truly and centrally needing to happen in the life and need situation we are praying about, and what is the immediate event which, if it took place, would be the most direct step toward making the desired change result. We should check that, so far as we can tell, both the end and the means that we envisage as best will not be out of line with God’s goals, character and scale of values, but will rather make for his glory; then we should take our request submissively but confidently to God, stating our arguments and knowing that in making this request we have done all we could to discern and fit into this will. Following this procedure in a spirit of pure-hearted praise, we can know for sure that he will certainly “hear” (take note) and answer us, even if not entirely in the way we had hoped. In answering the question, What should we ask for? we also see the answer to its negative counterpart, What should we not ask God for? The short statement of that answer is: things we want and now request just because we want them and for no higher reason than that. It is sadly possible to say, in effect, “Lord Jesus, heavenly Father, my will be done if you please; this is what I want. And the mere fact that I want it is my warrant for asking you to supply it.” There are praying people who get no further in their petitions than listing items tagged, so to speak, with the formula “This is what I want.” And they look to God as if he is simply there to do like Jeeves in the P. G. Wodehouse stories, whose role is to wonderfully supply the various felt needs of the young master and get him out of scrapes. When Martha asked Jesus to send Mary into the kitchen to help her, and a man asked him to tell his brother to divide a legacy fairly (Lk 10:40-42; 12:13-15), Jesus gave them sharply negative answers. Jesus would not be manipulated that way then, and the holy Three will not be manipulated that way now, even in face of repetitious prayer that seek to wear down all divine resistance.
In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus says: “When you pray, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do, for they think that they will be heard for their many words” (Mt 6:7). He is not here talking about asking for wrong things but of asking for anything, whether right or wrong, in the wrong way. What Jesus is objecting to is the fact that some people think that if they say often and insistently enough to God, “This is what I want; please do it,” they will twist God’s arm and thereby secure what they ask for. But real prayer is not like that and right requests become wrong if presented in that fashion. That is superstitious, irreverent and pagan, even when those who think and act like this are regular church-goers. It is never the way to petition almighty God.
The lack of forthrightness in petitioning God is not right either. When we are clear that what we are asking him to do is to meet a real need and that he will glorify himself by doing so, we should make our request boldly and persistently, thus showing strong faith in his holy goodness. Two of Jesus’ parables make this point, by “how-much-more” reasoning, though in the first case Jesus leaves the disciples (and us!) to work this out for ourselves.
The first story (Lk 11:5-8) is of the man who at midnight rouses his friend from bed in order to borrow three loaves so that he can fulfill Eastern society’s sacred duty of hospitality and feed another of his friends who, unannounced, has just dropped in for the night. The roused sleeper feels this is an abuse of friendship but nonetheless gets up and meets the request because of the asker’s “impudence”—shameless persistence, unabashed cheek, and refusal to take no for an answer. How much more, then, can we expect God to respond with actions when we ask him to meet our own real and urgent needs (vv. 9-13)!
The second story (Lk 18:1-8) is of the unprincipled judge who vindicated the widow, not because justice so required (though it did) but because she had made herself a nuisance to him. This time Jesus made the how-much-more point explicit: “Hear what the unrighteous judge says. And will not God give justice to his elect, who cry to him day and night?” (vv. 6-7). Both stories were told to make us bold in petitionary prayer. Humble boldness and pertinacity as we engage with God in making any request is part of the biblical prayer pattern.
WHY SHOULD WE ASK?
This second question has to do with the motivation of all our asking. Once more we take our lead from the pattern of petition in the Lord’s Prayer. The Westminster Shorter Catechism told us, at least in outline, the significance of “Hallowed be your name / Your kingdom come, your will be done,” in terms of specific realities to request. Now we must dwell a little further on the significance of these phrases as model expressions of the desires that drive the regenerate heart.
The Bible perspective throughout is that with God—the Searcher of hearts—the inner realities of motivation, purpose and desire that prompt and energize our actions are just as important as the performance of the actions themselves, viewed from the outside. Petitionary praying (or any other sort of prayer, for that matter) that is performed mechanically, without any focused thought (as when we clean our teeth) and in a state of suppressed resentment, perhaps, at having to do it, or at something God has previously done or not done, is prayer from a heart that is not as it should be, and so the performance is in God’s eyes hypocritical to a degree. God assesses all our actions from the inside as well as the outside, as Jesus tried (unsuccessfully) to teach the Pharisees. Our positive point, now, can be stated thus: “Hallowed be your name”—which means, may you, God, be always and everywhere honored, exalted, magnified, glorified and praised for all that you are and do—is the basic petition of the entire Lord’s Prayer, the global ideal and desire that all the other petitions are actually spelling out and specifying in one way or another. Just as this petition is the controlling thought of the Lord’s Prayer as a whole so the longing to see it fulfilled should be the controlling desire of the heart whenever God’s children pray. We have been given the Lord’s Prayer so that we might learn from it not just the wording but the spirit, the animating attitude, of this authoritative model.
So we are to pray to God in order to further the praise of God first and foremost, not to gratify selfish concerns in which God has no place. Why then should we ask for what we do ask for? Our honest answer to that question should point toward God: his name, his glory, his nature, his kingdom. Often, however, our asking is more murkily motivated. James shows this in a specific way as he opens the fourth chapter of his letter. “What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you?” (We are fighting not only other people’s passions but also the passions within own hearts.) “You desire and do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel.” (That was what was going on in the churches that James addressed. It was a good thing that he took time out to write about it, because quarrelsome passion has infected churches again and again ever since James’s day, though not often, thank God, to the point of physical murder. Murder in the heart, however—“I hate so-and-so”—has undoubtedly often been present.) Now comes the key truth James has been working up to: “You do not have, because you do not ask. You ask and you do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions” (Jas 4:1-3, emphasis added). Here we see James highlighting self-focused motivation that produces self-focused desires and the “my will be done” type of asking. Compare with that, now, the two following examples of intercessory requests.
Abraham, a prophet (Gen 20:7) but temperamentally a quiet, unassuming and unheroic man, has just heard from God, who has appeared to him by a theophany in human form, that destruction faces the city of Sodom for its sins. Abraham is concerned for his nephew Lot and Lot’s branch of the family, who have settled in Sodom, and so he asks God to spare the city if fifty—forty—thirty—twenty—ten godly people live in it, obviously with Lot and his household in mind throughout. But the “I want” of his praying is absorbed into a stated concern for God’s glory as a just judge, and there is no reason to doubt that this genuinely expressed the God-centeredness of Abraham’s heart. “Suppose there are fifty righteous within the city. Will you then sweep away the place and not spare it? . . . Far be it from you to do such a thing, to put the righteous to death with the wicked! . . . Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?” (Gen 18:24-25). What comes first with Abraham is the hallowing of God’s name. Beyond the typical Eastern step-by-step presentation of Abraham’s request in his unique to-and-fro exchange with his theophanic Lord, Abraham shows that God’s honor is the supreme target of his prayer, and over and above the love, boldness, humility and faith that Abraham’s praying displays, his desire for God to be honored is the supreme quality for us to imitate as we labor to pray for people and situations that weigh heavily on our own hearts.
Set alongside this, now Daniel’s prayer that God will deliver his people from their exilic captivity. Daniel, though a major figure in Babylon, is an Israelite patriot, and his prayer shows him longing for Israel’s restoration. But central to his prayer is celebration of God’s covenant and justice and mercy (Dan 9:4, 7, 9), and the conclusion to which he works up is this: “For your own sake, O Lord, make your face to shine upon your sanctuary, which is desolate. . . . Delay not, for your own sake, O my God, because your people and your city are called by your name” (Dan 9:17, 19, emphasis added). In other words, in and through action to restore us, display yourself, vindicate yourself, glorify yourself. In other words, hallowed be your name. The quality test of all our petitionary praying is the clarity test, whether we make it apparent that God’s yes to our requests will in fact be or become a means to the hallowing of his name in praise for his demonstrated praiseworthiness. In this Daniel, like Abraham, is showing us the way.
ON WHAT BASIS DO WE ASK?
This third question about asking God for things raises the issue of expectations—and our basis for those expectations. What reasons have we to look for answers to our prayers? What reasons have we to expect that God will move, that divine action will be taken in response to the requests we make? The answer is that there is a solid foundation for these expectations in a trio of factors, which we may picture as the legs of a three-legged stool. As the stool will only stand if all three legs are in place, so we may expect answers to our prayers only when (1) our adoptive relationship with God, (2) the mighty promises of God, and (3) personal faith-full purity of heart are together. Scripture has much to say to us on these three themes.
The first leg of our stool is our knowledge that God is now our Father by adoption and grace. We weren’t born God’s children, nobody is, but we become God’s children through faith in Jesus Christ. He, who is the eternal Son of the Father by nature, brings us into the family as adopted children, and henceforth he is our elder brother. Our relationship with the Father of Jesus as our own Father is basic to all that we ask in prayer. Fathers give good gifts to their children, and that should give us boldness in making our requests.
In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus gives an intimate family invitation to
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, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? 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)
This invitation is addressed to all disciples of Jesus, all who through faith are children of God—and therefore it is a word from our Master and Brother meant specifically for us.
Observe the context. Matthew 6, where Jesus teaches the Lord’s Prayer, is the midsection of the Sermon on the Mount and consists entirely of teaching on three of the realities of life with our heavenly Father: practicing piety to please him alone (vv. 1-18), living single-mindedly as his heirs and servants (vv. 19-24), and trusting his fatherly care in daily life (vv. 25-34). It is within that family frame that in chapter 7, having warned us against sibling savagery in God’s family (vv. 1-5), Jesus invites us to offer petitions to our Father in heaven. Jesus addresses these words to all who know they are children of God through faith in himself, so with a humble boldness we can rightly say that our relationship with God as children to a Father is a solid basis for expecting that our asking will receive a positive answer.
A second leg of our stool is the promises of God as set forth in Scripture. Our God has given us promises in writing, and since he is a faithful God, we may confidently claim those promises, invoking them explicitly in our petitionary prayers. When we do this, we please and honor our Father by our trust. In Romans 4, Paul celebrates the faith of the aged Abraham and his equally aged wife, to whom God had promised the gift of a child. Measured by all human reason and all the circumstances, that promise was an impossibility. But, says Paul, Abraham didn’t stagger (as the KJV puts it) at the promise of God, that is, he did not vacillate in his certainty that God would keep his word; he trusted that God was able to fulfill his promise and actively expected him to do so. “No distrust made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised” (Rom 4:20-21). Abraham was sure that God could and would do what he promised—and of course it happened.
The promises of God are trustworthy. When we ask favors of God, we can rely on those promises, and to the extent that we are asking for what God has already promised to do, we should be free from all doubt that answers will come. But let us take care to get our perspective right. Peter generalizes about what is central in God’s promises to us. If we are looking for, say, a new car, a new spouse, perfect health, vocational success and public influence, as exponents of the once-popular “name it and claim it” teaching would encourage us to do, Peter’s view of God’s promises will seem disappointing and unhelpful. But what Peter allows us to glimpse of God’s promises is something truly better than any of these items.
[God’s] divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence, by which he has granted to us his precious and very great promises, so that through them you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped from the corruption that is in the world because of sinful desire. (2 Pet 1:3-4)
What does God promise us? That we will be “partakers of the divine nature,” that we will be rescued from “the corruption . . . of sinful desire.” What kinds of petitions will lead God to keep those kinds of promises? Clearly, not prayers for personal convenience but for personal sanctity, not for increasing affluence but for growth in grace. “Lord, make me as holy as it is possible for a saved sinner to be,” is a prayer ascribed to Murray McCheyne. That is how Peter would have us all pray. It should not surprise us that God’s promises to and purposes for us have more to do with our spiritual development than our physical comfort. Certainly, God promises to provide for our material needs (note: needs, not dreams; look at Mt 6:19-21, 25-34) for as long as he plans that our earthly life should last. But what he primarily has in view for us is a destiny of Christlikeness, and where Christlikeness is not being sought he may well withhold some of the benefits to which his promises refer, just as long ago he withheld rain and good harvests from idolatrous and immoral Israel.
One of the difficulties with promises is waiting. A small child waits endlessly, or so it seems, for the afternoon snack that mother is already retrieving from the refrigerator. Our own petitionary prayers, based on God’s promises, are likely to generate similar impatience in ourselves. “God has already promised to . . .” we say. “Why must I wait for it? Why must I even ask?” Godly people in the Old Testament often pleaded with God to finally grant them the land and prosperity he had promised them, or to release them from captivity, or from ongoing hostility and illtreatment, when God’s fulfillment of his word had been delayed. This must have felt particularly painful during Israel’s wilderness wanderings as children watched their grandparents die—the promise of land of their own yet unfulfilled; and during the exile, as parents watched their children attain adulthood—still in captivity; and in the post-Solomon era as one evil ruler after another occupied the throne, their misdeeds apparently going unpunished, and the moral and spiritual revival that the faithful sought not taking place.
Similarly, in New Testament times some faithful believers thought God was delaying the fulfillment of the promise of Christ’s return. Near the end of his second letter, Peter speaks directly to unrest and skepticism about Christ’s reappearing, and does so in a way that throws light on the whole issue of God’s apparent delays, whether in the past or as may arise in the future. Says Peter: “The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance. . . . [C]ount the patience of our Lord as salvation, just as our beloved brother Paul also wrote to you according to the wisdom given him” (2 Pet 3:9, 15). Our desire for instant action in response to our prayers reflects the limitation and smallness of our view of things compared with God’s. God fixes his time for doing what he has promised (and what his people look to him to do) in light of long-term purposes of goodness and wisdom involving far more than we can ever be aware of. “That all should reach repentance” is a case in point: who were Peter’s first readers, and who are you and we today, to compute God’s “all”? The principle that Biblebelievers must grasp is that it is God’s prerogative to do what he promises in what he knows to be the best and wisest way, at what he knows to be the best and wisest time. Seeing this will help us to develop the patience and settled trust that God desires to shape in us, and will stabilize our hope when our hearts move us to pray “Lord, how long?”
Sometimes God moves his people to engage in promise-based praying at trigger points in linear time so that the link between the asking and the answering is prompt, direct and obvious. This was true of Nehemiah near the end of Israel’s captivity under Persian rule. In chapter 1 of Nehemiah’s memoirs, we see him, having heard the bad news of Jerusalem’s sorry state, reminding God of his former promises, arguing that certainly the time was ripe for God to fulfill those promises and begging God for some part in the action—which, as the rest of the book bears out, God granted him. The large events of the book begin with this prayer of asking. We hear Nehemiah say:
Remember the word that you commanded your servant Moses, saying, “If you are unfaithful, I will scatter you among the peoples, but if you return to me and keep my commandments and do them, though your dispersed be under the farthest skies, I will gather them from there and bring them to the place that I have chosen, to make my name dwell there.” They are your servants and your people, whom you have redeemed by your great power and by your strong hand. O Lord, let your ear be attentive to the prayer of your servant, and to the prayer of your servants who delight to fear your name, and give success to your servant today, and grant him mercy in the sight of this man [the king, whom Nehemiah served as cupbearer]. (Neh 1:8-11)
The rest of the book tells how the king of Persia granted Nehemiah a leave of absence and governor status to head up a construction project that eventually rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem, despite opposition, in no more than fifty-two days, how then he reorganized the city and renewed its commitment to God, and finally how, in a second term as governor, he brought that reformation, which was crumbling, to renewal.
Self-quotation is commonly viewed as a vice, but J. I. is prepared to take a risk on that by citing what he wrote elsewhere about Nehemiah as a praying person.
Nehemiah’s walk with God was saturated with his praying, and praying of the truest and purest kind—namely, the sort of praying that is always seeking to clarify its own vision of who and what God is, and to celebrate his reality in constant adoration, and to rethink in his presence such needs and requests as one is bringing to him, so that the stating of them becomes a specifying of “hallowed be thy name . . . thy will be done . . . for thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory.” . . . Nehemiah punctuates his story with prayers to “my God,” who is “our God.” He starts his book with a full transcript of his plea for the covenant people (1:5-11), he ends it with four “remember me” petitions, the last of which is actually his sign-off line (13:14, 22, 29, 30-31), and he goes out of his way to record several other prayers in the course of his narrative [see 2:4; 4:4-5, 9; 5:19; 6:14]. . . . It is clear that as a writer he understands, and now wants his readers to understand, that only ventures that are begun in prayer and bathed in prayer throughout are likely to be blessed as the venture of rebuilding Jerusalem’s walls was blessed, and he so selects and arranges his material as to project this truth without having to put it into words.
Nehemiah’s leadership in the restoration of Jerusalem was outstanding for his openness to God’s leading (see esp. chap. 2), his wisdom in planning for God’s glory (see esp. chaps. 2, 7-12), his refusal to cave in to hostile pressures and ridicule (see esp. chaps. 4, 6), his zeal to work hard for God and motivate others to do the same (see esp. chaps. 3-4), his particular care for the needy and distressed (see chap. 5), his selfeffacing humility in times of success, and his tenacity in correcting disorders that made his previous efforts look like failure (see esp. chap. 13). But his leadership would not have been what it was without his praying, and his praying would not have been what it was without his confidence that he served a covenanting God who keeps his promises (Neh 9:8, 32; cf. Neh 1:8-9): a God of utter faithfulness, who can be utterly trusted.
The third leg of our stool, that entitles us to expect God to answer our petitionary prayers, is purity of heart, our own purity of heart before the holy God to whom we pray. By this we mean, in general, all that Kierkegaard meant when he titled one of his books Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing, namely, thoroughgoing God-centeredness. The Bible uses heart to designate the core of the person, from which come all our thoughts and desires, all the dispositions, inclinations, and strategies that shape our lives. The pure heart is the heart that seeks and serves God in everything without wavering, and rejects all alternatives to this agenda all the time. When Jesus said: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God” (Mt 5:8), he spoke out of his knowledge that seeing God will be the fulfillment of the pure-hearted person’s deepest longing. The principle we affirm here is that potent praying presupposes purity of heart as described. Before we say anything to God, therefore, we need to check up on ourselves to make sure, so far as we can, that nothing in us—no “grievous way,” as Psalm 139:24 puts it, no ongoing willful sin—is going to impede God’s positive answer to our prayers.
If we approach God with impure hearts, we are like children who are trying to fool their parents and whose parents can see quite clearly what the kids are up to. If a child asks the parent for twenty dollars in order to buy a video game, a wise parent will not respond positively if the proposed game is X-rated for graphic violence. If the child objects to this refusal by stomping and yelling and pretending to shoot every object in sight, those actions reveal a “heart condition” that puts an obstacle in the way of the parent granting that specific request at any time in the near future. We now follow the Bible in pointing to the behavior that puts an obstacle in the way of God granting our prayers. In Psalm 66:18-19 we read:
If I had cherished iniquity in my heart,
the Lord would not have listened.
But truly God has listened;
he has attended to the voice of my prayer.
Blessed be God,
because he has not rejected my prayer
or removed his steadfast love from me!
God has granted the request of the psalmist, but would not have done so had he “cherished iniquity in his heart”—that is, held on to anything in his life or his life plan that he knew was wrong. Under those circumstances the Lord would not have “listened to” his prayer: that is, given it a positive answer. God knows all things, including the thoughts behind our askings. But does God always “listen” to us when we ask? That, it seems, depends in part on the condition of our hearts. Willful children, storming at their parents as they try to force them to do something, may call forth the response, “I can hear what you say, but I’m not listening,” or simply “I’m not listening.” Petitions from an impure heart evoke just that response from God.
The prophet Isaiah helps us to comprehend God’s “nonlistening” more clearly—and not confuse it with any limitation of power.
Behold, the LORD’s hand is not shortened, that it cannot save,
or his ear dull, that it cannot hear;
but your iniquities have made a separation
between you and your God,
and your sins have hidden his face from you
so that he does not hear. (Is 59:1-2)
Isaiah tells these people, God hears you all right, in the sense that he knows what you are asking, but he doesn’t hear in the sense of responding to your request. Why not? Because of the sins, the perversities, the things you know are wrong which nonetheless you are cherishing. Be honest, admit your error, give it up, repent of it, and so purify your hearts (James’s phrase, Jas 4:8) before you bring requests to God. To be sure, purity is not a bribery tool, as if when we give up enough of ourselves, we prevail on God finally to act. The emphasis of Isaiah 59 is on God’s prerogative, not ours. But we should approach a holy God of unlimited power with inner purity; otherwise, we are asking God, in effect, to turn a blind eye to any sins and vices, which of course he cannot and will not do. This is part of learning to pray not only with our words but with our whole being.
In summary, then, when God’s fatherly relationship with us and his faithfulness to us as promise keeper are linked with our own cultivated and disciplined purity of heart, we have a warrant for expecting answers to our requests, and that is both startling and thrilling to know. What, from God’s standpoint, appear as serious, faithful, sustained prayers from his own children are all going to be answered in what, from his standpoint, are thoroughly positive terms.
HOW DOES GOD ANSWER OUR PRAYERS?
All this leads to our fourth and last question. How does our God answer our prayers? It is often said that he gives us one of three answers: yes, no and wait. This is not wholly wrong, but the matter can, we think, be made much clearer as follows.
Every petitionary prayer brings before God a situation of need that we are asking him to meet. Regularly we tell him just how, as we see it, he can best take action to meet that need. It is clear from the number of specific prayers recorded in the Bible that that is how our God wants us to pray; indeed the truth is that as both the Father and the Son invite us to present our petitions, so the Holy Spirit within us stirs us up to do just that. The overall thrust of all the Spirit’s many ministries to each believer is ever to deepen, enrich and make closer our fellowship with the Father and the Son, and prompting us to intercessory involvement with both is one means by which he achieves this end. We are, then, constantly to be using our limited wisdom to work out what might most fully advance the good of those for whom we pray, the relief of each need about which we pray and the glory and praise of our prayer-hearing, promise-keeping heavenly Father, the universal provider from whom all good things come. If our reasoning was right, what he does is what we asked; if our wisdom failed, what he does is what we should have asked. He knows and does what is better in every situation—situations, remember, of which the prayers we have made are now part. A moment ago we said that God always answers his children’s prayers positively, and that is the clue we need to understand the actual outcomes of our praying. God’s yes is regularly a case of “your thinking about how I could best meet this need was right”; his no is a case of “not that, for this is better”—and so is really a yes in disguise!—and his wait (which we infer from the fact that though we have asked for action, nothing yet has changed) is a case of “wait and see; I will deal with this need at the best time in the best way. Whether or not you will be able to discern my wisdom when I do act, that is what in fact I am going to do. Keep watching, and see what you can see.”
Examples may help to clarify this. Here, first, is a biblical example of God’s no being a yes in disguise. When Paul asked the Lord Jesus for miraculous healing for his thorn in the flesh, the Lord’s response was to say, in effect, Paul, I’ve got something better in store for you than healing. My grace is sufficient to keep you going, though you remain unhealed (2 Cor 12:7-10). No doubt Paul had thought that his ministry would be curtailed by his continuing disability, and he knew that miraculous healings brought glory to Christ; so here were two strong arguments to back his petition as in three solemn sessions of prayer he pleaded for the miracle to happen. But now he understood that Christ’s answer (though painful) was better than his request, and so he tells the Corinthians, “I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me” (v. 9). That was the Lord changing for the better a request that had been made honestly and with a purpose of glory for God and out of a truly pure heart. Paul’s need was actually met, though not in the way he had asked for; his ministry (miraculously) went on undiminished; and Christ was glorified; thus prayer was answered.
Carolyn, when teaching young children to pray or adults newly arrived at prayer as a discipline, is fond of saying, “God fixes our prayers on the way up!” Some people get so entangled in the various dos and don’ts of prayer, so transfixed by the problem of sorting out what is our part and what is God’s part, so bogged down fretting over whether they, as mere flawed humans, should ask anything of a holy, almighty God or conversely whether there is any point in asking since God will do what he wants anyway that they become paralyzed about praying. “Why ask God for anything? There is no way to get it right.” Romans 8:26, however, provides wonderful release from this paralysis. “For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words.” We as praying persons are being prayed for by the Holy Spirit himself! So Carolyn knows she is entitled to say, “Don’t fret; just pray. God fixes our prayers on the way up.” If he does not answer the prayer we made, he will answer the prayer we should have made. That is all anyone needs to know.
But what about timing? When will God answer our prayers of asking? When we ask God for things, we always hope that they will be given straightaway. We humans are always in a hurry, but God sometimes keeps us waiting because he is not. Luke 18:3-5 points to this: the unjust judge kept the widow waiting before he gave her justice. God has his own time frame and his own plan, which reflects his exhaustive knowledge. He knows the best time at which to answer our prayers as well as the best way to do it. “The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise,” says Peter: with God a thousand years is as a single day. God’s time frame, different as it is from our own, provides no grounds for complaint that God is keeping us waiting. He knows what he is doing: he is working according to plan; it is for us to adjust to him, not the other way around.
Sometimes the things that we ask for involve more than we realize, and God, who loves us, gives us more than we knew we were asking for as he responds to our requests. This is especially so when we pray about our own spiritual lives, where knowledge of what we really need is regularly lacking. The great hymn writer John Newton—who was a boy sailor, a navy deserter, then a slave trader, then a Christian convert, a friend of William Cowper, John Wesley and George Whitefield, who went on to become pastor first of Olney Church and then of St. Mary Woolnoth in London, and ultimately was a major evangelical leader for a generation and more—speaks poignantly of this in a hymn he wrote looking back on God’s work in his life. His words should make us think deeply about our own prayers—both for ourselves and for others.
I asked the Lord that I might grow
In faith and love and every grace;
Might more of his salvation know,
And seek more earnestly his face.
’Twas he who taught me thus to pray,
And he, I trust, has answered prayer;
But it has been in such a way
As almost drove me to despair.
I hoped that in some favored hour
At once he’d answer my request;
And by his love’s constraining power,
Subdue my sins and give me rest.
Instead of this he made me feel
The hidden evils of my heart,
And let the angry powers of hell
Assault my soul in every part.
Yea more, with his own hand he seemed
Intent to aggravate my woe;
Crossed all the fair designs I’d schemed,
Blasted my gourds and laid me low.
“Lord, why is this,” I trembling cried;
“Wilt Thou pursue thy worm to death?”
“’Tis in this way,” the Lord replied,
I answer prayer for grace and faith.
These inward trials I employ
From self and pride to set thee free
And break thy schemes of earthly joy,
That thou mayest seek thy all in me.
That is how the Lord sometimes answers prayer for spiritual advance.
We have it on firm scriptural authority that the Father’s response to requests faithfully, humbly, hopefully, expectantly made by his own children, out of a pure heart and an honest desire for God’s glory, is never going to be a flat no. One way or another God’s response will be a positive response, though it may be “I am adjusting the terms of your prayer to give you something better than you asked for.” Or it may be, “I know that this isn’t the moment in which answering your prayer would bring you and others most blessing, so I’m asking you to wait.” Or it may be, “I am answering your prayer, but you don’t know the strategy I’m working on, and it doesn’t at the moment feel or look like an answer at all. Nonetheless, it is. Keep praying, keep trusting, and keep looking for what, down the road, I may be able in wisdom to let you see.”
We are not implying, however, that the pain of seemingly unanswered prayer—honest, earnest, pure-hearted, long-term petition—will ever be eliminated entirely from our lives as long as we are here on earth. Scripture seems clearly to indicate the contrary, particularly in connection with persons close to us whom we very much love: family, colleagues, friends. We find it unimaginable, for instance, that David did not regularly pray for his scapegrace son Absalom, whom he loved so much, whatever mistakes he may have made in parenting him; yet Absalom, rebelling against his father, came to a thoroughly bad end (2 Sam 18). And Paul tells us that he prayed with agonized love throughout his ministry, presumably for the Jews whose rejection of Christ and Christians had put them squarely under God’s wrath (Rom 9:1-3; 10:1; 1 Thess 2:14-16). Members of Paul’s immediate and extended family, former friends and fellow Pharisees must have been in Paul’s mind here, along with the Jewish community in general. Can we doubt that pioneer Puritan pastor Richard Greenham and pioneer missionaries Carey in India, Judson in Burma and Morrison in China, all of whom saw virtually no converts among those whom over the years they sought to lead to Christ, prayed for the communities in which they worked, and for individuals within those communities, the way Paul prayed for the Jews? That petitionary prayer makes a difference, and that in heaven we will find what difference our prayers made, and that here on earth we are to go on praying for the physical and spiritual needs of others as love and compassion prompt us is not to be doubted, but here on earth the pain of not seeing all the changes in all the people that we longed to see is something we have to live with. The Lord Jesus himself, our prime model in praying, knew this particular heartache, as his tears over Jerusalem showed: “Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes” (Lk 19:42; cf. Mt 23:37-38). We will find that Jesus our Master upholds us when our experience of disappointment after praying comes close to his.
And it is as if the Lord adds, “By the way, always check when you ask me for something whether you yourself should be the beginning of the answer to your own prayer by doing something that you have not yet ventured to do.” Here we should recall that Jesus’ prayer for Jerusalem, implicit in the lament just cited, was truly answered when—after he had endured death, then risen and returned to glory—thousands in the city came to faith. Sometimes praying without action is as defective as is action without prayer, and our own inaction may be the factor that blocks the blessing we pray for. Let us not forget this as we move on.
If what this chapter has said is right, our practice of intercession may benefit from overhaul. Many pray for people and causes from lists that they compile to jog their memories. That is undoubtedly wise and good, but as life goes on, their lists lengthen so that increasingly they run through names and proposed needs at high speed each time, and the conversational discipline of backing our requests with reasons why God should do this or that is squeezed out. So, too, does the task of asking God what we ourselves might need to do to implement answers to our prayers. That is not good at all. Laying before God specific requests that one has been asked to make or that goodwill has suggested, adding “if it is your will” and then hurrying on, falls short of the intercessory pattern that we meet, for instance, in Abraham’s prayer for Sodom (Gen 18:23-33), and Ezra’s and Nehemiah’s and Daniel’s and the psalmist’s prayers for Jerusalem (Ezra 9; Neh 1; Dan 9; Ps 74; 79).
Now if we are going to take time to think our way into the situations and personal lives on which our intercessions focus, we may have to limit the number of things we undertake to pray for. But our amplifyings and argumentation will lift our intercessions from the shopping list, prayer-wheel level to the apostolic category of what Paul called “struggle” (Col 2:1-3), and may well enrich our experience of the truth declared by James: “The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working” (Jas 5:16). It would seem, therefore, that all of us are likely to benefit from talking over with our heavenly Father from time to time how we should order our personal intercessory prayers.
Here, now, is a true story (name and location not given for obvious reasons) offered by J. I. that illustrates some of what we have been saying: She lived in Eastern Europe and had come to a living faith in Christ. She wanted to go to the United States for Christian theological education. So twice, after prayer and praying each moment, she went to the U.S. embassy to apply for a one-year visa, but each time her request was denied. She went a third time, and now her passport was stamped with a prohibition against applying again. As she turned away from the desk she told the Lord that she accepted this as his will. Suddenly she was recalled, her passport was requested, and without explanation the prohibition was struck out and a one-year student visa stamped in. To this day she does not know why that was done. Her prayer had been answered positively, but in a way that tested both her persistence and her submission to God’s will. She serves God joyfully in the United States today.
Yes, God answers prayer, at the best time and in the best way. Never doubt that as you bring your requests to him today.