On Asking God for Things

(First things first. As you will observe, the moniker for these not so weekly devotionals has been appropriately changed. In vain have I tried to produce a “weekly” fodder. Rather than promising and not delivering, I have adjusted my promise to something more manageable. From now on you must content yourself with the “occasional” fodder. How occasional, you ask? As occasional as I can muster. And now to the fodder at hand . . .)

“We pray most earnestly night and day that we may see you face to face and supply what is lacking in your faith.” 1 Thessalonians 3:10

I’ve been thinking quite a bit about petitionary prayer. By “petitionary” prayer I mean the kind of prayer in which we ask God for things (to be distinguished from devotional praying, wherein we worship, confess our sins, or just simply commune with God). And as I’ve introspectively observed my own petitionary prayer life, I’ve arrived at two conclusions.

Prayer Accomplishes Nothing
The first is that praying doesn’t change anything. Somehow I’ve been operating with the subtle yet mistaken impression that petitionary prayer is a means of bringing about a desired end. And while it is certainly true that prayer is appropriately directed toward this goal, I’ve needed to be reminded that it is God—not my prayers—that change things. Prayer is powerful and effective (James 5:17) only in as much as it moves the will of a God who is himself powerful and effective. He is the acting agent; prayer is simply asking him to act.

When my child asks me for a snack, the fact that he ends up with one is ultimately dependent upon my choice, not his prayer. The mere fact that he is “praying” to me should make this plain. How mistaken he would be if he began to think that his act of asking was itself the means by which he received a snack, as though his speech-act bypassed my will and brought about a snack quite independent of me. Or imagine my son being denied a snack after asking politely and thinking that the rejection was due to his “asking ability.” Rubbish. But somehow I had let this thinking slip into my prayer life. You can tell when this has happened because you begin to get preoccupied with the act of prayer itself; specifically the manner in which you pray—as though you were reciting an incantation that had to be said just so in order to bring about the desired result. This unhealthy perspective can also be seen when we begin to wonder why our prayers aren’t “working”—as though the hang-up is related to our expertise in praying rather than the will of the One we are praying to. Petionionary prayer is nothing more than asking God for things. We needn’t complicate it by becoming focused on our act of praying.

Ask God for Things You Actually Want
The second thing I’ve observed about petitionary prayer is closely related to the first; it is futile to ask God for things that you don’t really care about. Praying for something because I ought to, rather than because I want to, is probably about as inspiring to God as it is to me. Of course, as Christians who know we should be asking for God’s help, we are often tempted to view petitionary prayer as a spiritual “discipline;” something we are to do whether we feel like it or not. That might be true of devotional prayer, but it’s not true of petitionary prayer. Praying for something must be connected to actually desiring the thing prayer for. Again, imagine my son sitting me down out of a sense of duty and asking me to help him fix his bike, all the while not caring one whit about his bike, nor even caring if I helped him. Such an entreaty would do little to move my heart. In fact, such an entreaty isn’t even an entreaty at all; it’s just speaking a bunch of words we don’t really mean. How many of our prayers are like this?

I’m no disparager of the prayer list; but I’ve begun to wonder how much of my prayer life is hemmed in by a list that requires me to pray for things that aren’t pressing on my heart that day. A prayer list can be a helpful way of reminding us feeble minded humans about the things that concern us, but when it pushes us to ask for things that we don’t really want, it serves no real purpose. Nothing is more uninspiring to my prayer life than trying to pray through a list of peoples and things that I don’t have any particular concern for that day. So inauthentic. Perhaps it would be better for us to scan our prayer list each day before we pray and see what jumps out at us, followed by a time of reflection in which we jot down anything else that comes to mind. Similar perhaps to how a husband and wife might set aside an evening to talk about their marriage, but first write down all the things they want to make sure they discuss.

But this raises another point. Sometimes there are things we should care about that we don’t care about. Maybe part of our petitionary prayer life needs to be asking God to give us a heart for the things that we should be seeking his help for. And that’s not a bad place to start.