Trusting God’s Answer
Lucy was a young mother with deep faith, good friends, and cancer. As spring blossomed, Lucy withered. Time and again she called her pastor, Jana, to pray. I accompanied her, says Jana, as she rang the bell at heaven’s door, rattled its gates, slammed its knockers, not on her own behalf, but in prayer for those she would leave behind. We prayed for her husband, her little girl, her mother and her father. We all prayed. Some prayed because there wasn’t anything else they could do for her. Some prayed out of hearts full of faith. Some prayed because Lucy said she could feel their prayers, that she was buoyed by them, held up in a web of prayers.
Lucy’s own prayers, in those last few months, were filled with a deep sense of God’s presence, often wrapped in the words and music of a hymn. Foggy from surgery, the words of The Lone, Wild Bird, filled her. Another time Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring was her waking company. Toward the end, it was gospel songs that sustained her. As they welled up through her, she gathered visitors around her bed to sing them. And the web of song and prayer sustained her…until the July morning when her feet were lifted off the path and she was ushered through the door.
Word of Lucy’s death spread quickly, and by the time the hearse came to take the body, 55 friends had gathered. They flanked the walk and filed the porches of the little house and sang the body out – I’ll Fly Away.
In the lives of all the prayer warriors I have known there is heart break and loss – but there is not much despair. There is instead an invisible web that buoys them up and ultimately, carries them home.
What did Lucy get for all her praying? Did she get remission? Did she avoid pain? Did she see an angel or was she offered a sign in the heavens? No. What Lucy got was what we all get. She got God. Ask, Jesus says, and it shall be given to you.
Jesus says here, “Ask, and it will be given to you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened.”
Later in Matthew, Jesus sees a fig tree not bearing fruit, and he curses is to never bear fruit again, and it immediately withers. And the disciples are amazed and ask how he made the tree wither away. Jesus answers them, “Truly I tell you, if you have faith and do not doubt, not only will you do what has been done to the fig tree, but even if you say to this mountain, “Be lifted up and thrown into the sea, it will be done. Whatever you ask for in prayer with faith, you will receive.”
Those are hard texts for people who have studied history, or watched someone they love suffer, or prayed that a war would end, or a cure would be found. These texts have caused speculation about praying the right way – well, if you did it right, you would get what you asked for. They have caused admonitions to pray more fervently – if you want it enough, God will answer. They have caused doubters to abandon their struggle with faith.
These passages are hard to understand when we understand prayer as an exercise in letting God know what we want.
Amy Plantinga Pauw is professor of theology at Louisville Seminary. She writes about the idea that when we pray with confidence, we get what we want, if Jesus’ own life is any indication, this is not what he meant when he said ask and you will receive. “The Gospel stories present Jesus as a homeless baby, as an adult with no place to lay his head, as a convict, abandoned and scorned by others. If God’s Word Incarnate was not guaranteed a life of material blessings, why should his followers expect it? In the garden of Gethsemane Jesus prays, “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me; yet, not my will but yours be done….a better theology of prayer,” says Dr. Pauw, “says that our faith aligns us with God’s purposes, and gives us confidence to ask God for all things…Faithful prayer is powerful because it connects us to the power of God.”
Several years ago, I read a series of books about an Episcopal priest, Father Tim, in a small town and a small church. I enjoyed the series because the author, Jan Karon, had captured the characters present in every congregation and in every small town. I KNEW these people. And so, when Father Tim was on his way to the hospital to visit one of the elderly ladies of the church who was suddenly very ill, and he stopped on his way to pray the prayer that never fails, I was not sure what to make of it. Was this some silly turn in the stories that was going to make everything turn out happy? Was this some prayer I should have learned but didn’t?
As the story goes on, the prayer that never fails is “Thy Will be done.” Ask God, search for God, knock and seek to be close to God…and your prayer will never fail.
The reality is, we don’t always get what we want, and we have to trust God’s answer. Jesus compares our relationship with God to a child and parent. What parent would give their child a stone when your child asks for bread? Or a snake when your child asks for fish?
These comparisons seem strange to us, so we need to understand more about them in the context of life in Galilee in the first Century. When they baked bread, they made little round loaves that after their time over the fire looked a lot like the round, brown rocks along the shore of the Sea of Galilee. Their bread and their rocks looked alike. Bread sustains you, and of course, there is no nourishment in a rock. If you asked for something that you thought would satisfy you, you thought would taste good to you, you thought it would give you strength and sustain you, like bread but it really was a like a rock and would give you no nourishment, would your mom or dad give it to you?
Then Jesus says, “if you asked for a fish, what kind of parent would give you a snake?” Now the word here that we translate snake is really eel, and according to Jewish food laws, eels are unclean animals. Fish, of course, were a staple in their diet. So, what kind of parent, would hand their child something unclean, something that would defile them and make them unholy, when their child asked for a fish?
Jesus says, we are evil people, and we know we wouldn’t do that to our children. How much more will the heavenly Father give good things to those who ask him. Good parents are eager to help their children. This is what parents do. If your child asks for a stone or an eel, will you give it to him? No. What if he begs? No. What if he pleads? No. What if he says, “I can’t live without that eel?” You still say no. Children often ask for foolish things, which are withheld. The same is true with God. Often we plead for things that to us seem like bread but to God are like a rock. Our Heavenly Father says no, not because he hates us but because he loves us. Sometimes God’s no is the surest sign of his love for us.
But even though we don’t know what is best for us, we are told to ask, and to search and to knock…persistently. How prayer works is a mystery:
N.T.Wright says God is like an artist working with difficult material, and prayer is the way that some of that difficult material co-operates with the artist instead of resisting him.
Archbishop William Temple said, “When I pray, coincidences happen; when I stop praying, the coincidences stop happening.”
Having to trust God’s answer can be disillusioning. C.S. Lewis was born in 1898 into a Christian household, and at the age of 15 declared himself an atheist. He later said of that time paradoxically, “I was very angry with God for not existing.” “Really, a young Atheist cannot guard his faith too carefully. Dangers lie in wait for him on every side” (Surprised by Joy).
He wrote of finally coming to accept faith at 31, “You must picture me alone in that room at Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. [In the Trinity Term of 1929] I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England” (Surprised By Joy, ch. 14, p. 266).
This reluctant convert became arguably the most influential Christian writer of the first half of the 20th Century. He wrote about pain in the world and God and the relationship between our wants and God’s wills. He said this,
“When we want to be something other than the thing God wants us to be, we must be wanting what, in fact, will not make us happy…God wills our good, and our good is to love Him and to love Him we must know Him: and if we know Him, we shall in fact fall on our faces. If we do not, that only shows that what we are trying to love is not yet God – though it may be the nearest approximation to God which our thought and fantasy can attain. Yet the call is not only to prostration and awe; it is to a reflection of the Divine life, a creaturely participation in the Divine attributes which is far beyond our present desires. We are bidden to “put on Christ,” to become like God. That is, whether we like it or not, God intends to give us what we need, not what we now think we want.” (The Problem of Pain)
As spring blossomed and her life faded away, Lucy got what she needed. Lucy got God. Held in a web of song and prayer, God’s presence was constant with her until she was buoyed up to see God face to face.
Just a few more weary days and then, I’ll fly away.
To a land where joy shall never end, I’ll fly away.
I’ll fly away, O Glory, I’ll fly away.
When I die, Hallelujah, bye and bye, I’ll fly away.
Ask. You will receive.
Search. You will find.
Knock. The door will be opened.
May we go to the throne of grace, entrusting our concerns and desires to the One who loves us as a parent loves a child and whose will is ever directed to his children’s good. Are there prayer concerns this morning in the family of God?