Who’s Doing the Praying?

Romans 8:26-27

Children’s prayers are cute. You can find some on the internet and it is always difficult to tell if someone made them up or if children really prayed these prayers. But in either case, they are cute.

Dear GOD,

Please send me a pony. I never asked for anything before. You can look it up.

-Bruce

Dear GOD,

Are You really invisible or is it just a trick?

-Lucy

Dear GOD,

If we come back as something – Please don’t let me be Jennifer Horton because I hate her.

-Denise

Dear GOD,

I think about You sometimes even when I’m not praying.

-Elliott

Dear GOD,

Thank you for the baby brother, but what I prayed for was a puppy.

-Joyce

And then I found this prayer:

Thank you God . . .

for standing by me so far this day.

With your help, I haven’t been

impatient, grumpy, judgmental, or lost my temper.

But . .

I’ll be getting out of bed soon, and

I’ll really be needing your help even more.

I can identify with that one.

Here is one more joke about prayer.

A journalist assigned to the Jerusalem bureau takes an apartment overlooking the Wailing Wall.  Every day when she looks out, she sees an old Jewish man praying vigorously.

So the journalist goes down to the wall, and introduces herself to the old man.

She asks: “You come every day to the wall.  How long have you done that and what are you praying for?”

The old man replies, “I have come here to pray every day for 25 years. In the morning I pray for world peace and then for the brotherhood of man.

I go home have a cup of tea, and I come back and pray for the eradication of illness and disease from the earth.”

The journalist is amazed.  “How does it make you feel to come here every day for 25 years and pray for these things?” she asks.

The old man replies, calmly: . . . “Like I’m talking to a wall.”

And I identify with this one as well.

The truth is praying is very difficult for me. I have struggled continuously over the 37 years of my Christian life with prayer. My personality values competency and it is stressful for me to be so incompetent at something Christians are supposed to be good at.

Actually, it is not difficult to pray, but it is very difficult to pray authentically.

I remember the first times I prayed out loud in the presence of other people. I was red in the face and stumbled and stammered. I have seen other people pray out loud in a group for the first time and it is awkward. But then we get better at praying. We listen to others and copy what they do and before you know it, we can pray just like everyone else. We learn the proper vocabulary. We learn to pray the things that will make others respond by saying, “Amen!” We learn to pray.

But learning to pray is not the same as praying authentically.

I was taught to pray, when I was growing up,

Now I lay me down to sleep

I pray the Lord my soul to keep

If I should die before I wake

I pray the Lord my soul to take

This is an eighteenth century prayer that many children are taught to pray in the US and maybe in other countries as well.

I prayed it every night for many years and I don’t think I ever thought about what it meant. If I did, I think I might have questioned the wisdom of a young child thinking about dying before going to sleep. “Sweet dreams!” I don’t think so.

I raced through the prayer which was followed by the blessing of the family.

Now I lay me down to sleep

I pray the Lord my soul to keep

If I should die before I wake

I pray the Lord my soul to take

God bless Mommy, Daddy, Mitzie, Cathy, Lee, Heidi, Trudy, Ginger, Nicky, Mokey, Tiny, Goldie and whatever other animals we had. Amen.

The blessing of parents, five sisters, two horses, a dog and two cats, all in one breath.

When we went to the ocean for our annual summer vacation, although we were Lutheran and not Catholic, my two older sisters would listen on the radio to the Catholic mass and try to race the priest through the recitation of the mass.

I can pray the Lord’s Prayer:

Our Father in heaven

May your holy name be honored;

may your kingdom come;

may your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

Give us today the food we need.

and forgive us our sins,

just as we have forgiven those who have sinned against us.

And lead us not into temptation,

but deliver us from the evil one.

For yours is the kingdom, the power and the glory forever.

Amen

I can pray this and race through it without thinking about what I am praying. Or I can pray it meaningfully, thinking about what I am saying as I pray and it can be an authentic prayer from the heart.

Some of us grew up in liturgical churches where we had memorized prayers but more spontaneous churches also have a form of memorized prayers. There are key words that are used. In one tradition, the prayer starts out quietly and includes the recitation of certain scriptures. Then the volume and intensity of the prayer increases as the person praying calls on God to heal or to bind Satan and defeat enemies or to provide something that is needed. After a bit of this, the volume and intensity falls back down and the prayer ends with expressions of blessing the Lord.

When someone prays, you can see the cultural background that influences how they pray.

Any of these kinds of prayers, the childhood prayer I learned, the Holy Rosary in the Catholic Church, the liturgical prayers and the culturally learned spontaneous prayers, can be authentic. But they can also be just words that are recited.

Each of us, in our different Christian cultures, have learned how to pray so that we fit in with the others in our group. In some Christian groups, prayer replaces interpersonal dialog. Rather than say congratulations to a newly engaged couple, there is group prayer in which everyone has to pray. It gets tedious listening to prayers that become quite repetitive and it is obvious that all they are trying to say is, “I’m so happy for you. Congratulations! May God bless you.”

Sometimes prayer is used to pass on news about someone. We pray but are really telling other people what we heard about the health or other need of someone.

Sometimes we debate each other by praying. Someone prays and then someone else prays, disagreeing with what the first person prayed.

It would be much more authentic to stop praying and pass on news we have heard and then go back to praying or stop praying and debate the issue and then begin to pray again.

Then there is the pressure that we feel to pray or we have not shown that we are spiritual. We have a nice dinner and then before we leave we pray and everyone has to pray. If you don’t pray, then there is something wrong with you or you don’t really care about the people you are with. So we pray even when we don’t have any inspiration to pray, but we have learned what to say and so we pray. After such an experience I feel ashamed that I used prayer to fulfill a cultural expectation.

We pray before we eat and at home it is not so bad, but when we are asked to pray for a church group before a meal, we do so and sometimes feel embarrassed afterwards because it was a prayer meant to fulfill a cultural expectation rather than an authentic prayer. As a pastor I am often expected to pray and it is a struggle to make my prayers authentic. Too often they are simply prayers from my head trying to meet the needs of the occasion.

There is a lot of inauthentic prayer in Christians groups.

There are some examples of heartfelt prayers in the Bible. When Peter was walking on the water to Jesus and he began to fear the waves and started drowning, he cried out, “Lord, save me!” That’s an authentic prayer, straight from the heart to the lips.

The writer of Psalm 137 was in exile in Babylon and bitter that Israel had been defeated by Babylon. The psalm ends with

O Daughter of Babylon, doomed to destruction,

happy is he who repays you

for what you have done to us—

he who seizes your infants

and dashes them against the rocks.

This too is authentic prayer, straight from the heart to the lips. We may not like the sentiment, but it is authentic in that it honestly expresses what is on the heart.

Some may object to this because praying that an infant be dashed against the rocks is not a nice prayer; it is not a Christian prayer. But what is prayer if it is not expressing what is on our heart, good or bad? Prayer is expressing what we think and feel to God.

Why do we do this? Is it to tell God what to do? Does God sit around waiting to act until enough people pray or until someone with enough faith prays so then he can finally act? If enough people pray that some country’s infants will have their heads dashed against the rocks, will God do it?

This is absurd. God is not waiting for orders. God is not waiting to act until enough of us tell him what he should do.

God will act with or without our prayers and assistance. God is moving steadily to the end of time and is fighting to draw us into his kingdom without violating the free will he has given us – which does not make this an easy task. We can block God’s will for our life by refusing to submit to him, but we cannot block God’s will for anyone else. God is too creative and too loving to allow this.

Authentic prayer is praying from the heart. When our heart is bitter, we pray, expressing our bitterness, and the process of healing begins and continues until we are able to forgive those who have wronged us. When we bypass what we are feeling and settle into conventional, acceptable prayer, nothing much of value is accomplished.

Nosson Scherman is an Orthodox rabbi in the US who has a wonderful understanding of the meaning of prayer. I put some of his quotes in the bulletin.

He said that

Prayer is not a list of requests; it is an introspective process, a refining process of discovering what one is, what one should be, and how to achieve the transformation.

Prayer is a process by which we are changed. There is nothing we can tell God that he does not already know. There is no idea, no matter how brilliant or creative, that will make God sit up and say, “Now why didn’t I think of that?” We don’t pray to inform God, we pray to be shaped and molded by God into his image and to be conformed to his will.

Rabbi Scherman wrote

The desired result of prayer is the increase of God’s presence.

That is why we pray. We don’t pray to tell God what to do; we pray to be shaped and brought into conformity with God’s will for our lives.

This happens when we pray authentically, from the heart.

But even when we pray authentically from the heart, we have problems.

Sometimes we pray against God’s purposes.

The prophet Jeremiah was praying for the people of Judah but God told him to stop. (Jeremiah 7)

So do not pray for this people nor offer any plea or petition for them; do not plead with me, for I will not listen to you.

The people of Judah were pouring out offerings to other gods and God told Jeremiah

My anger and my wrath will be poured out on this place, on man and beast, on the trees of the field and on the fruit of the ground, and it will burn and not be quenched.

If you or I were in Judah at the time, we would be holding all night prayer meetings and fasting and praying for God to revive and protect the people of Judah, but God had determined that his patience was at an end and he was going to act in judgement against Judah.

Jeremiah was praying authentically from the heart, but his heart was not in conformity with God’s will.

Sometimes our sinful preoccupation with ourselves and our selfish interests leads us to pray for what grieves the heart of God.

Mark Twain wrote a short essay titled, The War Prayer, in which a church in the north of the United States was praying for victory over the south in the American Civil War. His point was that both north and south were praying for victory without realizing the implications of what they were praying for. Churches in the north and south of the United States thought God was on their side.

How does God handle our prayers when we pray such short-sighted prayers?

Sometimes we pray not knowing God has already answered our prayer.

When we first moved here in January 2000, I came alone and lived with a couple in Rabat for the first six months. Annie stayed at her work in the US and made two or three visits. Each time she came and even while she was away, we looked for possible places to live. We prayed and many in the church prayed with us. Finally it was June and Annie was coming over and we still did not yet have a place to live. I was frustrated and wondered why God was not answering our prayer.

Then Michelle Russon went to a birthday party at a home of a French/German couple who had a daughter at school with Michelle. The Russons informed us that this couple was moving and the simtar told us about this house at the same time. We came and looked at it, liked it and within two or three weeks we moved into the house that is now our home.

We spent a lot of time praying unnecessarily. What did God think about all the time we spent praying for something he had already answered?

Sometimes we pray for things that are not good for us.

The first summer I was a Christian, I worked as a lifeguard at a home for severely and profoundly retarded men and women. I started my first Bible study that summer and I also prayed every day that I would win the New Jersey state lottery.

We pray for lots of things that are not good for us, that would harm us rather than help us if God said yes to our prayer.

In an interview, Ruth Bell Graham said: “I am so glad God did not listen to my foolish demands in my younger years. I would have married the wrong guy fifteen times.”

In the Jim Carrey movie, Bruce Almighty, Carrey is given the powers of God for Buffalo, New York for a short period of time. He is quickly overwhelmed by all the prayer requests he receives which interfere with the fun he is having using his powers for himself, so he has all the prayers come to his computer and answers yes to all the prayers.

What quickly results is chaos. Everyone wins the lottery but because the prize is divided by the number of correct guesses, people get only a few dollars as their prize. The local hockey team wins, everyone’s stock portfolio rises and riots break out in the streets.

Bruce has this dialog with God:

* God: You made a mess of things, huh?

* Bruce: There were so many [people]. I just gave them what they wanted.

* God: Yeah, but since when does anyone have a clue what they want?

Isn’t that the problem? Since when do we have a clue about what is really good for us?

And sometimes it is not only that I don’t have a clue about what is really good for me, sometimes I have a longing deep inside that I cannot articulate.

Gustave Flaubert was a nineteenth century French writer, best know for his novel, Madame Bovary. He is known as a writer who extended great effort to find just the right word. And he was aware of how short he fell of the ideal toward which he strove. One of his famous quotes in Madame Bovary is this:

The human language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out a tune for a dancing bear, when we hope with our music to move the stars.

In the same way, we have a deep longing we wish to express in our prayers but stammer out a few inarticulate lines that do not match the depth of the longing in our hearts. Words simply cannot express what we mean to pray.

For all these reasons, our misdirected prayers, inefficient prayers, cultural prayers, longings we cannot articulate, for all these reasons, verses 26 & 27 of Romans 8 are such good news.

In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express. ²⁷ And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints in accordance with God’s will.

We do not know how to pray as we should and in the weakness of our praying, the Holy Spirit helps us.

The Holy Spirit intercedes for us.

Do you find this incredible? I do. The Holy Spirit, not some fifth-level angel, but the Holy Spirit intercedes for us! When we do not know what to pray for, the Holy Spirit takes our deep longings and expresses them to the one who searches our hearts, God the Father.

When I struggle to know what to pray or am stuck praying in the cultural way I have been taught, the Holy Spirit prays for me, expressing what I cannot express adequately.

The Holy Spirit intercedes for us and he translates our prayers into prayers that are in accordance with God’s will.

When I pray for something that is not God’s will, like winning the lottery or trying to get illegally into Spain or to marry a certain person or whatever, if my prayer is from the heart, God interprets that prayer into a prayer in accordance with God’s will.

I may pray to win the lottery but the Holy Spirit translates that prayer into “Help me find the security that comes from knowing I am loved by you.”

Paul prayed many times to have his thorn in the flesh removed, but the Holy Spirit translated that to a prayer for Paul to maintain humility in the midst of all his tremendous gifts.

Like Flaubert’s cracked kettle and dancing bear, we miss the mark in our prayers but we can take deep delight that the Holy Spirit transforms our beating on the cracked kettle into music that moves the stars.

God does it all for us. When we were lost and without hope God came to us and offered us salvation that made us righteous in his eyes. When we are lost and without hope of ever becoming more holy the Holy Spirit works in us to transform us. Even in our prayers that we try hard to pray but miss the mark and fall short of what we are trying to say, even in our prayers God comes to us and the Holy Spirit translates for us, interprets for us, intercedes for us.

Do you see how carefully and how thoroughly God is at work in us making us holy, helping us to know his will, teaching us how to pray, helping us when we pray inadequately or in misdirected ways? God is giving us every advantage possible, helping us in every way he can to bring us into his kingdom.

Do you have any doubt that God loves you? Is there anything God will not do to help us draw closer to him and bring us victoriously into his kingdom?

What is our responsibility? God is doing all this work in our lives. What do we need to do? We need to expend energy to pray authentically. When I pray in church, I focus intently on trying to pray what the Holy Spirit is leading me to pray. I am more successful some times than other times, but I enjoy praying in church because I think the intensity of my focus helps me to pray more authentically.

One of my problems is that when I pray in the mornings, I can get into a rut praying the same things once again for the same people. Sometimes I don’t know what to pray and simply ask that God bless this person or that.

Because it is just me in the morning I can slip into a routine and not put forth the energy I do when I pray in church. I need to work harder to express just what I think and feel about each person or situation. This is why it is good to journal before you pray. When you take time to think more clearly what it is you are thinking and feeling, then you can pray more authentically. On mornings when I do put forth the effort, my time in prayer is a rewarding experience and I feel that I have really prayed that morning.

It is comforting to know that even when I am off the mark in my prayers and even when I don’t know what to say other than “Bless Mark,”the Holy Spirit will take my prayer and intercede for me.

I don’t want to discourage you from praying but think about how you pray. Try to identify the cultural patterns in your prayers and set yourself free from those culturally learned patterns. Take time to examine what you are thinking and feeling and then pray authentic prayers that express what is on your heart and mind.

And take heart that the Holy Spirit himself is helping you to bring you victoriously into God’s kingdom.