Prayer: Why Bother?

       An Indiana woman named Linda Jo Peters wrote a few years ago:  “Our daughter, Esther, attends the University of Chicago. We are very proud of her hard work and common sense. So I was surprised when she called to ask if she could go on a camping trip to a park in southern Illinois—alone! There is no woman in this country who does not know the risks of driving by herself, let alone camping by herself. But Esther said she wanted time away to reflect on the choices she will be make in her third year of college. My mind was racing with worry, but her father and I had worked hard to instill in our children self-reliance balanced with trust in God.

       “After I got off the phone I began a dialogue with God. Finally I said, ‘I guess you just want me on my knees for that weekend!’

       “Esther did agree to take my cell phone and she did call after she had set up camp. Then she called the next morning to report what happened during the night. While she was cooking dinner she heard a rustling behind her. Turning her flashlight, she discovered a skunk. It did not threaten her and she avoided startling it. But all through the night the skunk seemed to be circling her tent causing the zippers to rattle.

       There was no way anyone with evil intent would have approached Esther's tent while the power of prayer in the form of a black-and-white critter was circling it. For a mother trying to learn to let go and let God, it was a powerful answer to prayer.”

       I’m really glad that Linda Jo got a skunk as an answer to her prayers for her daughter.  But let’s face it.  Sometimes we don’t get the skunk.  Sometimes we just get the smell. We pray for something and it doesn’t happen.

       We are in a sermon and small group series on Hard Questions and Great Hope.  Last fall people wrote down questions about the Christian faith.  Several questions asked about prayer – and specifically unanswered prayer.  Here are some of the questions that inspired this sermon. 

Read Questions

       Let me start with a general look before I address another question in much greater detail 

       Why are some prayers answered and some prayers seemingly unanswered?   Why does Esther Peters get a skunk and others get nothing or seemingly nothing?  Why it is that on Michelangelo's ceiling of the Sistine Chapel all Adam has to do is lift a finger and he can touch the hand of God. But sometimes when I lift my hand to God in prayer there is no response. 

       I recognize that God isn’t a vending machine where I put in a prayer and out pops the product.  The world is very complex and there is much more involved than me and my needs.  If my prayer was always answered with a divine “yes, right away” no matter what I chose to pray for, that would effectively make me God.  Anything I chose to bend the knee for would happen. 

       And if my prayers were always answered with a “yes” that would mean that yours couldn’t be.  You might pray for rain to ease a drought.  But if I wanted warm sunny days to head for the beach there would be no rain for you.  God cannot say yes to every prayer.  That would be for Him to abdicate His authority and send the world into chaos. 

       You may remember the movie Bruce Almighty where Jim Carey is put in the role of God – by Morgan Freeman of course.  At one point he gets so tired of actually listening to all the prayers that bombard him 24/7 that he simply decides to answer, “Yes to all.” 

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       If you’ve seen the movie you remember that the result is chaos. 

       God never hits the “yes to all button.”  Sometimes He says “no” and that is an answer.            

      But given the fact that not all prayers can be answered, why are some prayers answered and others not?  Well let me offer several statements and then encourage you to apply them to your own situation. They aren’t original with me.  I got them from a pastor who got them from someone else.  But I only borrow from the best.

       If you pray and nothing seems to happen, there are a number of possibilities. 

       If the request is wrong, God will say no to your request.

       If the timing is wrong, God might choose to say “go slow, wait.”

       If you are wrong maybe God will say, "You need to grow."

       No, slow, grow?

        But if the request is right and the timing is right and you are right, chances are God will grant the request – unless you are requesting that God do something He cannot do and be true to the world He has made. 

       Let me develop these statements.

       First, if the request is wrong, God will say no. Some prayers are wrong.

       James and John come to Jesus to claim the seats of honor in heaven. Jesus’ answer is a straightforward “no.”  It’s a wrong request. Yes, it’s good to want to be close to Jesus.  But if you want to be closest to Jesus that’s competition against your brothers and sisters in faith -- and that’s a wrong request. 

       Another time Jesus and the disciples aren’t welcomed by a village of Samaritans.  John wants Jesus’ permission to call down heavenly napalm.  Jesus says, “You don’t know the kind of spirit that’s showing up in you here.  I came to save people, not fry them.”

       The disciples were capable of making wrong requests of Jesus.  I am too – requests that are morally wrong and request that conflict with the valid need s of others. And when the request is wrong, Jesus says no.  God loves us and other people too much to say yes to wrong requests. God will answer the prayer, but his answer will be no.

       There are other times when the request is right but the timing is wrong. God will say “slow down.” Parents have to do this all the time.  Your child wants something that is okay in itself but too early for their maturity – like wearing makeup and nylons to school in the first grade, 

         Parents need to be able to say, "Not yet.”  So does God.  We might stamp our feet and hold our breath but God isn’t intimidated. He simply says, "Kick and scream, but not yet." God's delays are not necessarily God's denials.

       And God has his reasons for his “not yets.”  Sometimes it’s so we develop character, endurance, trust or patience.  Sometimes, as I’ve seen in my life, it’s so God can do a much greater thing than we have in mind.  I believe that God closed the door of teaching for me because He wanted me up here. 

        If the request is wrong, God will say no. If the timing is wrong, God will say, "Slow.”

If you are wrong, the third statement, God will say, “Grow.”  

       When Pastor Norman Vincent Peale was a boy, he found a big, black cigar.  He slipped into an alley, and lit up. It didn't taste good, but it made him feel very grown up -- until he saw his father coming. He put the cigar behind his back and tried to be casual.

       Desperate to divert attention from the smoke rising up from behind his head, young Norman pointed to a billboard advertising a circus. "Can I go, Dad? Please, let's go when it comes to town." His father said "Son, never make a petition while at the same time trying to hide a smoldering disobedience."

        God says the same thing to us.  Psalm 66:18 says that if I'm leading a life of disobedience to God, the Lord will not hear my prayers.  Other verses say the same thing. 1 Peter 3 says: "Husbands, live with your wives in an understanding way. Grant them honor so that your prayers won't be hindered."   That’s pretty clear. 

       Now I don’t want to overstretch this. We can too easily get into the false belief that suffering is always caused by sin or that all our prayers for other people would be answered if we just led perfect lives.  It doesn’t work this way. But I can’t ignore what the Psalm says either.  But there are times when I need to ask if I'm the barrier.   If you want to pull the plug out of the power of prayer, just dishonor God in your life on a continual basis.

       God prays too.  If we are in a troubled marriage He prays that we keep the vows we made before Him and fight it through.  If we are refusing to forgive someone, He prays that we forgive as He has forgiven us in Jesus Christ.  And if we keep say “no” to God we can hardly expect Him to say “yes” to us.  God says, "Why should I honor your requests when you don't honor mine?

       If the request is wrong, God will say no. If the timing is wrong, He'll say slow.  If I am wrong He many say grow. But if the request is right and the timing is right and I am right, chances are God will grant the request – unless I am asking God do something He cannot do and be true to His own character and the world He has made. 

       Let me speak to that last part in the context of this question from one of you.  It’s a powerful and personal question.

       “When we have an adult child who was raised as a Christian, who doesn’t walk with the Lord anymore , why doesn’t God answer our most fervent prayers for our precious child and for His child as many scriptures promise – or does He answer?”

       That’s a painful question. When a child of Christian parents rejects the faith — doesn’t believe in God, is not part of a church — that hurts, because the parent knows how important a relationship with Jesus Christ is. I have seen kids from solid Christian homes get into drugs and absolutely ruin their lives and even die. There are plenty more scenarios.  We do not always approve of the choices our children make, and when they persist in a lifestyle or a habit we see hurting them, we hurt too.

       This is a question particularly framed about children.  But I have had many of you ask the same question about friends, siblings and parents.  You pray for them to come to faith.  You know that God wants then to come to faith. So why doesn’t God bring them to faith?  

       So, in terms of the question, “why doesn’t God answer our most fervent prayers for our precious child as many scriptures promise.”

      I want to start with the last part of that question – the part about “as many scriptures promise.” I suspect that the verse the writer most has in mind is Proverbs 22:6 that says, “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.”

       Parents hold on to that verse in child raising.  My parents did.  I have too.  And when we don’t see it fulfilled we have two choices.  We can believe that God has broken His word.  Or we believe that we are at fault.  “The Bible says, if I train up my child right, he will not depart from it. He has departed from it, so I didn’t train him up right. I am a failure as a parent.” The self-recrimination can become brutal.

      But neither reaction is called for.  God hasn’t broken his word and we aren’t failures in God’s eyes. Because as much as I would sometimes like it to be, Proverbs 22:6 is not a promise from God.   It’s an observation  by a smart human being.  It tells us that proper training and instruction are much more likely to produce a good result that bad training and no instruction.  That is a true observation but it’s not a promise.    It a proverb from the Book of Proverbs.

       It’s like a mechanic who says, “if you change your oil every 5,000 miles you won’t destroy your engine.”  That’s not always true.  Some people are faithful on oil changes and lose their engine anyway – like I lost an engine on a Nissan when the timing belt broke.  5,000 mile oil changes aren’t a promise.  But they’re sure the way to bet.  It’s based on the fact that people who don’t change their oil almost always ruin their engines – like I did with my ’68 Mustang. 

       Proverbs deals in generalities, not absolutes. It describes for us how things generally work, but it does not give us any ironclad guarantees. For example, it says hard work is better than laziness because those who work hard prosper and the lazy suffer want. Generally this is true, but there are exceptions.

        But if Proverbs 22:6 isn’t a guarantee, what good is it? It tells us how to raise children! Instruction and discipline do a child good. Christian parents can be confident that their efforts are worth it. Yes, a child might wander from the path. He or she might disappoint terribly. You are responsible for your efforts, not the results, which you cannot control. But you can know, long before you see a child grown, that instruction and discipline are good. They are worth the effort.  If nothing else they give the child a firm foundation to return to when things fall apart.

       Now back to prayer.  Proverbs 22:6 simply cannot be a promise from God because that would not be in keeping with the world He has made.  God will not bring our children or anyone else to Him against their wills – even if we pray for it – because that would violate the very thing God is doing in their lives. 

      If you’ve read C.S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters you remember that it is written from the point of view of hell. It is a series of letters from a senior devil named Screwtape to a junior tempter named Wormwood.  And in the eighth letter Screwtape reminds Wormwood the reason God gave both us and our children free will.   

       Screwtape writes: “To us a human is primarily food; our aim is the absorption of its will into ours, the increase of our own area of selfhood at its expense. But the obedience which the Enemy demands of men is quite a different thing…(He wants) to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of Himself-- creatures whose life, on its miniature scale, will be qualitatively like His own, not because He has absorbed them but because their wills freely conform to His. We want cattle that can finally become food; He wants servants who can finally become sons…The Irresistible and the Indisputable are the two weapons which the very nature of His scheme forbids Him to use. Merely to over-ride a human will would be for Him useless. He cannot ravish. He can only woo.”

       God doesn’t want cattle.  He wants sons and daughters who come to Him because they want to.  That is why God created each of us, and our children too, as free moral agents – able to make our own choices and have those choices count. That includes the possibility that those choices will lead our children away from God – at least for a time.  It also means that those choices are not the parent’s fault if we have made the honest effort to “train up a child in the way He should go.”            

       A good friend of mine was talking about his two daughters. They shared the same parents. They were nurtured in the same environment.  But they have chosen very different directions.  One is walking with the Lord.  The other started dabbling on the dark side before she was in sixth grade.  He prays for her.  He counsels her.  But he also knows that her choices are her choices.  He knows and has told her that God can show His power in her life by protecting her from harm or God can show His power by redeeming her from the harm she inflicts on herself by her own bad choices.  It’s her choice which road God takes.

       If you start kicking yourself because of the choices your kids have made just remember that God created two perfect children and raised them in perfect environment, yet both of them rebelled against His will.  God didn’t override their choice.  But He promised a Savior.

       Our children aren’t robots or puppets. God made our children with minds of their own. Sometimes, to our heartbreak and disappointment, our children choose not to follow the way we have taught them. But Proverbs 22:6 is still in the Bible. “When he is old he will not depart from it.” It’s a human observation but God put it in His word.  I think what this verse is telling us is this: God has given you the chance to plant the seeds into your children. And eventually, as you hope and wait and pray, the harvest will come.

       I believe this is true for parents whose kids have gone so far as to close the door to faith. I believe this is even true for parents whose kids have died of an overdose. I still don’t believe it’s too late. 

       I’m not saying that everyone is saved no mater what they want.  That would take away true free will.  I’m not saying that there is a second chance after death.  The Bible says, “It’s appointed to people once to die and then comes the judgment.” 

       But I am saying that God who stands outside time and who can cut through any level of drug-induced haze is able to make that moment of that appointed death last as long as He needs to say, “Everything your parents tried to tell you about Me is true.  But I do love you and want to give you wholeness.  Do you want Me?  Perhaps it is only then that the seed of faith will finally grow.

       I can’t give you a Bible verse to support that.  But it sure fits with our understanding since Einstein of the elastic nature of time.  It also fits with our understanding since the cross of a God who “wills all to be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth.”   I believe that such a God will do what it takes to reach people.

       To Christian parents disappointed by their adult children, I would say this: The seed is good. Remember Jesus’ parable about the sower who cast seeds and some grew and some did not? The seed is the gospel. You planted that seed. You watered that seed. You can be confident that the seed itself is good. What can you do now? You can encourage in whatever way you are able, and above all you can pray.

       We can’t pray that God simply override their free will and force them into faith.  God cannot and will not do that.  He won’t do that for our unbelieving children, our unbelieving parents, our unbelieving siblings, our unbelieving friends or our unbelieving anything else.

       But we can pray that God will surround them with Godly people and examples and awaken in them their need for faith.  We can pray the God will allow situations to unfold that will awaken them to their true need.  We can pray for their hearts and the moving of the Holy Spirit in their lives.

       In some mysterious way, God’s calling and human freedom work together to bring a person to Christ.  Never give up, because no one is beyond God’s reach. Never stop loving, because love is powerful.