“Beck and Call…and Pray” – Pr. David Hewitt – KOG – July 25, 2010
Today we are going to join with Jesus and talk about “prayer.” Prayer. You know, I’m glad to be able to stand before you like this. During the times I couldn’t stand, confined to a wheelchair, all sorts of emotions entered my mind –some positive, some negative – and those negative emotions are related to prayer and how we view our relationship with God. First of all, there was a feeling, when I was most incapacitated, when I was constantly being taken care of, aided, helped…when people were serving me “at my beck and call,” as the saying goes…even as I was feeling very grateful for being helped, I also had an uncomfortable feeling of losing control. If one is served, then sometimes one is limited to when and where the server is able to serve you. And sometimes, when one wants something, the answer is “no,” or “no, not now,” when you KNOW that if you had the power, the ability, you could get it yourself. That kind of feeling may enter into whether we want to pray to God and rely on God like that, or not.
The other negative feeling that followed being served so much was the feeling of guilt. I was talking with another person who, some time ago, was receiving all sorts of food and other favors from people after an illness who said, plainly, “I feel guilty” for causing such disruptions in people’s lives. The implication was: even though he was quite touched at the show of support from others, he still felt guilty for seeming to use and manipulate other people, even if that was not his primary intent. Now, he DID pray for help from God, and, through other people, God answered his prayer. But that his prayers were answered, and answered in the affirmative, did not make him feel very good. As St. Teresa of Avila once said, “Answered prayers cause more tears than those that remain unanswered.”
Though St. Teresa made that pronouncement many hundreds of years ago, that is the one thing she said that lives on in our culture today. Why? Because there seems to be some truth to it. We have translated that saying into something more secular. Now we say, “Be careful what you wish for….” Want to win the lottery? Be careful what you wish for! Do you know how to handle all of that money you’ll receive? Are you ready for the very different way people will treat you once you get rich, or, if you want fame, once you get famous? If you want power, authority, and responsibility, be careful what you wish for: Are you ready for the trials and tribulations that come from having that power and authority? Are you ready to take on an increased responsibility for all that goes on where you live?
You see, there’s tension there – tension between claiming a gift, and the gift claiming US. That’s why we should wonder, why does Jesus have to urge us to go to God for our requests? Why does He have to say, “Ask, and it shall be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you.” Why does He have to point out that “everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and everyone who knocks, the door will be opened”? (Luke 11:9-10) Shouldn’t it come naturally to us, to go to God in prayer, about everything? Why does the Apostle Paul have to practically beg his Christian friends in Philippi to “not worry about anything, but by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God”? (Philippians 4:6) Why do we have a problem with prayer? You could say we have a problem with prayer for 2 reasons: 1) God & 2) us.
First, God. I want to share with you a little poem by Violet Nesdoly en-titled, “I Don’t Want to Pray.”
“I don’t want to pray,”
slap words sting
from my four-year-old daughter.
How have I millstoned God to her
So she won’t bring
her earaches to Him?
I remember, “Are you saved?”
evangelistic, zealous aunt
cornered me, seven.
Next time she visited
I hid.
Here Violet is using “evangelistic” in a negative way. But the way she felt, as a girl, about her pushy aunt is sometimes the way we feel about God. We feel that if we pray to God, we leave ourselves too vulnerable; He can take advantage of us. He can make us feel bad –
-- Which gets into our second reason we don’t pray: us. We sinners know that the more we rely, in prayer, upon God, the deeper we go into a relationship with God, and the deeper we go into a relationship with God, the deeper we He goes with us – deep into our vulnerabilities, our hurts, our fears, our worries, our selfishness, our waywardness – giving God a chance to call all of those things into question. This is being afraid of God, seeing God as our adversary.
Jesus knew this. That’s why the center of what He says is not, “Ask, search, knock,” it’s what lies behind it; He says, You’ll want to ask God, search with God’s help, and you’ll want God to answer your knocking IF you really understood what God is all about, and believed in God and His love for you! Earlier, Jesus taught them the Lord’s Prayer. I think the most revolutionary word in that prayer is the first one: “Father”! And later He says, if even sinful fathers and mothers take care of their children, how much more will your Heavenly Parent take care of you! As we see love in the actions of Jesus the Son, we can trust the love His Father has for you & me!
That’s why Violet Nesdoly ends her prayer this way:
Jesus is different
His words a compelling beckon
lure-and-bait questions
irresistible Pied-Piper-tune stories
I see my little girl
one of that eager wriggling crowd
pressing too close
for disciples’ comfort.
His eyes draw her near
she leans, trusting, against Him
He lifts her on His knee.
While He talks
she watches the way
His chin moves
fingers His beard
catches His eye
and whispers,
“I have an earache.”
You know, we parents can only give our children so much, and that’s all. Jesus reveals one more thing about prayer, the most important thing, what Jesus had just told Martha was the “one and only thing” she “needed.” He said, “How much more will the heavenly Father give…THE HOLY SPIRIT to those who ask Him!” (Luke 11:13) The Holy Spirit. Jesus urges us to ask for more, much more than “this n’ that,” more than earthly stuff. Jesus wants us to ask the Father for His Holy Spirit, and, as Pastor Paul pointed out last week, “let Christ be in us.” (Colossians 1:27) He wants to take care of us, not just materially. He wants to take care of us spiritually, where it really counts. He wants to take us deeper.
Oh, there’s one level of prayer that should never be neglected, for, after all, we remain human until we die. We are so limited. We still have material needs. I remember as a kid having an ant farm and watching the ants build there colony and I recall thinking, “they still need food, and I’m the only one who can help them.” I was their God. They could pray to me, that powerful person just outside their window, if they wanted to. I was so much more powerful than they. That’s one way to look at Isaiah 55:8-9, where God says, “For My thoughts are not your thoughts nor are your ways My ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways.” So we might pray to God simply because He’s so much more powerful, and because He has what we need.
If we were to make an acronym out of the word, “P.R.A.Y.,” with P standing for Praise, R standing for Repent, A standing for Ask, and Y standing for Yield,” that would be something anyone could understand, even non-Christians, as part of us ants bowing to the Big Guy who is watching our little lives from that big window in the sky. We praise God to butter Him up, we repent to make Him less angry at our mistakes, then we ask for what we want, and finally we yield to whatever His answer is. Simple, right? But God wants to give us His Holy Spirit; that’s what our Lord Jesus tells us today; God wants to go deeper that all of that!
If He’s giving us His Holy Spirit, He’s saying more than, “I’ll get you what you need; come to Me, because I am the best in one-stop shopping.” If God is giving to us His Holy Spirit, God’s saying, “Call to Me and I will answer you, and will tell you great and hidden things that you have not known.” (Jeremiah 33:3) And these “great and hidden things” amount to more than just knowledge. These great and hidden things, revealed through Jesus, say to us that this life prepares us for eternity; that God has made us for a purpose; that love and relationships are more important than power and prestige; that to be One with the God of love is all that matters; and that words such as these only begin to describe the depths of living an abundant and joyful, life on earth.
These “great and hidden things” are experienced through living in the Christian community. The apostle Paul was often a quite independent person. He came and went among the churches; he never relied on the offering plate, but made tents to support himself financially. But then he was arrested and spent a long time in prison. Suddenly his needs were many. He didn’t, at first, seem too comfortable with relying on others, such as the Philippian church. He said, in today’s lesson, “Not that I am referring to being in need; for I have learned to be content with whatever I have.” Yet, he has to admit, he is thankful for their gifts to him; “it was kind of you,” he tells the Philippians, “to share my distress.” He realized that God brought had brought them closer in their mutual need; He’s glad that his being in jail gave them the “opportunity” to “show” their love for him; and, He concludes, “No church shared with me in the matter of giving and receiving except you alone.” (Philippians 4:10-15)
What Paul calls “the matter of giving and receiving” is what we call “true community” – it’s relying on each other to such an extent that we are close to each other, in love. Just as God wants us to act that way for each other, He wants us to be that way with Him. Even if it means that we are challenged by God’s love…even if it means our lives are irrevocably changed from what they were before…even if it means learning “great and hidden things” from God that make us in some sense different from others in the world, and make others more uncomfortable with their sin…when we receive the Holy Spirit from God, as Jesus urges us to do today, our lives are the better for it. And our prayer life is never the same. As Oli Hallesby once said, “The Spirit of Prayer makes us so intimate with God that we scarcely pass through an experience before we speak to Him about it, either in supplication in sighing, in pouring out our woes before Him, in fervent requests, or in thanksgiving and adoration.” God wants us to “give and receive” with Him, constantly, just as we are called to do with others. He wants to be in a very intimate relationship with us, and us with Him.
I would add one more thing. The Spirit of Prayer involves reversing the order of P.R.A.Y. – it means Yielding to God’s will first – Listening to Him first, saying first, as Jesus says first in the Lord’s Prayer, “Your will, O God, be done.” Then the A, R, and P come next – then we ask, repent, and pray. For to yield to God, to listen to Him, is the ultimate in discipleship. It’s allowing Him to mold and shape our hearts, no matter how much sometimes that hurts, at first. As Mary Brutosky has recited:
Penetration to the edge of Mystery
Burns the fingers of my heart
And I look for a hiding kind of fog,
A respite for my soul,
But there’s no healing for the
Quivering center of myself,
That freshly blessed sinew
Divinity has kissed.
As this Mary has revealed, let us trust God enough to let in Jesus and His Spirit, to touch those hurt and damaged places in our hearts, that may at first “burn the fingers” of our hearts, but, in the end, gives us a “fresh blessing” in the center of our souls…that places our lives at God’s “beck and call” instead of the other way around…so that our lives for others may reflect God’s blessing. Amen!
