Spirituality Column #770

August 17, 2021

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

The Odd Grace of Prayer

By Bob Walters

“Be still, and know that I am God.” – Psalm 46:10

Prayer doesn’t tell God anything He doesn’t already know – not about a situation, the person praying, a human heart, or the eventual outcome.  The educated party to be – the one who is to be informed, shaped, and changed in prayer – is the one praying.

Yes, talk to God.  Spill your heart, guts, love, or rage.  Then be prepared to listen.

Prayer is where we discover 1. our relationship with God, 2. on a good day, discern the will of God, and 3. on our very best days, call down the action of God.

On any day, our best prayer outcome is when it reveals and nurtures our growing and abiding closeness to, trust in, and love of God.  Great prayer is where we shelter in God, not blame Him or beg Him. 

Prayer isn’t where we tell God what we want done, how He should proceed, who He should save, who He should condemn, or what He needs to do to get our approval of His actions so we will call Him righteous.  That kind of prayer is folly; God is already righteous.  Good and evil are whatever God says they are, and quite often humans don’t look in the most obvious place to discover what God is really thinking: in their own hearts.  We don’t see the long game; God does.  His promises and righteousness are eternal.

Thus, “God Is Good All the Time” is a fine truism, but tyrannically so.  Was God “good” when He removed his protection from Job and allowed Satan’s torments?  Was God “good” when he demanded Abraham sacrifice Isaac?  Was God “good” when His Son Jesus hanged mercilessly on the Cross?  Is God good when the most heinous and heartbreaking human injustices, crimes, diseases, dissensions, and accidents befall our paths today?

That’s the tyrannical part: we wonder – we demand! – why God would allow awful things when we think He should only provide good things.  But the fact is, it is our human freedom, aspiration, fear, pride, greed or a number of any other “human conditions” that Satan uses to mask and corrupt our view of God’s ultimate goodness and purpose.  Not the least of our difficulties being our and the world’s general fallenness … since Eden.

What Job, Abraham, and Isaac discovered after trials, what Jesus taught in His trials, and what we must trust in our trials, is that our faith and relationship with God is purified in these trials. Come out the other end of a life trial in faith, and our relationship with God will be strengthened beyond what we could imagine.  Think how Job grew in the Lord.  

God’s goodness and grace are always there, and our first clue that they are is the sacrifice of Jesus Christ.  We have the freedom to pursue our own agenda, but our true joy and abiding perseverance is only going to come by Christ’s great commandments: that we are to love God and love others.  We think life is about “me.” No, it is about God’s glory.

The greatest and most common self-inflicted wound in all humanity is to ignore the grace of God, and to not see it, expect it, and trust it in every situation.  We are the ones who make a hash of assessing God’s goodness; we are the ones who deny Jesus.  

Now … do I think some people have a special pipeline to God?  Mysteriously, yes.  Of course.  Absolutely.  Can God surprise any of us with a tangible, spiritual, discernible response to prayer?  Praise God, yes.  Must we trust God regardless?  Yes, then listen.

It’s among the oddest of God’s graces, but it is in our humility before God that we find our greatest joys and strengths. That is the peace that passes all understanding.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) prays boldly but understands he’s the one being judged.