And I tell you, ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened. What father among you, if his son asks for a fish, will instead of a fish give him a serpent; or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!” -- Luke 11:9-13
It seems like a good day to talk about prayer given the situation among us this week. Let us
begin at the bottom.
There are many tales and not a few jokes regarding what we
might call the “three wishes” problem.
The one that comes to mind, after one about the mermaid best forgotten,
finds three men marooned on a desert island.
A bottle washes ashore. The men
open it to release a genie that is, of course, willing to pay for freedom at
the usual and customary Djinn Union rate -- three wishes, which, happily, can
be divided equally among the desperate sojourners. The first wisher asks to be whisked off to
his home in New York City, and, in a flash, he is gone to reunite with his
family and friends and head off for beer and pizza. The second asks to go to San Francisco with
the same result. The third man looks
wistfully about and says, “I wish my two friends were back here.”
Unlike jinn, mermaids, Shakespearean witches, et al, God
responds to us as a loving and all-knowing Father. A more appropriate depiction is the “Old Man”,
Darren McGavin’s character, from A Christmas
Story, watching in delighted and rapt communion with his son as he receives
his sought-after gift, even vicariously mimicking Ralphie’s movements as he
loads the Red Ryder. The Lord is no
Coyote trickster. There is no
bait-and-switch, only, perhaps, a delay or a deferment to enhance the longing,
to solidify and consolidate our desires, to make our joy and rejoicing sharper
and sweeter. “Delight yourself in the
Lord,” the Psalmist reminds us, “and He will give you the desires of your
heart.” We get, as we noted before, not
what we say, but who we are.
This leads us to the necessity of importunity. Prayer changes us. It strips away our facades, our agendas, and
our illusions. It is the very act of
asking and asking and asking, seeking and seeking and seeking, knocking and
knocking and knocking that transforms us from selfish to self-less. Next time you watch The Searchers consider how the characters start out and how they
end. What is it that causes that change
except the seeking -- day after day, season after season, and year after
year. Debbie changes, becomes another
person, but, in the end, she is that which has been sought all along. The ends and motivations change, from rescue
to revenge to restoration and redemption.
Like the vanes on an arrow shaft, persistent prayer gives us stability and gets us on target. Sin, is, after all, missing the mark.
I have before mentioned answered prayers for temporal,
material needs and situations. The thing
I notice, looking back, is that those answers only appeared to be
material. Each one that I can recall –
and probably more that I cannot -- was like the creation of another chamber in
the outward spiraling shell of the nautilus.
God’s responses to our prayers
have eternal consequences, no matter how small or large the issue appears to be
because those answers move us toward maturity – sometimes called in the Bible “perfection”
-- that last chamber in the shell that is “the measure of the stature of Christ”.
Sometimes, as we pray, we will get an answer. I cannot describe that experience. It may be an overwhelming sense of peace, a
vision, a phrase, the proverbial still, small voice, a dream, a fragment out of
a conversation, a verse in the Bible lighting up like a neon sign, or any
number of other possibilities – I don’t know.
You will know it when it happens.
The old-timers called this “praying through”. They would simply not stop until it happened,
until they heard “yes” or “no” or, maybe, “no, not now.” More than forty years ago, I knew a boy who
was bleeding to death in the aftermath of a violent incident. An old preacher was on his knees some fifty
miles from the hospital praying, over and over, a verse from Ezekiel. Sometime in the darkness after midnight, the
old man stopped. No phone calls were
made back in those days, but he knew the bleeding had ceased, noted the hour in
the margin of his Bible and went to sleep.
Other times, we have no choice other than to get up and
keeping going, not knowing for certain, but believing and constantly
praying. The answer is such that it may
come only by degrees, little by little, strangely shrouded in mist and fog. We may be set free from a bad habit or a
besetting sin in a moment. Often,
though, it is like bush-hogging sprouts.
We just keep knocking them down until the buried root has exhausted its
vitality and can no longer generate above-ground growth. Even then, it is a good idea to have that
ground sown thickly with good seed to smother and break down what lies
beneath.
Prayers to surrender our lives to Christ, to be filled with
the Spirit, to walk in obedience and humility are always – at least, in my
experience – of the “ask and keep on asking” variation. It may become almost an unconscious thing for
the more saintly among us, but I cannot see that it stops this side of the
grave. Since I am still dragging this
shell around, I must assume that there is yet another chamber to enter, one
more rung on that ever-upward, ever-larger spiraling stairway. There will be another work for us to do, that
we could only do from that place and that position.
And we will find that to do it, we must pray.
