The Bungee Cord 7-25-22

Hello,

Yesterday, the Gospel reading was Jesus teaching the disciples how to pray. They said to him, “Lord teach us to pray, as John the Baptist taught his disciples to pray.” Who better to ask than Jesus.

I have heard many presentations on how to pray, some helpful….some not helpful at all. The ones that I find absolutely unhelpful are the ones that answer this question: “How to pray so that God gives you what you want.”

Maybe you’ve heard these presentations, too. One person said that to get God to give you what you want, your prayers have to be specific. This came from a missionary who needed a bike, and after going through months of prayer and still no bike, he decided that God wasn’t giving him the bike because God didn’t know just what kind of bike the missionary wanted. After all, there are so many kinds of bikes. So, revising his prayer for a red, ten speed bike….such a bike was given to him. To get God to give you what you want, you need to be specific in your prayers…..according to this person.

Another way to get God to give you what you want, I have heard on Christian radio stations. They say that you need to get as many people praying the very same thing, and the larger the army of pray-ers saying the exact same thing, the more hopeful you can be that you will get what you want. To get healed from a disease. To get the job you wanted. To get you out of the trouble you have fallen into. To get a parking spot on a busy parking day. Those who say this tell you to assemble the largest prayer army as possible, and maybe your prayer will drill through God’s boulder blocked ears.

To illustrate his teaching on prayer (Luke 11), Jesus tells a parable about a guy who received a midnight visitor and had nothing to feed him. So, the host runs next door at midnight and starts banging on his neighbor’s door, only to be told by the neighbor to go away because he was already in bed. Nevertheless, the neighbor keeps on banging, and the reluctant neighbor finally gets out of bed and gives the pesky neighbor his bread, because of his persistent knocking. Is Jesus, in this parable, giving yet another way to get God to give you what you want? Persistence?

I think not! And this is why: Jesus would have us know that the purpose of prayer is not to get God to give you what you want. The purpose of prayer is to climb into the lap of the heavenly Father, tell God everything that is on your mind, and be transformed by God loving embrace. I say that because when the disciples ask Jesus how to pray, the very first thing that Jesus says is, “Father”. Prayer is about a relationship. A powerful relationship. A self-sacrificing relationship. “Father.” In other parts of Scripture, Jesus tells us to pray using the more intimate word, “Abba”, “Daddy”.

Prayer, you see, is not about getting things. It is about having something. Having a God whose heart is so connected to our hearts that God delights when we come to him…crying…laughing…searching…asking….knocking. Jesus, when instructing us to pray, wants us to know that God is not some callous, ridged gumball machine, dispensing gumballs to those who operate the machine correctly. God is one who sees you and me as the “apple of his eye”. So valued are you and I to God, that when we sit on God’s lap and tell God everything that is on our mind, God doesn’t just listen to us. God joins us. That is what Jesus is all about. Jesus is the ultimate answer to prayer. If God is so moved by the struggles and fears that we bring to him that God would physically experience and feel those things in Jesus, we can rest assured that our prayers do not fall on deaf ears.

Although there are those who would have you believe that the purpose of prayer is to get God to give you what you want, I don’t think that is what the Bible teaches about prayer. The Bible teaches that to pray is to climb up into the lap of the heavenly Father, tell him everything, and then be transformed by God’s embrace.

Jesus, teach us how to pray. “When you pray, say, ‘Father.’”

Have a great week.

God’s grace and peace, (ggap)

Pastor Jerry Nuernberger

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