Prayer in God's Will

Professor Craig Keener shares the following story in an issue of CT magazine:

Around 1960, in the Republic of Congo, a two-year-old girl named Thérèse was bitten by a snake. She cried out for help, but by the time her mother, Antoinette, reached her, Thérèse was unresponsive and seemed to have stopped breathing. No medical help was available to them in their village, so Antoinette strapped little Thérèse to her back and ran to a neighboring village.

According to the US National Library of Medicine, brain cells start dying less than five minutes after their oxygen supply is removed. After six minutes, lack of oxygen can cause severe brain damage or death. Antoinette estimates that, given the distance and the terrain, it probably took about three hours to reach the next village. By the time they arrived, her daughter was likely either dead or had sustained significant brain damage.

Antoinette immediately sought out a family friend, Coco Ngoma Moyise, who was an evangelist in the neighboring village. They prayed over the lifeless girl and immediately she started breathing again. By the next day, she was fine—no long-term harm and no brain damage. Today, Thérèse has a master’s degree and is a pastor in Congo.

Craig writes, “When I heard this story, as a Westerner I was naturally tempted toward skepticism, but it was hard to deny. Thérèse is my sister-in-law and Antoinette was my mother-in-law.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

Not every claim to a miraculous raising today is authentic. Everywhere in the world, most people who die stay dead. Even those resuscitated miraculously, such as Lazarus, die again; all healing in our mortal bodies is by definition temporary. Such miracles do, however, remind us that Jesus Christ, who raised the dead during his earthly ministry, is the risen and exalted Lord. Sometimes he continues to grant signs of the future, reminders of the resurrection hope that in him awaits us all.

In 2014, Steve Stamkos was looking forward to representing his country at the Sochi Olympic games. Sports analysts reported the importance of his role, so all of Canada was counting on him too. Everyone was concerned when Stamkos had fractured his right tibia in November of the previous year.

Doctors inserted a titanium rod to promote healing and stability. And as the date for the games approached, sports analysts reported that physical therapists had instituted a targeted regiment to speed up the healing. But by early February it became clear, Stamkos would not be ready in time.

In a statement Stamkos said: "(This) is obviously very disappointing for me. I honestly believe we did everything possible in order to have my injured leg ready in time for the Olympics, but I realize you can't force healing."

Possible Preaching Angle:

Sometimes, despite our best prayers, our best efforts, healing does not come. God has other plans. You can’t force the healing; you can't force the healer.

Fran Tarkenton, a former All-Pro quarterback who led his team to three Super Bowls, wrote an article for The Wall Street Journal lambasting himself and other athletes for their shallow prayers. Tarkenton wrote:

My forays into hoping for divine intervention didn't work out. I prayed fervently before each of the three Super Bowls we Minnesota Vikings played in. We played against the Dolphins, the Steelers, and the Raiders … I was sure God would be on our side for the game against the Raiders! After all, they were the villains of the league, and it was hard to believe they had more Christians on their team than on our saintly Vikings. We lost.

Before every game, no matter what team I was on at the time, the coach would always ask the most devout player to say a prayer. This would happen after we'd already been out warming up—so we'd all seen the crowd, we were in full uniform (complete with eye black doubling as war paint), and the intensity of the week had built up to a near frenzy in the locker room … [Then] after this moment of devotion, the team would all shout in unison, "Now let's go kill those S.O.B.'s!"

A poll conducted by LifeWay Research found that many of us are very picky about who we will pray for. For instance, the poll revealed that we typically pray for …

• Family and friends 82 percent of the time
• Our own problems and difficulties 74 percent of the time
• Our enemies 37 percent of the time
• Government leaders 12 percent of the time.

Strangely enough, 36 percent of survey participants said they typically pray for financial prosperity, 21 pray to win the lottery, and 13 percent typically pray for their favorite sports team to win.

Putti Sok told her Christian college friends, "Leave me alone and quit praying for me." Putti described herself as a "Cambodian Buddhist girl," even though she was born in Long Beach, California and grew up in Dallas. "I figured I was Buddhist because my parents told me I was Buddhist," she said. "I thought Christianity was just a religion for Americans." Eventually Putti came to consider herself "an evangelistic atheist," challenging others to prove that God exists.

When Putti started her college education at the University of Texas in 2008, one of her goals was to build deep relationships. She succeeded in that, but some of her new friends were Christians who were active in a student ministry. During her sophomore year, Putti "hit a wall." "I began to see that everything I was doing was becoming meaningless," she said. "If what I was doing didn't have eternal meaning, then it was all in vain." She began to think, "If God is real, he should be able to hear my prayers." Each night she began to pray that he would help her understand what she had been hearing from her friends because it seemed like foolishness to her.

Then one day Putti entered a closet in the student ministry building that had been turned into a prayer room. Inside she found a bowl filled with pieces of paper with the names of students' friends. One after another she looked at the slips of paper and found her own name written on the slips.

She knew how strongly she had urged her friends not to pray for her and yet they had faithfully loved her and prayed for her anyway. She burst into tears that day in the tiny prayer room. "God was softening my heart then," she said. The next night she felt that God was asking her for a specific response, so she finally prayed to receive Christ.

"All of a sudden, I had a desire to go and share with people," she said. "God is real, and he has changed my heart." Putti is currently studying in preparation for full time ministry.

Tim Keller, reflecting on the passage, "Don't be anxious but make requests to God with thanksgiving", writes that, "We would expect Paul to say first you make your requests to God and then, you thank him for the answers. But that is not what Paul says." Keller then illustrates his point with a story from his early twenties:

I prayed for an entire year about a girl I was dating and wanted to marry, but she wanted out of the relationship. All year I prayed, "Lord, don't let her break up with me." Of course, in hindsight, it was the wrong girl. I actually did what I could to help God with the prayer, because one summer, near the end of the relationship, I got in a location that made it easier to see her. I was saying, "Lord, I am making this as easy as possible for you. I have asked you for this, and I have even taken the geographical distance away." But as I look back, God was saying, "Son, when a child of mine makes a request, I always give that person what he or she would have asked for if they knew everything I know" [emphasis PreachingToday.com].

In 2011, a South African pastor and seasoned marathoner nicknamed "JVR" decided to run 100 miles with three other running mates as a means for recruiting 100 child sponsors for World Vision. The plan was to do the last 26.2 miles of their 100 mile goal at the Chicago Marathon that year. During the night, JVR started to show signs of fatigue. He wasn't keeping up, and unbeknown to him or his teammates, his kidneys were starting to shut down.

JVR finished the race, as did his other three running partners, but by the time he made it to the team's tent after the marathon, he was in trouble. Medics took him to the hospital where he spent the next two weeks in intensive care, his body struggling to recover from the stress it had experienced. JVR survived, but he admits that doing extreme challenges, even in the name of a great cause, may not always be worth it. Considering how the marathon was born—legend says the Greek messenger Pheidippides ran 26.2 miles from Marathon to Athens to deliver an important note, then collapsed and died—raising the stakes just to raise more money should not be attempted lightly.

After the race JVR admitted, "A lot of me doing the 100 miles was about wanting to achieve. I am addicted to performance. When I meet God, he'll probably say, 'What were you thinking? I never asked you to do that.'" Though JVR still runs marathons, he's learned to first ask God, "What is it that you want me to do, Lord? What role do you want to play in this part of my life? I want to ask God first before saying, 'I did all these things for a great cause. I ran all these races.'"

In the fall of 2000, doctors diagnosed Pastor Ed Dobson with ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease), an incurable and fatal disease. The doctors gave him two to five years to live and predicted that he would spend most of that time in a disabled condition.

Shortly after he was diagnosed, Ed wanted someone to anoint him with oil and pray for healing. And he wanted someone to pray who really believed in healing. So Ed invited a friend, a Pentecostal pastor who had regular healing services, to come over and pray for him. Here's how Ed described what happened:

It was one of the most moving evenings of my entire life. He began by telling stories of people he had prayed for who were miraculously healed. He also told stories about people he had prayed for who were not healed and had passed away, receiving that ultimate and final healing. Before he prayed for me he gave me some advice.

"Don't become obsessed with getting healed, Ed," he said. "If you get obsessed [with getting healed], you will lose your focus. Get lost in the wonder of God, and who knows what he will do for you."

This is some of the best advice I have ever received …. Since that night, I've been trying to get—and stay—lost in the wonder of God.

How does God respond to a Christian who asks for guidance? It all depends. There's a big difference between a Christian who has "irregular, discouraging slips into disobedience that are quickly repented of" and a Christian who persists in "blatant, unrepentant refusals to obey God." Consider the following illustration:

Suppose you wanted to sit down with the owner of the small company that you work for and get some career advice. Tuesday is your appointed meeting day. When Tuesday arrives, you are late. By an hour. For no good reason. The owner is agitated that he has been waiting for you, yet in general he considers you a wonderful employee. It is safe to say that before he would share his career advice with you, you should genuinely apologize for being late. Yet being late—as long as it comes with an apology—will not cause him to withhold his advice.

If on the other hand you are not a good employee and have been recklessly embezzling money from the company—and the owner knows it—you should not expect him to share career advice with you. The only advice you should expect from him is, "Stop stealing money and make restitution!" So it is with God. If we are to receive guidance from God, we must apologize for any disobedience currently in our lives, but habitual, unrepentant sin will render God silent except for one word: repent.

The following thoughts about the Lord's Prayer could also apply to any written prayer found in the Bible (such as the Psalms or the prayers in Paul's letters):

We are usually at a loss regarding what to say to God on behalf of another person or, alternatively, to God himself regarding the fulfillment of his purposes in the world. The Lord's Prayer frees us from the tyranny of spiritual creativity and allows us to rest in the confidence of something certain and true. Instead of fabricating something snappy to garner God's attention, Jesus would have us lose all such originality and simply plagiarize … at the [invitation] of the Lord himself.

Pastor Lee Eclov writes:

I was surprised to read a Facebook posting from a friend in South Dakota named Diane. She wrote, "Had a nice surprise last night. At about 10:30 p.m. the phone rang. It was Governor Mike Rounds checking in with us to see how the road repair was going." There had been a lot of flooding in the area where Diane lives, and the roads were a mess—and the governor actually called her to see how she felt about the repair progress.

When I wrote Diane to express my surprise, she said it wasn't the first time a governor had called her. Another time, some years ago, one of South Dakota's previous governors called about some FEMA money for the area. She told me that when the governor called she was in the middle of a home perm, but couldn't very well tell the governor to hold while she rinsed her hair. She added: "That frizzy hair haunted me for weeks."

I know that South Dakota is a small state, but this was incredible to me. I asked Diane if she was in county government or something, and she said she wasn't. Sensing I was blown away by her interactions with the government, she had this to say: "I have found that shaking the tree from the top gets the fastest results. When there is a problem, I usually become the 'squeaky wheel,' and I think they just want to get me off their case!"

My conversation with Diane made me think of the parable Jesus told in Luke 18:1-8—the one about the persistent widow and the judge who finally relented and granted her request. Jesus concluded: "And will not God bring about justice for his chosen ones, who cry out to him day and night? Will he keep putting them off? I tell you, he will see that they get justice, and quickly. However, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?"

The issue isn't whether God cares or is listening. The issue is whether we have faith enough to persist in "shaking the tree."

What is the use of praying if at the very moment of prayer, we have so little confidence in God that we are busy planning our own kind of answer to our prayer?

—Thomas Merton, Catholic writer and mystic (1915-1968)

If prayer stands as the place where God and human beings meet, then I must learn about prayer. Most of my struggles in the Christian life circle around the same two themes: why God doesn't act the way we want God to, and why I don't act the way God wants me to. Prayer is the precise point where those themes converge.

—Philip Yancey

Perhaps the cool, crisp air in Huancayo, Peru, should have signaled to our mission team that God was about to do something truly special.

The local Peruvians informed us that a strike was being organized by those who serve the nation's department of local transportation, and it might take place on the day our mission project was scheduled to begin. At best a strike would limit our work. Worse, it could put our team in danger. We would have to walk a mile to the mission site with potential threats lurking around every corner. Having heard the discouraging news, the men on the mission team decided to walk the streets of Huancayo and ask God for a miracle.

We walked, we prayed, and then we waited.

The next day, the strike did indeed take place across the entire country of Peru—everywhere except in Huancayo. God demonstrated his power in a miraculous, mysterious way. There was no other explanation except for the power of prayer. I couldn't help but remember the story of how the Lord protected his people from one of the plagues sent on the Egyptians. In Exodus 10:20-23, God draped a thick blanket of darkness over all the land of Egypt but shielded his people with light so they could move about freely. Thousands of years later, he made a way for a small missions team to move through Huancayo even though the transportation strike restricted everyone else in the country. I'll never forget the miracle in Peru. It's another clear and constant reminder that God works in amazing, unexpected ways all over the world.

Years ago, Dave Phillips and his wife, Lynn, had a talk about the callings they felt God was stirring in them. As they discussed what they were most passionate about, they agreed that bringing relief to suffering children and reaching the next generation with the gospel were at the top of the list. The thought of starting a relief agency was considered, but Dave's response was, "But that would mean I have to talk in front of people." By nature, Dave is a very quiet, behind-the-scenes man.

But after much prayer, Dave set aside his fears, and he and Lynn started Children's Hunger Fund out of their garage. Six weeks after CHF was launched, in January of 1992, he received a phone call from the director of a cancer treatment center in Honduras asking if there was any way he could obtain a certain drug for seven children who would die without it. Dave wrote down the name of the drug and told the director that he had no idea how to get this type of drug. They then prayed over the phone and asked God to provide.

As Dave hung up the phone, before he even let go of the receiver, the phone rang again. It was a pharmaceutical company in New Jersey asking Dave if he would have any use for 48,000 vials of that exact drug! Not only did they offer him eight million dollars' worth of this drug, but they told him they would airlift it anyplace in the world! Dave would later learn that the company was one of only two that manufactured this particular drug in the United States.

Within forty-eight hours, Dave had the drug sent to the treatment center in Honduras and to twenty other locations as well. It was then he believed that God was at work, validating his calling to this ministry.

Year after year, God continues to provide supernaturally.

Travel back 200 years in Christian history to John Newton, the slave-trader-turned-pastor and hymn writer. He would receive almost unbelievable answers to his prayers because he believed in what he called "large asking." When explaining what he meant, Newton would often cite a legendary story of a man who asked Alexander the Great to give him a huge sum of money in exchange for his daughter's hand in marriage. Alexander agreed, and told the man to request of Alexander's treasurer whatever he wanted. So, the father of the bride went and asked for an enormous amount. The treasurer was startled and said he could not give out that kind of money without a direct order. Going to Alexander, the treasurer argued that even a small fraction of the money requested would more than serve the purpose.

"No," replied Alexander, "let him have it all. I like that fellow. He does me honor. He treats me like a king and proves by what he asks that he believes me to be both rich and generous."

Newton concluded: "In the same way, we should go to the throne of God's grace and present petitions that express honorable views of the love, riches, and bounty of our King."

Emma Daniel Gray died on June 8, 2009, at the age of 95. There was a big story about her in the Washington Post because for 24 years she was the woman who cleaned the office of the President of the United States. She served six presidents till she retired in 1979. Her official title? Charwoman.

What made the story even more interesting was that Mrs. Gray was a devout Christian. She would stand and pray over the President's chair each time she dusted it—her cleaning supplies in one hand, the other on the chair. She'd pray for blessings, wisdom, and safety.

While reflecting on the way she lived life, her pastor said, "She saw life through the eyes of promise is the way I'd put it. You can always look around and find reasons to be [unhappy]…but you couldn't be around her and not know what she believed."

That is exactly what God's people do: see life through the eyes of promise—and pray accordingly.