Matthew 7:7-11
The Rev. Dr. Robert S. Langworthy, preaching
September 29, 2024
Prayer is a fundamental practice of the Christian faith – one so crucial that Jesus brings it up a second time in His Sermon on the Mount.
Yet, though prayer is crucial, there’s probably no practice of the Christian faith that as often occasions people’s giving up on the Christian faith! How many have grown disappointed and disillusioned with God because they prayed and the baby still died, prayed and the beautiful ministry to which so many gave their all still came to nothing, prayed and their efforts to create peace and reconciliation in their city still failed!
Because in these verses Jesus gives such an unreserved promise about the results of prayer, He creates a strong possibility for disenchantment with it – and with God. For when He promises, “Everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks the door is opened,” He bases confidence about that promise on God’s essential, immutable character, arguing that since we trust human parents who are “evil” (that is, selfish by nature) to “give good gifts” to their children when they ask of them, how much the more should we trust an infinitely good heavenly Father to give us good gifts when we pray!
So is Jesus’ unrestricted encouragement of daring, bold prayer at fault when we grow disappointed with the practice, or is it our projection of wishful thinking and false expectations onto His promise that’s at fault?
While in the Sermon on the Mount Jesus puts no qualifications on what we ask of God in prayer, elsewhere He does. For example, in John 14:13, He promises, “I will do whatever you ask in my name.” He can’t mean that if we recite “in the name of Jesus”, as if it were a magical incantation, the Lord Almighty will follow our lead and obey our wishes. Would God kill off an innocent person just because someone asked him to, saying, “in the name of Jesus”? No, to ask in Jesus’ name is to ask in line with Jesus’ character and His agenda of love and justice for all. It is to ask for what He’d ask for if He were the one praying: for things like kindness, fairness, generosity to the poor, faithfulness to God.
Jesus is not promising God will give us whatever we ask for. The promise is that God will always give us “good things”. But those good things may not involve the things we had in mind. God will, out of His righteousness and love, turn down certain requests.
That means that the good thing God does in fact give us, in response to our prayer, might not look like anything we had envisioned or could even imagine as being good. Brian Sternberg, a world record holder in the pole vault, broke his neck in a gym accident that rendered him a quadriplegic. With many other believers, Brian fervently prayed for healing and the recovery of his mobility; but God gave him a different gift instead. Brian says that God healed him of the need to be healed, a gift he initially resisted but finally embraced because it gave him a special credibility in bearing witness to Jesus. People listened to him because he’d overcome a terrible tragedy and radiated joy and peace in a life of soul-satisfying purpose. Brian viewed his tragedy as a blessing in disguise and thanked God for not repairing his body.
Because the Lord loves us and knows what’s best when we most of the time don’t, God’s response to a prayer may be something we at first can’t see as being at all good. I know a man who thought a certain woman was his perfect destiny in marriage and prayed she’d say Yes when he proposed to her. When instead she broke his heart, he was emotionally devastated. Yet, years later, he realized he’d been blinded by his infatuation and that, by turning him down, she saved them both from what would’ve been a miserable marriage due to their divergent aims in life. He later observed, “Now I only want what God thinks best. For what God thinks best is always what I’d think best if I knew as much as God knows. I praise God for all the doors He’s shut in my face.”
Because the Lord loves us with wisdom, we also should not expect that He will always deliver us from difficult people or circumstances. Often we are better off to be kept in tough situations because, if we deal with them right, they expedite, more than having everything go our way, our growth of character and the reformation of our conduct. Thus, in order to change the state of our soul, God may refuse to change the state of our affairs. One man who’d long prayed for relief from excruciating arthritic pain came to appreciate God’s severe mercy in letting his suffering continue, that it might give him an empathy and compassion for others that enables him to comfort them more deeply.
There are things we cannot automatically expect to get from prayer – such as: what we want, what we deem good or what we’d like to see changed in our situation or the people around us. But there are other things we can always expect to get from prayer, because they’re the things that prayer was primarily designed to accomplish: sanctification, guidance and empowerment.
First, from praying, we can expect to be, over time, changed for the better, even if nothing else changes, and sometimes because nothing else changes. Steadfast prayer centers us on God and God’s concerns for the world. It advances our development as disciples of Jesus as we pray less to make requests of God and more to allow God to make us anew, less to tell God what to do and more to listen for God to tell us what to do, less to prevail upon God – as if we have to prompt Him to help us – and more to let Him prevail over us to prompt us to love like Jesus.
Second, from praying, we can expect to be, over time, led in the right direction – guided down the path of righteousness and truth. To pray well is to “stop, look and listen” and to wait on God to get His revelations through our thick skull (and sometimes past our hardened heart).
Third, from praying, we can expect to be, over time, inspired and empowered to do our part in God’s great plan. To open our heart in prayer is to open it to God’s heart and to God’s Spirit who strengthens us for doing right.
Prayer then instills hope – maybe not of getting exactly what we want or what we deem best or what we’d like to be changed in our circumstances – but always of getting changed ourselves into Christ’s likeness, guided on His path and strengthened to fulfill our unique role in the realization of His beautiful plans.
Maybe there is no such thing as unanswered prayer – and every answer is perfect for us. So let’s pray and gain the hope prayer promises!
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