“Prayer doesn’t change God, it changes us.” (Shadowlands)
Some of you may recall Anthony Hopkins intoning that line in the movie version of “Shadowlands”, as he portrayed beloved author and oxford don C.S. Lewis. This idea was articulated also directly by the danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard.
Does this mean that prayer is pointless? A one way street? Merely talking to the air or a cosmic brick wall? No, for we are instructed to pray by Jesus himself. “Ask and it shall be given unto you. Seek and ye shall find. Knock and the door shall be opened unto you.”
Prayer takes us into God’s presence. In fact, people often get more than they bargain for. Pop culture has sometimes cheapened prayer or tempted us to use it as a kind of gumball machine in the sky. People think of it as a way of attaining health and wealth. Church people sometimes admit to praying over the most mundane stuff, like finding a parking spot. This has made me think that an essay is in order to remind us of the dangers of prayer.
1. You may have the misfortune to get what you ask for.
Remember the haunting tale of the Monkey’s Paw? That is the danger of prayer as talisman. God doesn’t actually work like the evil talisman, but be aware that an answer to prayer may be something that comes with unseen consequences. Maybe you get the promotion you wanted, only to have to face new struggles with colleagues and stress in the marriage. Maybe the thing you wanted turned out to be a source of trial and testing. God can use the very thing you want to humble you, and teach you the art of surrender to His will. Which brings me to a major point.
2. Prayer means a surrender of the will.
When we pray, we bow before our maker, and if we are rational, His greatness and beauty overpowers us with a sense of our limitations. We gasp “Thy will be done, Lord.” Kierkegaard again writes of prayer as a struggle, “The righteous strives in prayer with God and conquers, in that God conquers.” (From Edifying Discourses, vol 4)
3. You may be forced to look at some hard truths about yourself.
Facing who God is, encountering His living presence, means discovering who we aren’t. We are not deities. We are more like little toddlers pretending to drive the big car. And we soon see that we need to give up the driver’s seat. (Or as a nurse acquaintance used to say, “Jesus take the wheel!”)
God is love. We aren’t—we are often selfish, petty, jealous, and eager at other’s losses.
God is holy. We realize that we are sinful; we have addictions that are unhealthy, habits that are shameful, relationships that lead us astray.
God cares about injustice, making us realize that we suffer a lack of passion about the woes of the less fortunate—we “care” but usually not enough to do anything much.
4. Your view of the world may change in ways that are uncomfortable.
I mentioned the injustices. A will informed by God is more awake to the misery of sin in the lives of others. You are more awake to injustice. You care more about inequalities. You care more about nature itself.
5. You may be led to go somewhere you don’t want to go.
I recall a lecture by the theologian R. C. Sproul on discerning God’s will. He recounted how he was deciding between two job offers after seminary, one at his beloved bucolic institution in Pennsylvania, and another position in Boston. At the end he felt God’s clear guidance, and ended up moving and having a couple of unhappy years in Boston. Years later he mused “I have no earthly idea why God led me there except maybe to get me out of my comfortable environment.”
Dr. Jerry Rankin, president of the Southern Baptist International Mission board reflects on some who heeded the call of Christ to leave behind their comforts and proclaim the Gospel in foreign lands.
“During my seventeen years as president of the International Mission Board, I never got used to the funerals. Death wasn’t necessarily the result of violence or because of a missionary’s Christian witness. Missionaries succumb to disease, are killed in a carjacking, or in an accident while traveling a dangerous highway. Some were in the wrong place when a terrorist bomb exploded in a shopping mall or got caught in a mob of anti-American demonstrators. But there were those who were targeted because they dared to proclaim the truth of the gospel in a hostile environment.” (You may read more here)
Prayer doesn’t necessarily lead to riches and health, as some have erroneously supposed. Sometimes it is rather the very way of the cross, as it was for Jesus himself at Gethsemane. After Jesus went through his passion and resurrection, he predicted to his disciple Peter, “when you are old you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go.” John the gospel writer further elaborates this, that “Jesus said this to indicate the kind of death by which Peter would glorify God.”
Jesus’ early followers were men whose prayers were effective They healed people who were sick, and transformed lives. They “turned the world upside down” (in the complaint of their enemies). Yet for all their spiritual success (or rather because of it), they nearly all died as martyrs to the cause of Christ.
5. Prayer changes your will, but your own will needed it. You will be transformed in a positive way:
Richard J. Foster in his great book Prayer, wrote:
“The death of my own will”—strong language. But all of the great devotional masters have found it so. Soren Kierkegaard echoes Woolman’s experience when he notes, “God creates everything out of nothing—and everything which God is to use he first reduces to nothing.”4
Do you know what a great freedom this crucifixion of the Will is? It means freedom from what A. W. Tozer called “the fine threads of the self-life, the hyphenated sins of the human spirit.”5 It means freedom from the self—sins: self-sufficiency, self-pity, self-absorption, self-abuse, self-aggrandizement, self-castigation, self-deception, self-exaltation, self-depreciation, self-indulgence, self-hatred, and a host of others just like them. It means freedom from the everlasting burden of always having to get our own way. It means freedom to care for others, to genuinely put their needs first, to give joyfully and freely.
Little by little we are changed by this daily crucifixion of the Will. Changed, not like a tornado changes things, but like a grain of sand in an oyster changes things. New graces emerge: new ability to cast all our care upon God, new joy at the success of others, new hope in a God who is good.
Please remember, we are dealing with the crucifixion of the will, not the obliteration of the will. Crucifixion always has resurrection tied to it. God is not destroying the will but transforming it so that over a process of time we can freely will what God wills.”
Amen.