Praying Like We Believe It

[The Midweek Encounter is a ministry of Encounter Church in Kentwood, MI. These posts are reflections on Sunday's message, which can be heard here each week: http://myencounterchurch.org/#/messages-media]

Prayer sounds like it should be so easy. I find talking to other humans relatively easy most of the time, so why does it suddenly become so hard when the other part of the equation is a deity and not a human? If anything, shouldn’t that be easier, since I know God is kind of required to listen to me and to care about what I’m saying? Instead though, I find myself hesitating to ask for certain things, forgetting or neglecting to pray altogether, and constantly wondering whether my prayers are going anywhere at all.

Photo Credit: Flickr User snowpeak, Creative Commons

Reading passages like Luke 18:1-8, and especially Luke 11:9-10, bring up a lot of questions for me. In Luke 18, the persistent widow in the parable bothers the judge until he gives into her demands. Going to God over and over again sometimes feels like it’s showing a lack of faith instead of being a sign of having faith. Because it is often misused, Luke 11:9-10 can look like an instance of “magic genie God,” where we simply tell him what we want and voila! there it is. “So I say to you: Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.  For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.” Shouldn’t this mean that God answers all of my prayers, regardless of what they they are?

Really though, both of these passages point to the same virtue: persistence. The widow maybe does bother the judge a bit, it’s true, but the judge isn’t a perfect representation of God--our God, who is perfect, is never bothered by us. He likes when we repeatedly pray the same prayers, because prayers are a way of building relationship, just like talking to our family or friends is. When we look at the context of Luke 11:9-10, we see that Jesus is pointing to God’s desire to bring about the best for his children, and he is reminding them to pray in accordance with God’s will. Often times when we pray, our limited perspective doesn’t enable us to see the greater God may be working.

This is all an excellent reminder of why we should pray, and yet it still doesn’t get at the heart of why prayer is so hard. I love the quote from Abraham Joshua Heschel that Pastor Dirk used:

"The issue of prayer is not prayer; the issue of prayer is God."

At first it sounds almost incorrect--we believe God is good, all-powerful, all-knowing--so how could he have “issues?” But when I dig deep down, my issue with prayer isn’t really about the act of praying itself; it’s about my insecurities, hang ups, and questions about the one I’m praying to.

Maybe how we pray reveals what we really believe about God.

It’s difficult, frustrating, even tedious to pray the same prayer over and over for weeks, months, years. Repeated praying can feel like we don’t believe God will answer our prayer, or that he’s not even listening at all. When God answers with a “no” to something we thought for sure would be within his will, the temptation to stop praying can become even stronger.

In these times, we need to remind ourselves of who God really is. If we turn to the Bible and see over and over again how good, faithful, and loving he is, we can relearn to pray like we really believe those things. God doesn’t love us any more or any less when we keep praying the same thing, and his answers to our prayers don’t mean he loves us any more or any less either--even if he doesn’t answer in the way or in the timeline that we’d like him to. If we allow it to, prayer can be an expression of faith that we know he will hear and answer.

So this week, I’m trying to return to some of the prayers I had stopped praying for a while. It’s with a bit of trepidation, but I’m hoping that doing so will remind me of who God really is, and that he does what he says he will.

[Brianna DeWitt believes in Jesus, surrounding yourself with good people, and that desserts are best when they involve chocolate and peanut butter. She writes about faith, growing up, and whatever else pops into her head on her own blog, and tweets (largely about food) at @bwitt722.]