God never says “No” to the prayer of faith…
One of my favourite writers as far as his rhetorical approach (and a lot of his thoughts too) was G.K. Chesterton. One of his trademarks was to turn a common notion on its head. So I’m taking a page from his book(s) with the title here.
The first thing that needs to be said is that I’m not going “Word of Faith.” That was a group that claimed that whenever you claimed something in real faith, it happened. I was raised indie Pentecostal, and even I was never that extreme.
But there is nonetheless a real sense in which God never says “No” to the prayer of faith.
The basis of this claim lies in Luke 11.13, part of a passage I have been reflecting on again as I was due to preach on it today.
We’re reading along in this little story about the man asking his friend for bread at midnight and getting further details about the one asking receiving (now there’s a clue that I’m not out to lunch in my title, by the way), and so on….
And all of a sudden we get blindsided.
You evil people know how to give good gifts to your children – how much more will My heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him?
Now wait one cotton-pickin’ minute.
We were talking about the Holy Spirit? Weren’t we talking about bread?
And it’s a mistake to backtrack now and take all the preceding discussion to be metaphorical. Yes, I know that this little passage opens up with a sort of parable. But it’s part of a larger passage in which we are indeed told to pray for “our daily bread.”
There are a couple of layers to what Jesus is doing here.
First of all, in the first part of the chapter, He teaches His disciples the content of prayer, but in vv 5-13, the focus has moved on more to the how - the manner. And we can certainly see from Romans 8 that it is the Spirit that teaches us how to pray, and indeed, intercedes on our behalf, because our praying is in fact inadequate. And so even in our prayer for bread, the Father sends the Spirit so we can pray rightly.
But there is even more here than that, and as noted, we saw a hint already: those who ask receive, those who seek find, those who knock have the door opened to them.
And we say, “Really?” Because it often seems it isn’t so.
For my Facebook status, I put up the title of this post as a thought, and my friend Brian said: But God said “No” to Jesus Himself in Gethsemane.
And that is a good starting point for our reflection.
We could say that Jesus is unique. For, as the traditional Reformed communion liturgy says, Jesus was abandoned so that we may never be. In that sense, Jesus’ prayer could not be answered in order that ours always will be.
But there is even more in Jesus’ case. For God did answer Jesus in Gethsemane in the terms Jesus frames things Himself here in Luke 11.13.
The point is that when we pray, whatever we pray for – yes, when we pray for our daily bread – we are in fact at bottom praying for the Holy Spirit. The plea for bread is part of the plea of the coming kingdom (cf vv 2-4), and the Spirit is the earnest (down payment) of that inheritance. Even when He declines to fulfill many of the specifics of our prayers, God never simply answers with “No.” That would be a contradiction to Jesus’ promise that those who ask will (not may) receive.
Even as God answered Jesus’ prayer in Gethsemane via equipping by the Spirit through an angel, God always answers our prayers of faith. Even when we do not see the specific thing we requested, we do receive – again – the Spirit.
And that, I think, is a very great encouragement. If we focus on the specific request we have made, we will start to feel that often God really doesn’t answer our prayers, after all – or at least, not reliably. But when we see the way Jesus has developed the nature of prayer in Luke 11, we are encouraged to pray, because we know that it is never wasted, never unanswered, that the one basic good will always be given to us.
And thus, God never says “No” to the prayer of faith.
Tags: prayer