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‘Whatever you ask for in prayer with faith, you will receive.”
This stark verse is quite a challenge. I’ve prayed for lots of things in my time. I’ve thought that I’ve had faith for the vast majority of them. Of these prayers that i have prayed with what I consider to be faith, only a small portion have been answered in the way that I was praying, or hoping for. So what’s going on here?
It could be that I don’t have enough faith. I’ve always wondered who the arbiter is in deciding how much faith is enough, and of what sort. It must be God, but I’ve had an awful lot of people in the course of my life tell me that they’re sure I don’t have the enough faith, can’t have, otherwise this or that would have happened, or wouldn’t have done. I would be able to walk, I’d be in less physical pain, I might not have depression, my band might have been more successful and so on and so forth. So what role does God have in all this? Is it right for us to see the prayer of others go unanswered (as far as we can see) and draw our conclusions and judgements about them and their faith accordingly. It seems to me that seemingly unanswered prayer offers us a dangerous opportunity to assume a role that was never ours.
I’m never totally convinced that if I believe hard enough, with enough force, or with the kind of intensity which runs the risk of bursting a blood vessel, that this is what results in the answer to prayer that I may have been seeking.
Prayer is a relationship, a developing conversation. What I’ve been most struck by about it recently is that as well as speaking, both parties in it can choose to listen to. It does us good to listen to the voice and the heart of God, but the idea that he might want to listen to me too has been somewhat baffling, humbling and exciting to me recently. What a concept! God thinks I’m worth listening to.
Some of us see miracles, seemingly on a daily basis. At what point do these cease to be miraculous? Some can be physical healings, or cures. Others can be seeing a hardened heart softened by the glorious, gentle embrace of the Spirit. Prayers can be answered immediately. Prayers can take a lifetime to answer. Many will, it seems to me, only be answered in the light of a new world, in eternity.
So, what are we to take from Jesus’s statement? It’s bald and bold. There aren’t too many ways of getting around it or taking it out of context to fit our circumstances. The closest I can come to an answer is to encourage each one of us, including myself, to persist and persevere in prayer. If we see our prayer relationship with God merely as a means of spiritual oneupmanship, or as a way of getting ahead of others who choose not to pray, so that we, rather than they, come to fullness of joy, then I think we are missing the point. We saw last week, did we not, that God’s design for us and our relationship with him is contentment and trust, that we please him because we were made for his joy and glory. I don’t please God more than you because I happen to be in full time ministry. We have an invitation to a lifelong, life-giving transformation through the work of the Spirit. Similarly, I wonder, are we designed to be content with who we are, and our circumstances, hard and sometimes terrifying and seemingly unfair as this is? If I am to rejoice in the Lord always, theoretically, this has to happen when I am in pain, or suffering, and when I am not. I have not been good at this during my life!
What if God’s desire is for my heart’s desire to simply be him, his praise and his glory? What impact does this have on what I ask for in prayer with faith then?
You’ll see this post is almost entirely speculative. I think in the end it’s because there isn’t a single one of us, or any who have gone before, who truly understand the depth, privilege or potential of prayer. I certainly don’t. I simply offer my speculations and hope and indeed pray that they are somehow helpful to you as you go about your day today.