DEAF Prayer
Have you ever said “I will pray about it?” Perhaps you have some big decision to make. A job opportunity, choosing a university, which subjects to take for A-level, when to retire or who to marry. There are any number of decisions that we all have to make in life and, if we are a believer, invariably we ‘pray about it.’
But have you actually pondered what you expect to happen as a result of your prayer? How, exactly, do you hope that God will answer? We perhaps hope that God, in some mysterious way, will clear the fog of our thinking. Or else we hope that God will so arrange circumstances that the ‘right’ option becomes clear. I suspect a good number of believers simply pray so that they can say that they have done so - before they go ahead and do whatever it was they most wanted to do anyway!
Whatever the case, all believers seem to fall back on, when asked why they made a certain choice - “I prayed about it.”
The disconcerting thing, if we allow ourselves to ponder it, is that many Christians say this after objectively bad decisions. This begs the question: what was God doing when they prayed? Did he not answer their prayer? Or did they not pray enough?
A spiritual answer is that God may have answered but that in His wisdom he desired the pray-er to go through the consequences of the bad decision. This could well be true - but it does beg the question of what was the purpose of praying in the first place? Why not rather just simply pray ‘your will be done’ and go ahead and make your own choices - trusting to God to work it all out for good?
Here we come to the point of this post. I would argue that this indeed is the attitude that we should have to prayer - but with a very important caveat. Our danger is that we spend a disproportionate amount of time talking to God and not enough listening to Him. We should pray ‘your will be done’ - but for that prayer to have any credibility we must also seek out what God’s will is. And the only place we can discern this with any assurance is Scripture.
Let’s suppose that you are pondering which university to apply for. You have many options before you. One is close to your parents. Another is miles and miles away from your parents. One has a great academic reputation whilst another is in a very popular city. As a believer you ‘pray about it’ - vaguely hoping for some guidance. In the course of time, such ‘guidance’ occurs - ‘doors’ open and close. Perhaps your grades end up ruling you out of the university with the highest reputation but then you discover your friend failed to get into their first choice also - freeing you both up to attend your second-choice which is the same for both of you. You praise God for his ‘providential’ leading and happily head off to university.
What is the problem? The problem is that no listening has taken place - except to the shifting circumstances of life. What has God to say of the decision? In short, prayers may have been spoken, but answers have not been sought from Scripture.
Of course, the Bible does not provide specific answers to many of the choices we must make in life. But it most definitely does teach us what God desires of us - Paul writes in 1 Thessalonians 4:3, for example, “this is God’s will - that you be sanctified.”
We ought not to make our choices by following merely our own whims and desires or by the whim of changing circumstances. This was a mistake that King David’s men made before he had yet been made king. The current king, Saul, was seeking to kill David and was hunting him around the wilderness. Saul happens to walk into the cave where David is hiding and proceeds to relieve himself. David’s men encourage their leader to seize this ‘clearly’ God-given opportunity to rid himself of his persecutor and seize the kingdom - but David refuses. The man after God’s own heart know that this is not what God desires - despite the favourable circumstances.
The best way to make good decisions is not to rely on circumstances - even when we call it ‘providence.’ Instead, we must do as Christ told us “If you abide in Me, and My words abide in you, you will ask what you desire, and it shall be done for you” John 15:7. We must pray, but we must also listen to the answer.