Regular Network Norwich columnist James Knight continues to look at the topic of prayer.
 

In this, the second and concluding message on the subject of prayer, I want to look at prayer from a slightly different angle. You can hear some people misunderstanding the real benefits of prayer when they say, ‘God does not need our advice about how to run the world’. The implication is, ‘If He is all-knowing then surely He knows best before we even begin to ask for things’. A corollary of that is the expectation that if He is all-loving and benevolent, He will do good things regardless of our supplication. Now straight away we can see that there are certain kinds of prayer to which this point is not relevant. The highest form of worship and the numinous sense of awe which occurs in devotional prayer is not of this kind; that is, there is no request, only praise. Most people would agree that if there exists a loving, all-powerful Creator, He is most definitely worthy of praise.

 

 

I have read about people who abstain from supplicatory prayers - asking God for nothing - attempting to live their lives in an unadulterated worshipful state. Now I think (and again I am not certain) that one whose worshipful inclination comes as a result of discharging the second type of prayer on grounds that to ask God for things for the self is the least good thing out of all types of asking might not be far from the ‘full life’ that Christ spoke about. The difference largely depends on the reason why the man thinks that asking is not a good thing. A gambler who asked God to help him quit his habit because he wants to live a better life would certainly be admired. But a gambler who did not ask because deep down he didn’t really want to quit, or because he did not think that asking would do any good would not be so admired. 

 

The point about asking for favourable things and whether a benevolent God should be giving them anyway is a bit more involved. The principal problem of saying ‘If He were a good God He would be doing what I asked anyway’ is that such a statement can be used for justifying the abrogation of supplicatory prayer. In fact, if this were true, it would surely constitute an argument for our doing nothing at all. Every move we make and every action we take involve our attempt to bring about a result of some kind. I reach up in my cupboard for the gravy powder, the result is that I have gravy on my vegetables. Why not take it further and say that if God wanted me to have gravy on my vegetables He would make it appear on them? The problem is obvious - it obviates our necessity in creation. It affects the responsibility that God has given to us in creating us. He has given us, as Pascal said, ‘the dignity of causality’ He has given us the freedom to be contributors in creation - the blessing of being able to collaborate with Him. An analogy which I like, one that I didn’t invent, is the analogy of a playwright. He writes the story and the structure but the actors are left to improvise minor details of the story. If the dignity of causality involves our being involved in creation, then it certainly follows that God instituted prayer - a type of prayer - in order that this might be fully realised. God created the whole universe and the evidence seems to be that He has created us with the capacity to know (in time) almost everything about its nature, its structure, its properties, and the multitude of activities concealed within it (including human psychology and reasoning). 

 

The dignity of causality is underpinned by the fact that there are a great many things that God has not yet done on earth. Every single person in creation is on his or her own separate journey, and the multitude of activity both in actions and in prayers is creating a dream of which we are not, as yet, fully cognisant. A soldier who goes to war for the sake of peace is in a different position to the clergyman who prays for peace every day. The dignity of causality comes with guarantees, themselves fixed by the natural laws; it is up to us to play a part in that which will bring praise to God. I have found that to pray for things brings with it a certain peace which helps in praising Him. Whether the prayer is granted or refused, one knows that the outcome was a discretionary wish of our Lord, for He knows what is best for us at all times and He knows more than we do that if He is refusing a prayer it must be because He has a better plan for us; one which He will reveal to us when He knows we are ready. 

 

 

Our act of prayer must not be separated from the continuous act of God Himself any more than all of our other acts. There are no favourites with God; Christ’s refusal proves that. God does not answer more frequently those who serve Him best, because He who served Him best of all, did not have the cup of suffering taken away from Him at Gethsemane. In fact, when Christ said on the cross, while enduring tortuous pain - ‘Father, why have you forsaken Me?’ - He was not at all comforted by His Father. He couldn’t be, because He had to die, so that we could be saved. Love has never been more profound.

 

There is one prayer, in my experience, which will be continually answered, and that is our prayer for wisdom. And the simple reason is this; God desires that we become wiser and wiser, as we gradually become more and more like Christ. It is not difficult for us to understand why some of our prayers are not granted, because God’s wisdom must sometimes refuse what ignorance may quite innocently ask. In fact, in retrospect, I am glad that God did not answer some of my prayers, as He clearly had something better in store for me than the things I was actually praying for. 

 

However, there is one thing about prayer that I should mention, which could seem quite contradictory to unbelievers. There are two types of petitionary prayer, which at first seem inconsistent, but with a little thought, are clearly not. They are, at times, inconsistent in the practical sense, but if our faith is as strong as it should be, that problem can soon be circumvented. The first type of petitionary prayer, the Lord’s Prayer, which has the clause - ‘Your will be done’, and that clause, by its very nature must modify the sense in which the following petitions are made. Nothing can be asked that is not in accordance with His will. But ‘Your will be done’ should not be simply a submission, it should progress increasingly into joy and desire. To simply treat it as submission impoverishes the prayer itself. But though the prayer should be something greater than mere submission, it should be no less than submission. We should know that His refusal of these requests will be wholly just and salutary.  He will stand vindicated. To me, the first type of prayer presents no theoretical difficulties, even though my refractory nature and turbulent hopes will find plenty of practical difficulty in following it. 

 

We are not to pray with any assurance that we shall receive what we ask, and this seems to me compatible with our preparation for a denial, if it should occur. But there is second type of faith to which I was referring; it is a cruder sort; faith that everything the petitioner asks will be given to him. It is as if God commanded of us a faith that even Christ did not possess. There are verses in the Bible where faith is, so to speak, vicarious. Thus the necessary faith in the case of the afflicted servant (Mathew 8:13) is not his own but that of his master the Centurion. The healing of the Canaanite child (Matthew 15:28) depends on her mother’s faith. But this is not simply faith that a particular healing will take place, it is a deeper, more complete faith in Christ Himself. There are times, of course, when numinous feelings occur because of an attraction to a particular ability or gift. Thus in Matthew 9:28, the blind men are asked not ‘Do you believe in Me?’ but ‘Do you believe that I can do this?’. The words are ‘that I can’ not ’that I will’, but both really amount to the same thing - to believe He will is to believe He can, and to believe He can is to believe He is God. To believe simply, that He can, implies the corollary - ‘Because He is God’.

 

But what may we say of Matthew 14:31, where Peter is reproached for his ‘little faith’? He had lost his faith and he sank into the waves whilst trying to walk on water. It seems that Peter might have had a degree of faith in the power of God and yet been entirely uncertain whether he could continue walking on water. For in that case his faith would surely have told him that whether he walked on water or whether he sank he was equally in God’s hands, and he would have prepared himself, so far as feebleness allowed, to glorify God either by living or by drowning; and his failure, if he failed, would have been due to a tainted or flawed humiliation of instinct, but not to a lack of faith. 

 

But let us now turn back to prayer. Matthew 21:22 says that whatever you ask for in prayer, you will receive, if you have faith. But can we take that to mean ‘having an overall faith in the omnipotence and goodness of God?’ We cannot. A lot depends on what type of prayer we use - the first type or the second. You can either pray with confidence that the prayer will be answered no matter what, or you can pray with ‘Your will be done’ in mind, preparing for a refusal of that particular prayer and putting all faith into the belief that even if it were denied, the denial would be for our betterment, therefore it would be a merciful denial. I believe the latter type of prayer is the most successful. 

 

What if one were put off prayer, believing that God will only answer if He wishes to, therefore rendering it pointless? I have of course covered this point in last week’s message, but what if, when you were young, your father said you could have anything you want for Christmas and when you asked for a skateboard gave you a text book instead, then first disclosing the dormant reservation with which the promise was made? Of course the text book may be more edifying than the skateboard, but that is not where the difficulty, the sense of inconsistency, lies. You would be tempted to complain, not that the skateboard was denied, but that the promise of ‘anything you want’ was made. 

 

One thing is perfectly clear, whatever else faith may mean, I feel quite sure that it does not mean any state of cognitive certitude such as might be - I think it sometimes is - assembled from within by the natural action of a strong inclination upon the amenable and obedient imagination. The faith that accomplishes all things is a gift from the One who created all things. We should, I think, regard ourselves as spiritually flawed, and use petitionary prayer (among other types) as a way of requesting that we should be more like Christ. It is then that whatever we ask for shall be given, and, thankfully for those who wish to grow in wisdom, that includes wisdom itself. God, when He became a man, chose to be united to a human nature not of impenetrable nerves but to a nature sensitive and unable to live through the dreadful conditions He endured - He chose that night to sink to the depths of Christian experience, to resemble, not the heroes of His creation, but the very weakest of His creation. It is here that we can say that the poor really are blessed, because the poor know that they rely solely upon God sustaining them. To be sustained by God is to truly experience the ‘full life’ to which Christ was referring.