1 – Pray First
2 – Confidence In Being Completely Honest With God (Even To The Point Of Complaint)
3 – Pray For Incremental Gains
Pray First
My church (about two years ago) started to make available these rubber bracelets that say PRAY FIRST. The point of them is to wear one as a reminder to yourself to do just that (no matter what the circumstances might be that you find yourself in). In times of distress, the tempting thing for most of us is to try and resolve the situation ourselves, or the complete opposite: just simply panic. What I have learned to get better at (but don’t always remember to do; that’s why the bracelet helps) is to pray first. We see this exemplified in the Bible. Here are two examples…
- The believers chose to pray first in order to make a decision between Justus and Matthias, when they were looking to replace Judas who had killed himself: “Then they prayed, ‘You, Lord, know the hearts of all; show which of these two You have chosen to take the place in this apostolic service that Judas left to go to his own place.’ Then they cast lots for them, and the lot fell to Matthias. So he was numbered with the 11 apostles.” (Acts 1:24-26)
- The church at Antioch chose to pray first after before sending out Barnabas and Paul: “As they were ministering to the Lord and fasting, the Holy Spirit said, ‘Set apart for Me Barnabas and Saul for the work I have called them to.’ Then after they had fasted, prayed, and laid hands on them, they sent them off.” (Acts 13:2-3)
Confidence In Being Completely Honest With God (Even To The Point Of Complaint)
Though I have been a diligent reader of the Bible for many years, reading Old Testament scholar, J Richard Middleton’s book Abraham’s Silence helped to solidify my confidence with regards to being completely honest with God during prayer (even to the point of complaint). As described in its description on Amazon: “This book provides a fresh interpretation of Genesis 22 and reinforces the church’s resurgent interest in lament as an appropriate response to God.”
Genesis 22 depicts a “hard to wrap your mind around it” scene where Abraham attempts to sacrifice his son Isaac, because God had told him to. Middleton’s thesis looks into the fact that Abraham never once even questions the oddity of what God has told him to do, contrasting it with Job’s chapter after chapter of completely transparent lament and complaint to God regarding the circumstances that he finds himself in. Middleton also weaves into his book many other examples of prayer which are filled with complaint and lament from others like Jeremiah and Jesus (just to name a few), in order to contrast these many examples with Abraham’s shockingly unique lack of complaint in the face of God’s command to sacrifice his son. (I’m not going to get into the main point of Middleton’s discussion about Abraham’s own silence. It is not the point of this article. You would need to read his book for that.)
What I wanted to share is something that I learned from reading Middleton’s book about prayer: that we should have confidence in being completely honest with God (even to the point of complaint). As Old Testament Scholar, Michael Heiser always said over and over throughout his time as a biblical scholar when answering the question of “What Does God Want?”, his simple answer (as written about in his book of the same title)… “God wants a family.”
We have to ask ourselves: “What does a truly, healthy family always have?”
Complete honesty and safety when its members express complaint to each other. This was a big point made by Middleton; that God wants us to be completely honest with Him, despite however risky it might seem. In other words, if Heiser was right that God wants a family, then Middleton was right when he wrote:
“Lament psalms, which make up over one-third of the Psalms (compared to hymns of praise, which compose less than a quarter), are honest, abrasive prayers, which squarely face up to the dark side of human experience; and so they can provide us guidance (a “protocol”) for how to ‘host’ and process disorientation… A lament psalm is a prayer for help from the bottom of the pit.”
Later Middleton goes on in another section that he calls: Lament—Supplication with an Edge:
“…following the lead of the psalmists, we can take our anger, our doubt, and all the dismay and the terror of life, and we can put it at the feet of the Most High. We can bring our pain to the throne of God and say, ‘You’re supposed to be faithful, but I don’t see it! You’re supposed to be good, but I don’t experience it.’
And, contrary to appearances, that desperate, honest voicing of pain to God is not blasphemous, but is a holy, redemptive act. Prayers of lament are radical acts of faith and hope because they refuse, even in the midst of suffering, to give up on God.
Notice how desperate—even childish and regressive—the speech of the psalmist becomes in Psalm 30:
What profit is there in my death, if I go down to the Pit? Will the dust praise you? Will it tell of your faithfulness? (30:9)
Here the psalmist mounts an argument for why God should save him. I’m going down for the count, he says. I’m about ready to die, and they don’t praise you in the grave. Don’t you want me to praise you? Then save me quickly!
This childish, desperate outburst is actually a radical confession of faith; the psalmist, even in his desperation, knows that help lies in God alone. None other can deliver.
That is why Psalm 39 is peppered with imperatives, commands addressed to God. You have to be desperate to address imperatives to the Creator, to tell God what to do. That is the inherent boldness of supplication or petitionary prayer. And lament is supplication with an edge.
The fact is that silence will not get us through the pain. Only speech addressed to God gets us through—speech that summons God into our suffering, which says to God, as the writer of Psalm 30 did, ‘Hear, O LORD, and be gracious to me! / O LORD, be my helper!’ (30:10). Or, even as the writer of Psalm 39 did in his impropriety, ‘Turn your gaze away from me, that I may smile again’ (39:13a). It doesn’t have to be theologically correct speech. But it has to be gut-honest speech.”
Pray For Incremental Gains
The final thing that I have learned is that even though God can resolve our complaints instantly, sometimes His allowing of us to journey through what we might be lamenting or complaining about is actually the means by which God is having us grow. Though it is not a bad thing to pray for an instant healing or resolution, I have now learned that it might be more appropriate to simply pray for incremental gains. Take this example: Peter opens his second epistle with…
2 Peter 1:2 (HCSB) – May grace and peace be multiplied to you through the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord.
If we read this to quickly and in isolation, it could be tempting for us to just pray to God for grace and peace to be instantly multiplied to us, and then passively move on with our day, assuming that it will just happen. Now, that’s possible, but when we read this more carefully, we see that Peter is expressing a desire that the reader MAY gain a multiplied grace and peace THROUGH the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord.
Well, that sounds more like an encouragement to gain such by a process rather than an instantaneous moment of asking. No?
It seems as though Peter is telling the reader that a multiplied grace and peace comes by learning about God, and that takes time and effort on our part. Maybe instead a prayer about making incremental gains, as we read the Bible and practice what it encourages, is the means by which grace and peace are multiplied?
After all, this is how Peter ends this same letter:
2 Peter 3:14-18 (HCSB) – Therefore, dear friends, while you wait for these things, make every effort to be found at peace with Him without spot or blemish. Also, regard the patience of our Lord as an opportunity for salvation, just as our dear brother Paul has written to you according to the wisdom given to him. He speaks about these things in all his letters in which there are some matters that are hard to understand. The untaught and unstable twist them to their own destruction, as they also do with the rest of the Scriptures. Therefore, dear friends, since you know this in advance, be on your guard, so that you are not led away by the error of lawless people and fall from your own stability. But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To Him be the glory both now and to the day of eternity. Amen.
I hope this helps…
Godspeed, to the brethren!
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