P.R.A.Y.: Ask

Matthew 6:10-11

February 7, 2021 • Mount Pleasant UMC

In the last year, we learned the meaning of “essential.” 365 days ago, I doubt any of us had though to classify any jobs into “essential” and “non-essential,” and there was quite the debate on the national scene about exactly which people, which services and which activities were considered “essential” enough to stay open. To the person who is working that particular job, any job becomes “essential” when you rely on it for your income and wellbeing; some of you know that all too well! And there was a lot of discussion about who gets to decide what is essential and what is not. I personally consider Starbucks an essential business, but if you don’t drink coffee or other morning beverages, you might disagree, so who gets to decide? And that became even more heated when some states (not Indiana) declared churches as “non-essential” but bars as “essential.” It says something, doesn’t it, about what we value and depend upon as a culture? What do we think we can not live without?

That question has been rattling around in my brain as I’ve been thinking about the next part of our prayer model. We’re continuing our journey this morning through the Lord’s Prayer in this series I’ve called “P.R.A.Y.: Prayer for Normal People.” The last two weeks, we’ve hit the first two letters in our acronyms: P for pause and R for rejoice. This morning, we come to the movement in prayer that we most closely associate with the act of praying: A is for ask. When we pray, we tend to spend most of our time “asking” for things, for answers, for God to show up and do what we want, what we think is “essential.” But what if there’s a difference between our definition of “essential” and God’s? What happens when we think God ought to answer one way and he doesn’t? Before we get directly to that question, though, let’s look at what Jesus says about two different types of asking.

So the next section of Jesus’ prayer, the next two verses as we have it in our English Bibles, is really focused on two different kinds of asking: intercession and petition. Intercession is asking for others, while petition is asking for ourselves. And, if we’re honest, we tend to focus on the second one more than the first, or at least most of us tend to spend more time praying for ourselves than for others—even when we promise others we will pray for them (cf. Greig, How to Pray, pg. 73). Spiritual formation writer Richard Foster says intercession is “a way of loving others” (Prayer, pg. 191). We care for others by lifting them up to God…sometimes.

There’s an often-told story (so it may or may not be true) about the owner of a bar in a small Texas town who wanted to expand his business and so he applied to the local planning commission for a permit to do so. Members of a local church got wind of the project, however, and launched a campaign against it. They had protests, press releases, petitions and even prayer meetings, begging God to stop the process. However, when the commission granted the petition, the Christians were bitterly disappointed. Why had God not answered their prayers for what they knew was right? So the project went forward, and the week before the grand opening, a lightning bolt struck the bar and burned it to the ground. The Christians were thrilled, but the bar owner was not, as you might guess. He sued the church on the grounds that it had prayed for the destruction of his business. When the case went to court, the church members loudly denied all responsibility, which caused the judge to come to this conclusion: “I don’t know how I’m going to decide this. We appear to have a publican who believes passionately in the power of prayer and an entire congregation that has lost its faith entirely” (qtd. in Greig 93-94). Thankfully, the power of intercession is not dependent on whether we believe in it or not, but as I’ve been reminding you the past two weeks, the power of prayer is dependent entirely upon the God to whom we pray.

So, intercession is praying for others. And it is about praying the best for others. Jesus prays, “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” (6:10). Just to be clear, the “your” in this prayer is God, not you. Or me. But this is the setting for intercession. We pray for others in the context of the coming kingdom of God. We’re praying, as Pete Greig says, for a “regime change” (94). We’re praying that things would be set right, made the way God intended them to be. This mindset, then, gives shape to all of our prayers for others. Let me give you some examples. Let’s say we’re praying for a friend who has cancer—as, I imagine, many of you are right now or have recently in the past. When we pray for healing from cancer, or from any disease, we know we’re praying in alignment with God’s kingdom because Jesus came to bring healing. He came, as the prophets in the Old Testament said he would, “with healing in his wings” (cf. Malachi 4:2, CSB). One of the last promises of the Bible is that when Jesus returns, his kingdom will be a place where there is “no more death or mourning or crying or pain” (Revelation 21:4), a promise I read at almost every funeral or memorial service I do. So, here’s my point: when we pray for healing for someone, we are completely in line with Jesus’ prayer for his kingdom to come. Healing is a part of and a high value in the kingdom that is coming. As to why it doesn’t always happen here—we’re going to come back to that in a few moments.

Let’s think about another type of intercession we often make, maybe that a lot of us have been praying over the last year. It’s actually a prayer Paul tells us to make. In 1 Timothy, Paul instructs the church to make “intercession…for kings and all those in authority” (1 Timothy 2:1-2). If you’re like me, you often don’t know how to pray for such things. How do you pray for an election? Well, typically we pray for our candidate to win, but if the polls are to be believed these days, in any election, half of us are going to be disappointed. Do we pray for particular policies? Do we pray for certain outcomes in debates and judicial decisions? My best advice is: yes, absolutely. God wants us to pour out our hearts to him. But even more essential than telling God what we want is to pray for his kingdom to come, his will to be done. And this is not a “throw up your hands and give up” sort of prayer, kind of like, “Well, this is what I want, but whatever you want, God, I guess that will be okay.” We already know what God wants; it’s all through the Scriptures: justice, truth, righteousness. He wants “all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth” (1 Timothy 2:4). So when I pray intercessory prayer for leaders or rulers, I pray that all they do will be guided by justice, truth and righteousness. I pray that their lives and actions would line up with God’s kingdom, not mine. Remember, we’re ultimately praying for regime change, for God’s kingdom to come. In the end it will, but until then, we pray for leaders and those in authority, as Paul says, “that we may live peaceful and quiet lives in all godliness and holiness. This is good, and pleases God our Savior…” (1 Timothy 1:2-3). There is much more I could say about that, but I hope the point is clear: Jesus’ pattern for intercession is to pray that ultimately, God’s kingdom would come and God’s will would be done. There is nothing higher or better you can pray for someone else.

“Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” That’s intercession, then Jesus moves on to the kind of prayer we all like: praying for ourselves. The fancy word for that is “petition.” In the Lord’s Prayer, this is represented by bread: “Give us today our daily bread” (6:11). Now, we don’t realize it (and maybe by the time I’m done you won’t care anyway), but there is a translation problem here. The word we know as “daily” is only used here—in all of ancient literature. The early church fathers said they never knew anyone else to use that word, which means most likely Matthew (and Luke who also uses it in his version of the Lord’s Prayer) made the word up. The problem with that is when you have no context, it’s hard to translate. There’s a lot of ink that has been spilled about how translators get to where they get, and none of this is going to change how the church recites this prayer, but I think the best version of this verse should go something like this: “Give us today the bread that doesn’t run out” (cf. Bailey, Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes, pg. 121). That appears to be what Jesus is really praying here: asking God to take care of not just today but of every day. I mean, one of our basic fears is not having enough, right? We’ve faced that over the last year in the whole debate over who and what is “essential.” It causes us to ask things like, “What about the future? What if I lose my job? What if the kids get sick? What if I am unable to work? How will we survive?” (Bailey 121). Jesus’ prayer is meant to release us from that fear by entrusting now only today but every day into God’s hands. “Give us today the bread that doesn’t run out.” Or, a longer way to put it, “Give us bread for today and with it give us confidence that tomorrow we will have enough” (Bailey 122).

That makes sense, especially in the culture Jesus lived in, where people were paid for their work every day. And tomorrow there might or might not be work. So they might have enough for today but not for tomorrow if they only relied on the local economy. Jesus wants them to rely on God for their needs. But of course he’s not just talking about bread. For the first century Galilean, “bread” was a staple. It’s something that was required every day and it came to represent that which was needed. So for us today, we don’t just pray about bread. In fact, in our culture, we probably rarely pray about actual bread, but we have needs and we pray about those. We petition God to provide what we need. Here’s something to note about this prayer, though. As one author put it, it’s about “our needs, not our greeds” (Carson, “Matthew,” Expositor’s Bible Commentary, Vol. 8, pg. 171). Or, someone else said it’s for bread, not cake (cf. Bailey 122). It’s for what we need, not necessarily what we want. And it’s communal. In other words, Jesus doesn’t say, “Give me today my daily bread.” No, he says, “Give us today our daily bread.” In an increasingly individualistic culture, we need to remember that. We need to hear that.

Saint Teresa of Calcutta recalled an incident where an older man came to her mission and said he knew of a family with eight children who had not eaten in several days. Could she do something for them? So Teresa gathered up some rice and went to the home. When she arrived and offered the rice to the mother, the mother gratefully received the gift, divided it in half and went out the door. When the mother came back, Teresa asked where she had gone, and the mother pointed toward the neighbors’ house saying, “They are hungry also.” In the midst of her own suffering, the mother was concerned about her neighbors (Bailey 122). It’s about we, not me.

So what should we pray for? Jesus gives us permission to pray for anything, to ask for anything, but it’s all still in the context of the coming of God’s kingdom. What God wants matters more than my own plans or even our group plans. (Which leads to the old proverb, “If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.”) So that, then, brings us to the question of “unanswered” prayer and the even bigger question: is everything that happens “God’s will”?

Many of you know that at age seventeen, as I prepared to attend Ball State, I had to have a physical and that’s when they first discovered my heart “insufficiency.” Just what a teenage boy wants to hear: you’re insufficient! When the doctor told me what was going on, we took it to our local church and the godliest woman I have ever known laid her hands on me and prayed for me. I mean, I used to say that when Esther talked, God listened! And Esther prayed for my healing, and we believed the heart issue would go away. Except it didn’t. When I went back to the doctor, it was still there, and for many years after, I had annual visits to the cardiologist to monitor it until the time came to replace the faulty valve. That was in 1999, and I had a procedure that, I was told, would last 25 years. Imagine my surprise, then, in 2017, when I went to a new cardiologist here in Terre Haute and I was told that the valve would need to be replaced again. Wait a minute—I still have 7 years left on this one! And so we prayed, but surgery still happened, surgery that was much more serious than the first time and much more dangerous than we knew at the time. That doctor saved my life by finding the problem this time. And I’m praying now that I never have to go through that again because the second recovery was much harder than the first. Now, do I believe God can heal? Yes, absolutely! I’ve experienced it and seen it happen. So why didn’t God heal my heart when we asked?

Here’s my deeply theological answer to that question. After over thirty years of thought and prayer on the subject, I can truthfully say: I don’t know. Why does God heal one person and not another? I don’t know, but it does bring me back to that question: is everything that happens God’s will? We very often say that it is. We write horrible things off as “God’s will,” as if that’s somehow supposed to make it better. Is everything that happens God’s will? Well, you may be ready to run me off this morning, but I beg you to hear me out when I say I don’t believe everything that happens is God’s will. If it were, we would have to say that God is responsible for murdered babies, for human trafficking, for slavery and racial injustice, for all the wars that have plagued human history, for famines and genocide and plagues and coronaviruses. We’d have to say God directly caused all of those. Even the sort of justice God has planted in the human heart will tell us that if God is the sort of God who does things like that, he’s not worthy of worship. His name is not “hallowed.” If God does things like that to us, he is a cruel God indeed. And if he causes everything, then why bother praying at all, especially to a God like that?

Here’s the reality and the witness of Scripture: God does not cause everything to happen. God has given human beings free will, the ability to pray and to choose and even to choose wrongly, even to choose evil. We abuse that free will all the time. We do things that hurt others, that hurt our world, that hurt the human race. God does not cause everything—but he can and does use everything. The Israelites, wandering through the desert, had to wonder why they weren’t able to just go straight to the Promised Land, but God was using those years to shape and mold them into the people he wanted them to be. God uses everything. The prophet Joel saw an army of locusts coming that would destroy the crops and the land. It was a horrific event. But there’s that marvelous promise at the end of the chapter, where God tells them he will restore the years that the locusts have eaten (cf. Joel 2:25). Nothing will go to waste because God uses everything. And this Biblical promise culminates in the often-misquoted Romans 8:28, where Paul reminds us: “We know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.” There is nothing that happens that God can’t use, that he can’t bend to his will. So while not everything that happens is good and not everything that happens is God’s will, in the end, ultimately, God’s purpose will be carried out. That’s why we pray: “Your kingdom come, your will be done.” And that’s why we even do what we can to be answers to our own prayers.

So here’s what usually happens. Something bad takes place—sickness, accident, even death—and we say something to the person who is suffering like, “Well, it’s just God’s will.” Friends, it’s not a spiritual thing or a Christian thing to be indifferent when someone is suffering. We’re better off saying nothing than using trite phrases to try to comfort someone. I often say Job’s friends were at their best when they just sat with him in silence; they really messed up when they started trying to explain what was happening to him. They had no clue! They really didn’t know what was happening! They are the reason we can say it’s better to keep quiet and be thought a fool than to open our mouths and remove all doubt. Don’t blame God for the broken and hurting world. The brokenness, pain and grief breaks God’s heart as well, and while he could wipe it all away in an instant, that would remove our free will, and without the gift of choice, we couldn’t choose to love him either. Our calling, even when it seems as if our prayers are unanswered, is to keep praying, to intercede, to petition heaven for daily bread and for God’s kingdom to come. If our prayer is for God’s kingdom to come—well, that prayer will be answered, just maybe not in the way we think or in the time we think it ought to be.

So we pray, “Your kingdom come,” and in praying that we set aside our own kingdoms and our own plans and allow God’s kingdom to have first place in our lives. Not a kingdom we have created. Not a kingdom our favorite politician has designed. God’s kingdom is what matters above all else. And to continually remind us of that coming kingdom, Jesus gave us a meal, an enacted prayer. We call it holy communion, or the Lord’s supper, or the eucharist. What it really is a foretaste of the kingdom of God, a reminder that one day, when all the pain and tears and death and hurt are gone, we will feast at God’s table. This bread, this cup—they are reminders of what Jesus did so that we could spend eternity with him. They are reminders that we are children of the eternal God, and one day we will feast at the table with the King of the universe. This is not a silly little thing we do, or an odd action we take part in. This is a proclamation of the coming kingdom of God. This bread, this cup, they are reminders that our ultimate prayer will one day be answered in full: “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” (6:10).

Pause. Rejoice. Ask. Let’s prepare our hearts to pray and receive these radical reminders of God’s kingdom. Will you pray with me?