Start Where You Are (and End Up with God)
There are a few pretty obvious apparent contradictions in the Bible concerning prayer. They raise some interesting questions. The first one of these is: DO WE NEED TO PRAY AT ALL? We’re told in Matthew, for example, “your father knows what you need before you ask Him.”
Jesus tells us this in Matthew 6:8, then goes on in the very next verse, 6:9, to instruct us how to pray using the Lord’s Prayer. The two verses read back-to-back literally tell us “your Father already knows what you need before you ask Him,” and “yet still you should pray; here’s how.”
We see this pattern elsewhere in Matthew. Again talking about prayer, Jesus tells us in Matthew 6:25 “do not worry about…what you will eat or drink,” repeats that in 6:31, yet tells us very clearly in 6:11, during the Lord’s Prayer, to ask God to “give us today our daily bread.”
Is it that on the one hand we shouldn’t worry about what to eat and what to drink, or that we should directly ask God, every day, for our daily bread? What is really going on here? Why this apparent contradiction in the Bible, in these words of Jesus from the Gospel of Matthew?
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Think of prayer working like a radio signal. There is a transmitter and a receiver, and in between one and the other is an electronic signal that’s carried on radio waves. The transmitter sends a signal, the receiver tunes to it, decodes it, and plays the sound we hear as a radio station.
Take, for example, your car radio. Now, some of you are more fancy than a preacher, and you have something I’ve heard of called “satellite radio.” I myself drive a 2008 Chrysler 300, given to me by my father. I only have the old-school, AM/FM car radio. The kind with an antenna.
What’s going on with a radio like that? Your favorite radio station is broadcasting right now, this moment, as we sit here. It’s playing a song you like, or beaming some timely, helpful news update. If you listen to the local radio, there might even be an episode of Trading Post on!
Prayer is tuning in. Though that station is being beamed around on invisible radio waves all the time – just like the presence of God in our lives – we can’t hear it without tuning in. We tune to the station – God – and we hear the signal. We complete the signal circuit; we’re tuned in.
And when we’re tuned in, we sit back and enjoy. We hum along to a catchy tune that takes us away from our worries for a while. We get timely updates helpful to our lives. We feel less lonely. Have you ever listened to the radio on a long drive at night by yourself? It works.
Here’s another important way prayer is like a radio signal. God’s blessings are falling around us, guiding our lives, all the time. Whether we listen or not. Just like a radio station being broadcast in the background all the time. Recognizing those blessings requires us to tune in.
GOD’S BLESSINGS ARE ANSWERS TO PRAYERS WE HAVE YET TO MAKE. Why pray when God knows what we want already? Because God is blessing us all the time. But we don’t see those blessings as answers to prayer if we don’t pray. We need to complete the signal circuit.
Do you see how truly awe-inspiring and perfect our God is? But there’s more; let’s dig a bit deeper. Jesus tells us our father “knows what we NEED before we ask him.” Do you see what Jesus does not say there? With regards to prayer, Jesus does not talk about what we WANT.
Why not? What is the crucial difference between “wants” and “needs?” If you come back to what we talked about last week, WANTS ARE SELF-WILL, NOT GOD’S WILL. AND SELF-WILL IS A FAILURE OF… IMAGINATION.
God knows what I NEED. He knows what I want as well, but he specifically wants to give me what I need, exactly what I need, every moment. And WHAT GOD KNOWS I NEED IS BETTER THAN ANYTHING I COULD THINK I WANT. Because self-will is a failure of imagination.
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Let’s turn to today’s scripture lesson from Luke. What is Jesus telling us about prayer here? He tells us to consider someone asking a friend for bread. It’s the middle of the night. The friend is asleep; his doors are already locked up tight. He doesn’t want to be bothered.
But what happens? Jesus tells us that this friend will go and wake everyone in his family up, fetch some bread, unlock his front door, and give it away. He does this, as Jesus tells us, not “because of friendship,” but instead because of “shameless audacity.”
What does “shameless audacity” mean? “Shameless:” flagrant, blatant, overt. “Audacity:” nerve, gall, rudeness. To call the definition of this behavior “pushy” seems to be putting it politely. And yet Jesus tells us that this will get us what we need when we pray.
It seems then that in this parable of Jesus, persistence in prayer pays off. Jesus tells us that the bread is given ultimately because of persistence, but persistence about what? Do you recall WHY this person is asking his neighbor for bread in the first place?
This person is asking for bread NOT FOR HIMSELF, but rather, as we’re told in verse 6, because he has a friend visiting him in the midst of a long journey, and he has nothing to offer. He asks for bread not for himself, but FOR SOMEONE ELSE.
And notice here that Jesus doesn’t say “suppose A MAN needs bread and asks his friend.” Jesus specifically says “suppose YOU” ask your friend for bread. He’s talking to his Disciples. He’s talking to us. And he’s telling us to ask – to pray – with “shameless audacity” for others.
Let’s go back to wants and needs. Luke tells us as we go on reading through today’s scripture lesson, in 11:9-10 “everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.”
You’ll notice Jesus is very precise with his language here. He only uses the future tense “will be” when he tells us “the door WILL BE OPENED.” “For the one who knocks, the door WILL BE OPENED.” At some point in the future. There’s that persistence again.
Contrast this with “asking” and “seeking.” Jesus says those “who ask, receive,” and “the one who seeks finds.” There is no future tense; Jesus does not say “those who ask WILL receive,” or “those who seek WILL find.” Asking IS receiving. Seeking IS finding. Apparent contradiction.
Jesus tells us that WE RECEIVE BY ASKING, THAT WE FIND BY SEEKING. Jesus tells us here, quite directly, that ASKING IS PART OF WHAT WE RECEIVE, that SEEKING IS PART OF WHAT WE FIND. As for the door, it will be opened, in the future, to those who ask and seek.
Am I suggesting that we don’t go to God in prayer with our concerns, our worries, or our WANTS? I want to be specific in saying that is most certainly NOT what I’m suggesting. The Bible tells us to take everything to God in prayer: sins, failings, gratitudes, anxieties.
God is our loving father, who will always ensure we have what we NEED. But again, what we need is not always what we WANT. God is not a magic genie in a bottle, or some other granter of wishes. We treat God like the loving father he is, not like a butler.
Suppose, as a loving parent yourself, your teenager comes to you to ask for a car. Like a good parent, you will likely take your child by the hand, bring him or her outside, hand him or her the car keys, take a deep breath, and wisely say “alright, kiddo: let’s go get some job applications.”
Because you are giving your teenager what they NEED, NOT WHAT THEY WANT. While we may ask God in our prayers for what we WANT, we are only guaranteed to get what we NEED. But – and I want to be clear on this – we ARE guaranteed to get what we need from God.
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This brings us to the second way prayer is like a radio signal. What your car radio tunes to – say, 99.3 for WTNS – is called the “carrier frequency.” There is something unexpected about a carrier frequency: it doesn’t carry the actual signal of the radio station being broadcast.
The actual audio information in a radio signal is contained in what’s called “bandwidth,” which are frequencies just above and just below what your radio tunes into. So if you’re tuning into 99.3, your radio is actually picking up the signal from the bandwidth AROUND 99.3.
So when we tune into God, we ask directly for our WANTS, but what we’ll get back from God is just AROUND what we’re asking God for. In other words, WE ASK FOR WHAT WE WANT, BUT WE GET WHAT WE NEED.
This is why we pray. WE PRAY NOT BECAUSE WE EXPECT TO GET WHAT WE THINK WE WANT. WE PRAY BECAUSE WE KNOW WE WILL GET WHAT GOD KNOWS WE NEED. I’ll say it again: WE PRAY BECAUSE WE KNOW WE WILL GET…WHAT GOD KNOWS…WE NEED.
WHEN WE PRAY, WE START WHERE WE ARE, AND END UP WHERE GOD IS. We focus on the tuning signal, and the more we pray, the more we notice what’s going on in the bandwidth. We noticed more and more that answers to prayers come in ways we don’t expect.
I’m reminded of this little reflection I read in a daily devotional recently. It goes like this:
“I prayed for strength and God gave me difficulties to make me strong.
I prayed for wisdom and God gave me problems to solve.
I prayed for courage and God gave me struggles to overcome.
I prayed for favors, and God gave me opportunities.
In the end, I have yet to receive what I wanted.
But I know I have everything God thinks I need.”
We pray not because God needs us to, or because we’re not getting what WE think WE want. We pray because IT IS THE ONLY WAY TO SEE THAT GOD MEETS ALL OF OUR NEEDS, ALL OF THE TIME.
We pray to live in God’s will, not self-will. We pray because WHAT GOD KNOWS I NEED IS BETTER THAN ANYTHING I COULD THINK I WANT. Because self-will is a failure of imagination. And God’s will is better than anything we could imagine for ourselves.
