The fact that we seek God at all in times of misfortune shows us
that our deepest being hungers and thirsts for him. We should
bring our fears to God; we should bring him our sickness and
anguish. But that is not enough. We must give him our
innermost being, our heart and soul. When we humble ourselves
before him in this way, and give ourselves completely over to
him – when we no longer resist giving him our whole person, our
whole personality – then he can help us.
Papa always encouraged people to look beyond their personal
struggles or hardships and to seek a greater vision – to consider
God’s desire to redeem the whole world of its need and despair. As
he expressed this longing through the prophet Isaiah:
Come, all you who are thirsty,
come to the waters;
and you who have no money,
come, buy and eat!
Come, buy wine and milk
without money and without cost.
Why spend money on what is not bread,
and your labor on what does not satisfy?
Listen, listen to me, and eat what is good,
and your soul will delight in the
richest of fare.
Isa. 55:1–2
Everything in life
is affected by our attitude, whether we are
getting a job done, playing a game, or singing in a choir. The same
is true for prayer.
We all know the story of the children of Israel, who turned to
God when they needed him, but ignored him when things were
going well. How do we measure up? Poet Kahlil Gibran admonishes:
“You pray in your distress and in your need; would that you might also
pray in the fullness of your joy and in your days of abundance.”
Abraham Lincoln, conscious of the same spiritual laziness in the
United States of his day, proclaimed “a national day of fasting, humiliation, and prayer” in 1863. His words at the time are even truer
today than when they were first spoken – a telling comment on our
present condition.
We have forgotten God…Intoxicated with unbroken success, we
have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming
and preserving grace – too proud to pray to the God who made
us! It behooves us, then, to humble ourselves before the offended Power, to confess our national sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness.
Too many of us forget God when we are healthy and happy, when
we are doing well. But God needs people who carry the depth of
their belief out into the world every day, people who not only appeal to him in times of distress, but who pay him homage because
they love him.
In the busyness of our lives, we often neglect the things of the
spirit, and our relationship with God becomes lukewarm. Rick, a
friend who works as a sales manager, tells me:
In my life, being busy is a big obstacle to prayer. There is seemingly so much to do. Society moves at a rapid rate, and stress is
more common than the common cold. I find myself caught up in
busyness, trying to tackle my to-do list, but missing God. If I am
honest, the big to-do list is self-inflicted, and the stress my own
fault. The reality of the situation is that letting go of my busyness
and turning to God is the only way to have a real life.
There are many things that stand in the way of our relating to God:
inner laziness, hypocrisy, pride, lack of faith, self-centeredness. All
of these are impediments to a meaningful relationship with God,
and therefore require us to take a stand against them. It is a question of deciding what our attitude will be, and then working to
stick to that decision.
Insofar as the self pushes for its own way, it hinders the working
of God. In each of us there is an unfathomable mass of ideas and
emotions that are neither concentrated on God nor at one with
his will – this is simply a fact of human nature. And because of it,
our prayers will always be burdened by our personal failings and
by the weight of self. That is why the Lord’s Prayer says: “Forgive
us our sins; deliver us from evil.”
Eberhard Arnold
Many people have experienced that a burdened conscience blocks
their communication with God. For example, a woman wrote to me
about a Gulf War veteran who told her that he had done terrible
things during the war, and that since then he has been unable to
pray. He was desperate: “I can’t talk to God anymore. Pray for me,
that I can learn to pray again.”
Often a sense of guilt does indeed block our way to God. Yet if
we are truly repentant, we will find someone we trust to whom we
can speak out our sins and shortcomings. It is true that forgiveness
comes from God alone, but an open and honest confession has a
mysterious power; through it complete freeing can be given, the
soul healed, and the relationship with God restored. As the apostle
James advises, “Confess your sins to one another, and pray for one
another, that you may be healed.” In
The Cost of Discipleship,
Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes:
No one should be surprised at the difficulty of faith, if there is
some part of his life where he is consciously resisting or disobeying the commandments of God. Is there some part of your life
that you are refusing to surrender at his behest, some sinful passion, maybe, or some animosity, some hope, perhaps your ambition or your reason? If so, you must not be surprised that you
have not received the Holy Spirit, that prayer is difficult, or that
your request for faith remains unanswered.
Insincerity is a hindrance in all our relationships. Ignatius writes to
the Ephesians: “It is better to be silent and
be,
than to talk and not
be.” Honesty demands that our words be backed up by our actions.
Jesus, too, speaks sharply against hypocrisy: “Woe to you, scribes
and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs,
which on the outside look beautiful, but inside they are full of the
bones of the dead and of all kinds of filth” (Matt. 23:27). We are
also instructed to lock ourselves in our rooms and pray in secret so
that God, who sees in secret, will reward us. I have always felt that
the point was not so much privacy as humility.
In order to warn us against self-righteousness, Jesus tells a parable about two men who went to the Temple to pray. One was a
Pharisee, a member of a Jewish sect known for its strict adherence
to the letter of the Law. The other was a tax collector. The first
prayed: “I thank thee, O God, that I am not like other people, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast
twice a week, I give tithes of all that I get.” The tax collector, however, stood at a distance, and without even lifting his eyes to
heaven, beat his breast and pleaded: “O God, have mercy on me, a
sinner.” Jesus says that it was the tax collector who was acquitted
of his sins, “for everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but
he who humbles himself will be exalted.”
Recently I had the privilege of meeting Desmond Tutu
, former
Archbishop of South Africa. During our conversation, he told me
that his favorite biblical text is in Romans 5, where it says that
“Christ died for us while we were still sinners,” because it shows
we have been loved long before we ever do anything to deserve
being loved. He noted that people who come out of a culture of
success and achievement find it difficult to accept the unmerited
grace of God. It is really the same with prayer: we are given the
grace to have a relationship with God independent of our achievements or pride of self.
Related to pride is egotism, which often leads us into self-centered prayer. That is the heart of the “prosperity gospel,” where
people pray unabashedly for wealth, success in their careers, and
other mundane things. Such trivial prayer belittles God.
The Lord’s Prayer begins with God, and not with ourselves or our
own needs. To use the words of St. Francis: “Let us be ashamed to
be caught up in worthless imaginings, for at the time of prayer, we
speak to the great King.” We have been told to ask so that we might
receive, and been promised that anyone who seeks will find, and
those who knock will find the door opened to them. But in all our
prayers we should bring glory to God, not to ourselves.
Often we are caught up in our important activities and no longer
see the working of God around us. The story of Balaam in the Old
Testament shows us how blind we can be. This prophet was so full
of his own ideas and intentions that God literally made fun of him.
It was the time of Israel’s wandering in the desert, and the king of
Moab was worried about this great tribe encamped near him. He
called on Balaam, a Gentile prophet, to curse the Israelites. Balaam
asked God for permission, and God told him he should not do it.
But Balaam, against God’s word, set off on his donkey toward the
Israelite camp the next morning.
He had not gone far before God decided to intervene. An angel
stood in the road with sword drawn. The donkey saw the angel, but
Balaam did not: he had lost touch with God’s will, being so full of
his own. The donkey had the good sense to step aside, which earned
him a beating from Balaam. Three times the angel stood in the way.
Balaam got increasingly annoyed at his donkey, who kept trying to
detour around the angel. The third time the angel chose a narrow
spot on the road where the donkey couldn’t turn either way. The
donkey sat down. Balaam started thrashing the donkey with a stick,
still blind to the messenger of God standing right in front of him.
Then God “opened the donkey’s mouth.” And the donkey didn’t
just beg for mercy. He lectured the prophet: “Why are you beating
me? What did I ever do to you? Am I not your obedient donkey
that you’ve ridden all your life?” Balaam was stopped short. He felt
stupid – and chastened. And suddenly he could see the angel.
Like stupidity
or spiritual blindness, unforgiveness can also block
the way to God. Jesus said our sins would be forgiven to the extent
that we forgive others, yet how few of us take this seriously! I am
sure many prayers are not heard because the person praying is
holding a grudge. Writer Anna Mow says:
If my heart is hard toward anyone, it is closed also toward God.
God forgives. That is his nature. He is real love. So my forgiving
relationship with others is the determining factor in my reception of the forgiveness of God. This is the bridge over which every Christian must pass. The secret of power in prayer lies right
here.
Another serious obstacle to the working of God in our lives is unbelief – or at least the shallowness that causes our faith to waver with
every emotion. The following story from the gospels wonderfully
emphasizes the importance of a deeply-grounded faith:
When they came to the crowd, a man approached Jesus and
knelt before him. “Lord, have mercy on my son,” he said. “He
has seizures and is suffering greatly. He often falls into the fire
or into the water. I brought him to your disciples, but they could
not heal him.”
“O unbelieving and perverse generation,” Jesus replied,
“how long shall I stay with you? How long shall I put up with
you? Bring the boy here to me.” Jesus rebuked the demon, and
it came out of the boy, and he was healed from that moment.
Then the disciples came to Jesus in private and asked, “Why
couldn’t we drive it out?” He replied, “Because you have so little
faith. I tell you the truth, if you have faith as small as a mustard
seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’
and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you, but this kind
never comes out except by prayer and fasting.”
Matt. 17:14–21
The point of this story is not the fasting, nor even perhaps the healing, but faith. We are weak people, weak in our faith and in our
devotion to God. But how big is a mustard seed? Very small, yet it
contains everything it needs to grow. We, too, should have everything within ourselves: the deep faith that Jesus speaks of, a childlike trust in God, and the courage to face difficulties. Most important, we must have love. As Paul tells us in his First Letter to the
Corinthians, without love even faith is not enough.
I have often been asked if it is really possible that an almighty
Being would allow one of us, small and weak as we are, to contact
him directly. Is it truly possible that he is influenced in some way
by our prayers? God is so infinitely great, and we so infinitely small,
so unworthy of his attention, that this seems unimaginable. On the
other hand, when we turn to God, we do so precisely because of
our weakness. In praying, we are asking God to do something we
cannot do, to help us because we cannot help ourselves, to change
something because we cannot change it.
Dick, a close friend, writes:
If God is not there, then we are alone in dealing with our feelings, and it is an impersonal, mechanistic universe; in times of
deepest need we will feel truly lost. None of us completely understands himself. If I believe I am alone, then I try to observe
myself, heal myself, manage myself, guide myself, and in the
process I split myself into observer and observed, manager and
managed, physician and patient, and so forth. This inner division
is intolerable for the soul.
God is love. He loves the poor and humble with a preferential love.
It is his will to reveal himself to the meek, the poor in spirit. And he
has promised his living water, his spirit, to anyone who asks for it.
Only in this flowing river of God’s power can our faith be living.
Out of it, our faith dies like a fish on dry land.
Therefore we must really believe, when we pray, that God hears
us. And we must believe that our prayers, poor as they may seem,
can change even the history of the world. That is, we must have
faith that through our pleading the breaking in of God’s kingdom –
the promised reign of justice, peace, and love – will take place.
There is no barrier, no wall or mountain, too high for the prayer
of faith. God is above everything, and his spirit is stronger than all
other spirits. When a person’s faith, life, and deeds are in the spirit
of Jesus, his prayers will be answered. Everything we do must have
one goal: that God’s kingdom comes on earth and that his will takes
place on earth. He can then show us that he is greater than our
hearts can grasp, and greater things will happen than we would
dare to put into words. His answer will surpass our boldest
imaginings.