I'm eager to hear from God this morning! How about you? He's already spoken his goodness to me in the hugs of my children and the beauty around me. Now I'm opening his word to Psalm 5 to see what more he wants to say. Let's read it together, at least twice. Look thoughtfully over each line and let it resonate in your heart. What are you needing to hear most in this moment?
In the morning, O LORD, you hear my voice; in the morning I lay my requests before you and wait in expectation. (v. 3)
Yesterday I blogged about the frustration of prayers that seem unheard. Here in this statement God is reminding me of some important principles for prayer. One is that I need to keep praying and voicing my requests to God. In and of itself, the process of praying draws me out of the physical and into the spiritual, keeping me in touch with God. To give up praying is to give up on God's friendship. God wants to hear my voice as much as I want to hear his!
Another thing he's emphasizing is that I need to become okay with waiting. It's not my strong suit, I admit. I want God to give me patience...right now! But part of learning to honor and depend on God is coming to grips with the fact that my timetable isn't his to keep. And that's hard. Yet so many times I tell my own kids to wait when they're nagging and insisting that I get up and move right now to do what they want. Funny how it feels perfectly reasonable for me to make them learn to wait! Come to think of it, parents who always jump when their kids say jump are making it even harder for their children to have a good relationship with God. The first time they ask for something and God doesn't give it right away will send them into a crisis of faith.
And then there's expectation. "I lay my requests before you and wait in expectation." It's not passive waiting; it's active. It's expectant. From cover to cover of the Bible, God makes it clear that we should pray in expectation that he will grant our prayers. Now a lot of us have learned to hedge our bets with God. We pray but we're afraid to expect a positive answer. Because what if he doesn't come through? We're afraid that if we get our hopes up it will hurt more if we're disappointed. It's less painful to ask God with an attitude of "He may grant this or he many not. I'm sure he'll do whatever is best." That way we can stay at a flat line of faith. No peaks. No valleys. Just keep it level. "He will or he won't. We'll just have to wait and see."
God never says to pray that way. I challenge you to find it in Scripture. "Wait in expectation," he says. "Expect a postive response. Believe that your prayers can move me, even change my mind." God doesn't always give us the answer we want, but he wants us to expect him to give it. He doesn't want us to pray with a fatalistic mindset that he's already decided what he's going to do anyway so our prayers are just a formality. Fatalism is the spawn of religion but not of a real relationship with the living God. Resist it!
Father, I will pray to you. And I will wait for you to answer. I concede that you have a much better sense of timing than I do. And even though you haven't always granted my every request, I will continue to pray with expectation that you will respond favorably--not because of who I am, but because of who you are and the covenant promises you have made through Jesus, your Son. Amen.
I guess I don't get it. This seems kind of opposite to what my last church taught through The Purpose Driven Life. I especially don't get it when it comes to sick people and healing. Some people teach that God always wants to heal no matter what and that if it doesn't happen it's because we didn't have enough faith, while other people teach that it's not always God's will to heal people. I know some of us were confused about this with Cathy. Some of us thought we should pray the devil out of her body and it would work, then we were disappointed when it didn't and started doubting their faith. Others of us thought we had to accept that God might have a different plan, but apparently this is fatalistic. I just don't understand.
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing your confusion, my dear friend. This is indeed a sometimes confusing subject. The Bible clearly says that sometimes we don't get what we pray for because we don't really believe God will grant it. But the Bible also teaches that not every no answer from God is because of a lack of faith. God may have something better in mind.
ReplyDeleteReligious people are always prone to going to one extreme or the other about any number of things. It's just human nature, I guess. Some Christians choose to latch on only to the teachings about praying in expectation and the promises that God will grant what we ask. They think that the results they seek are guaranteed if they have enough faith.
Other Christians tend to focus only on the sovereign will of God and assume that God probably doesn't care about their wants anyway. He already has everything pre-scripted so they're just expressing in prayer that they're good with whatever that turns out to be.
It makes things seem easier to camp out at one end of the pendulum or the other. We don't have to wrestle with the tension that being in the middle creates. But I think that's where reality and the whole teaching of Scripture put us.
God loves us and it brings him joy to see that we trust his love for us enough to ask him for the desires of our hearts. He enjoys rewarding our faith. He repeatedly invites us to make requests of him and expect a favorable response from him.
At the same time, we see in real life and in Scripture that things don't always go the way we asked, even when we pray in faith. And that's because God reserves the right to say no when he knows that what we're asking isn't in keeping with the larger good he wants to do. So when he says no, we then need to trust his heart and accept his will.
Prayer is God's legitimate invitation for us to have a relationship in which we find that he wants to grant our godly desires. But it is not a means by which we can manipulate God into doing whatever we want.
I believe that living in the tension between those two extremes is where a real relationship with God grows. Bless you as we all continue to wrestle with the adventure of life with God.
This is a vital and interesting discussion! The place where faith and "real life" meet is for each of us a huge part of the journey through life. I guess the thing is that we just have to realize that God and I have far different roles - God is above all, through all, and in all. His ways and thoughts are not my ways and thoughts. Soooo, easy to see the difficulty in understanding everything God does in my life. It comes down to the fact that my role is to "love the Lord with all my heart." I must never trust only in my own understanding of what I need or someone else needs. We can live in great joy and yet lean on the Everlasting Arms and cry our eyes out when we need to. Bless the name of the Lord!
ReplyDeleteK.B.