Take My Hand. Andrew Taylor-Troutman

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      Praying the Questions

      THE MYSTERY

      ADMITTEDLY, MY PRAYER LIFE has been inconsistent over the course of my life. When I was young, there were many days when I would wake up early just so that I could read my Bible. In the margins, I would scribble little prayers that were prompted by the particular text. I still have that Bible and I like to re-read those prayers, which are snapshots of my faith and my life from years gone by. The prayers are unsophisticated, but I try to be gentle with myself. More often than not, my intensity is evident; it is clear to me, even in looking back, that I was trying to be the best Christian that I possibly could. My dad likes to quote a line from the mystic, Kabir, when describing that time in my life: I was a slave to intensity.¹

      Years later, I think that I was motivated at least in part by a kind of bargaining with God. I was trying to earn blessings by my good behavior. While the blessings that I desired were quite juvenile, I remember thinking that if I did this or if I didn’t do that, God would give me exactly what I wanted. This attitude towards prayer lasted well into my adolescence. During my junior year of high school baseball, I was in a deep slump at the plate. I wasn’t even hitting the ball out of the infield. One game, I made a big demonstration of prayer, stopping to take a knee and bow my head as I approached the batter’s box. I still struck out!

      As a pastor, I have encountered in other adults a similar view of a prayer as a bargaining session with God. There seems to be a kind of theology in which it is believed that the prayer will only be efficacious if the person is fervent enough or pious enough or any number of fill-in-the-blanks. Many people pray before stepping up to the plate, so to speak, and while it certainly seems natural to pray for oneself, the problem is that such attitudes towards prayer can imply a view of God as one who needs to be coerced, convinced, or cajoled. I think we need to think hard about the ramifications of such theology. In the verse just before he teaches the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus states emphatically, “Your Father already knows what you need before you ask Him” (Matt 6:8). This makes sense to me. Isn’t this part of what we mean by claiming that God is omniscient or all-knowing?

      Perhaps what’s really going on is a kind of “magical” understanding of prayer. I understand “religious” belief as an idea about the Being (or beings) that are somehow beyond and greater than the human self. “Magical” beliefs would then be the attempt to manipulate those beings. For instance, I know another pastor who once told me that he had prayed away a rain storm. I looked at him in disbelief, not because he would pray for good weather, but because of the magical power that he assigned to his own prayers and, as a consequence, to himself. To put it another way, if prayer is magical, then is God omnipotent or all-powerful?

      One thing is for certain: I am expected to pray with people as a pastor. This expectation goes far beyond Sunday morning worship, and rightly so. Faith spills out from the walls of the church, running into homes and hospitals, and even filling up baseball stadiums. I pray for people every day, and I am sincere about those prayers. But I do think that there is a danger that such expectations to pray in different places for different things could go to one’s head. (I might start believing that I can control the weather!) Though I recognize my role as a spiritual leader, I consciously resist the implication that my prayers are somehow more powerful than others. When people come to my office for prayer, I often point at the phone on my desk, insisting that is a regular phone and not a direct line to God! When asked by the farmers in my congregation to pray for rain, I printed a prayer in the bulletin and encouraged everyone to pray. I tried to stress that this rain prayer was not some kind of magic chant: it is something that we do together.

      Yet the question persists, why should we pray? I’m told that Philip Yancey answers that question quite simply: we should pray because Jesus told us to do so. Fine answer! But more to the heart of the matter, what do our prayers do? How does prayer work? Imbedded in these questions is an understanding of the nature of God. Do our prayers have an effect upon God? Does prayer change God’s mind or will or plan? Can we pray away a thunderstorm?

      Reformed theology responds to these questions by stressing the sovereignty of God. God is in charge; the ruler of all creation has decreed a plan for humankind from the beginning of time, even from before time existed. Prayer, then, cannot be “magical” because we cannot control or compel God. John Calvin rightly warned against praying as if we had the ability to take something from God.² We believe that God is both omniscient and omnipotent.

      However, just because our prayers do not change God, we can still believe that prayer has the power to transform. Craig Barnes puts it this way: “It isn’t that our prayers are powerful enough to bring about changes. They are no more powerful than we are. It is God who is powerful. We may not know God’s will, but we can be certain that God’s power will change us, will transform us.”³ Because we are mortal and our perspective is necessarily in time, it may seem to us that God “answers” or responds to prayer, but actually, we are often the ones who have changed. We should pray because Jesus told us to do so; but even more importantly, we pray because Jesus prayed himself, and we are called to become like Christ. Calvin called this sanctification: the process of patterning our lives on Christ’s example. In the garden of Gethsemane, Jesus prayed for God’s will to be done, not his own (Matt 26:39; Mark 14:36; Luke 22:42). Prayer, therefore, can change our perspective and interpretation of events; prayer can even transform our experience of the world.