In the situation Western man finds himself, we can supply no demonstration of the necessity for prayer or even of its usefulness. It is futile to pretend that prayer is indispensable to man. Today he gets along very well without it.
Jacques Ellul 1
You have not because you ask not.
James 4:2
God answers our prayers, and he does not seem to begrudge doing so. He displays good will and cheer—at times, an almost puckish sense of humor.
Consider Genesis 18 where Abraham learns God is going to destroy the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. Abraham is horror stricken and pleads on behalf of Sodom: “Will you sweep away the righteous with the wicked? What if there are fifty righteous people in the city?”
The Lord answers, “If I find fifty righteous people in the city of Sodom, I will spare the whole place for their sake.”
Abraham decides fifty might be a touch high: “What if the number is five less than fifty? Will you destroy the whole city because of five people?”
“If I find forty-five there, I will not destroy it.”
Sensing he’s on to something good, Abraham asks, “What if only forty …?”
The Lord agrees.
Thirty?
Again the Lord agrees.
Twenty?
Yet again the Lord agrees.
Abraham pauses, possibly weighing his chances of finding even twenty godly people in a place like Sodom, the 42nd Street of the ancient Near East. Finally he works up his courage for one last request: “May the Lord not be angry, but let me speak just once more. What if only ten can be found there?”
God is not angry, probably just bemused. After all, he knows how many godly people are in Sodom: “For the sake of ten, I will not destroy it.”
With that, Abraham quits asking, and we’re left wondering: Would God have agreed to spare Sodom if Abraham had asked on the basis of merely one righteous man? Perhaps. But Abraham didn’t try. Was God looking for an advocate for Sodom—someone who cared? Abraham cared, but apparently not enough to risk asking God to save Sodom for the sake of one godly person.
God delights, the Bible says, in giving his people good gifts. Some Scriptures offer God’s help; others command us to make prayer requests so that he can answer them. Question 129 of the Heidelberg Catechism says the answer to our prayers is more certain than our awareness of things we ask for.2 The “problem” of unanswered prayer lies not in any reluctance on God’s part, but in our inability to articulate our requests properly and then accept God’s answer—whether a positive answer or negative. Two problems, in particular, prevent us from seeing our prayers answered.
We Don’t Think To Ask
In many areas of our lives, we simply do not consult God. Vance Havner said that what we used to call worldliness we now call secularization. Both mean we think world first instead of God first. We live in a desacralized, lay world. The sacred dimension to life is no longer assumed, as it was in Abraham’s time. God does not figure in the world’s plans. He is not opposed as much as merely ignored.
The reason that secularization is so dangerous for Christian leaders is that secularization does not harm “religion” at all. A false definition of secularization would be that it is the withering of religion. But as Richard John Neuhaus has pointed out, that has not occurred. If secularization harmed organized religion, we would expect to have fewer churches. But we actually have more. We would expect the proportion of people attending church to be down. But the proportion is greater. We would expect declines in religious rites as opposed to civil alternatives (marriages and funerals), less religious income, less religious literature, and a dwindling of new sects and new movements. But in fact they have all increased. By these standards, religion is doing very well.3
Secularization is growing along with religion. Secularization, properly defined, is a viewpoint that becomes more and more man-centered and less and less God-centered. By that definition we begin to understand the negative impact it has had on prayer life.
A common reason given for prayerlessness is busyness. Often the busyness comes from success. One reason for organized religion’s drift toward man-centeredness is the number of people involved. As churches and organized religion grow, we sense a need to get a rope around the growth—but we forget to let God tie the knot. As management science and demographic technology become more precise, we forget the role God plays in the building of his church. Pure prayer is the sincere crying out of a heart with nowhere else to turn; our fast-changing technology seemingly provides solutions to a lifetime’s worth of turning points, and we are never finally forced to our knees. Our competence in matters organizational leaves no room to lose our dignity before God, the essential precondition of asking for help.
For Christian leaders, a prime illustration is the church business meeting. One pastor said, “For a long time it seemed like we couldn’t integrate the secular and spiritual aspects of our business meetings. Prayer and Bible study was always something we tacked on at the beginning or the end; in between we did our business without considering the spiritual ramifications. Two and a half years ago we were at our annual board retreat and realized that we hadn’t been praying regularly. So the members committed to a weekly prayer meeting at 6:30 Friday morning. They have been remarkably faithful in attending so they must think it’s working. We’ve started to get better at making spiritual decisions at our business meetings, too. But we still have a long way to go.”
C. S. Lewis in his Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, writes, “Those who do not turn to God in petty trials will have no habit or such resort to help them when the great trials come. So those who have not learned to ask him for childish things will have less readiness to ask him for the great ones. We must not be too high minded. I fancy we may sometimes be deterred from small prayers by a sense of our own dignity rather than of God’s.”4
We Don’t Ask Correctly
Asking incorrectly is epidemic. One leader remembered his experience as a young air force officer in Japan “in the days when getting assigned to Vietnam was a great thing for your military career.”
He said, “I pulled all the strings I could to get assigned there, and finally the papers did get through. I had also prayed God would help me move up. I would be promoted an additional rank, which meant I would be the youngest person of my rank in the entire air force. In fact, everything in my military career had gone great up to that point.
“I was planning to attend an important religious conference in the U.S. on my leave before going to Vietnam. But when my orders came through, I found they had extended me in Japan one month, and I would miss the conference. I immediately went to see the squadron commander to see if there was any way I could get out of the assignment. He said it was too late, the orders had already come through.
“My shrewd career moves forced me to miss a spiritual experience I had been looking forward to. Suddenly it struck me that I had allowed my career to overshadow God in my life. I had placed so much stock in manipulating my career that I had left out the hand of God. I went back to my barracks and fell on my knees and said, ‘God, from now on my life is in your hands. No more premature pushing and pulling from me. I’ll do my best, and trust you to take it from there.’ That was the first time I really felt free in my prayer to God. It was because I finally realized I was too imperfect to ask for some things in my life, and that I could only pray for God’s will.”
Incorrect requests are often uttered, even by Christian leaders. At times, our prayer requests go unanswered because they are poorly formed or presumptuous. We do not take time to discover what the true, pure desires of our hearts should be, and thus offer up incomplete, half-hearted requests that God would be a fool to answer.5 Just what are the gremlins that invade our psyches, causing such weak, inappropriate requests?
We are impatient. We live in a fast-paced world and want quick answers. Ole Hallesby in his classic book on prayer uses Mary the mother of Jesus as the model for the lesson of waiting on God’s time and judgment. He refers to John 2:1-11, the story of the wedding festivities at Cana when the hosts run out of wine. Mary simply tells Jesus, “We have no more wine.” She then waits for him to do something about it, instructing the servants to stand by and carry out Jesus’ bidding.6
Hallesby says this is a paradigm for our requests: State our condition and wait. Too many of us suffer from prayer fatigue because we feel we have to lay out all possible solutions before God and help him make the decision. We may need to do that for ourselves, but not for God.
Several years ago my sister, a public school teacher, told me she was worrying about whether to accept a teaching contract offered by another school district or stay in her current school. Trying to help, I began asking her some fundamental questions: “What are your real options?” It turned out that neither school had actually offered her a contract yet. (This was in a period of declining enrollments, and teaching jobs were yearto-year question marks.) Her worrying was based on possibilities, not facts.
In a sense, our approach to God should be well informed. He wants us to express our problem from which we want relief as clearly and sincerely as possible. But we must ask expecting God to act, not as a rubber stamp for our agenda, but as a superior, active agent who has final control over our lives.
We forget to tie our needs into the larger needs of the body of Christ. Narcissism can only be counteracted by involvement in a group. The church can perform that function even in the case of highly individualistic needs. Many Christian leaders mention the importance of formal or informal prayer groups at the church and how that helps them keep perspective in their personal prayer lives.
Bob Dickson, pastor of Hope Presbyterian Church in Richfield, Minnesota, has a card under the clear plastic that protects his desk. It reads: “When we work, we work; when we pray, God works.”
“That card,” he says, “helps me do two things: (1) keep prayer at the top of my priority list and (2) keep me open to the way God works in the prayer lives of the people at our church. A couple of years ago, my wife, Gloria, got an idea for a prayer ministry here based on Ezekiel 47, the passage that talks about a river coming out of the temple, which we see as a river of prayer. As we have instituted the program, we now have over a hundred individuals on a regular basis going into our sanctuary with notebooks of prayer requests from our people. If one of our members has a problem, over a hundred people will be praying for that request.
“This program has had a tremendous impact on me as pastor. The distractions that attend a busy ministry—the phone, people, problems, meetings—are the biggest obstacles to my own prayer life. Yet I can walk across the hall to the sanctuary and in twenty minutes sense the Spirit’s presence as other people there are lifting up our church’s prayer needs to God. By burying my needs in with those of the entire congregation’s, I gain perspective, peace, and comfort from knowing I am merely one of the body.”
We evaluate answered prayer by material not spiritual standards. God may answer our prayers in a material way. He may also answer by giving us the spiritual strength to cope with a material loss—even as we have been praying that he would help us avoid the material loss. God’s idea of answered prayer is much broader than ours.
Martin Buber tells the story of a man who was afflicted with a terrible disease. He complained to Rabbi Israel that his suffering interfered with his learning and praying. The rabbi put his hand on his shoulder and said: “How do you know, friend, what is more pleasing to God, your studying or your suffering?”7
In the end, we do not know what God wants even when we bring requests to him that seem quite obvious. It is difficult to give up the “obvious” to an unseen, spiritual Being. But that is what faith is all about. It is also a fundamental element of answered prayer.
Jacques Ellul, Prayer and Modern Man (New York: The Seabury Press, 1970), 99.
Allen O. Miller and M. Eugene Osterhaven, Heidelberg Catechism (New York: Pilgrim Press, 1963).
Richard John Neuhaus, “Unsecular America,” The Religion and Society Report 1, 1 (June 1984): 2.
C. S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., 1963), 23.
Harry Emerson Fosdick, The Meaning of Prayer (New York: The Association Press, 1938), 142.
O. Hallesby, Prayer (Minneapolis, Minnesota: Augsburg Publishing House, 1975), 44-45.
Martin Buber, Tales of the Hasidim (New York: Schocken Books, 1961).
Copyright © 1985 by Christianity Today
