19 Jul Doubts about Prayer: You’re Not Doing it Right. He Can’t. He Doesn’t Want to.

“Ok, let’s pray this afternoon.” I clicked send on my text and hopped in the shower, my mind whirring. Looking ahead to our prayer date, anxious thoughts began to assail me. “What if nothing changes? What if it gets worse after we pray? What if the accompanying ailments don’t go away? What if we don’t pray for the right things?” Apart from the blissful ten minutes alone, I usually do my very best thinking in the shower. Today was no exception as the Lord graciously revealed three fundamental doubts I was harboring about prayer.

As my mind tilted toward a downward doubting spiral, a little nudge from the Holy Spirit reminded me that the God who created the heavens and the earth remains on his throne. My prayers are simply his gracious invitation to be part of the good work that he is already doing. My effort in prayer does not change outcomes; God changes outcomes. Prayer is a lavish invitation to partner with God and see his hand at work through the intimacy of asking. Our prayers are the entry point to communion with him. While he wants us to bring our specific requests to him in prayer, the meeting of our needs is just the beginning. The true heart of prayer is a deeper relationship with the One whom my heart was created to love. We may think that getting what we need is the point of prayer, but as we go deeper in and higher up in our faith, we learn that he is the prize. As the Lord kindly relieved me of my brief delusion of grandeur, I dissected my thought process. Why did the opportunity to pray for a friend in a difficult situation cause me anxiety instead of joy?

My anxious thoughts were undergirded by three fundamental yet subtle doubts:

You’re not doing it right.

Prayer is complex, mysterious, and wondrous, a bit like the majestically wonderful God we serve. As finite humans, we long to control the world around us, to make things safer or more predictable. That’s why I so desperately want there to be a “right” way to pray. If there’s a “right” way to pray, I can master it. I can achieve predictable outcomes. If there’s a “right” way to pray, that means there’s also a “wrong” way to pray and my lack of knowledge can get in the way of the Almighty. But the God we serve doesn’t perform based on our rote incantations, and he refuses to remain in the box in which we’re tempted to place him. Believing that “I’m not doing it right” and thus my prayers will not be answered makes prayer about me-my knowledge, my abilities. Believing the lie that it’s possible for me to pray the “wrong” way puts the control squarely in my court, a place it was never intended to rest. God is utterly other, incomprehensible, infinite, and magnificently powerful. He is absolutely faithful to his character and his promises, but he’s not about to jump like a monkey when we say the magic word. While the Bible gives us a wealth of wisdom on prayer and plenty of instruction, there is no formula for a “right” way to pray. The Lord’s Prayer in Matthew 6 teaches us how to pray like Jesus, and elsewhere in Scripture we are exhorted to pray fervently and without ceasing. I need to study what the Bible says about prayer, but for goodness’ sakes, I need to ditch the notion that “I’m not doing it right.” This sentiment is a distraction at best, and an insidious lie about how God works at worst. The important thing is to keep praying!

He can’t.

Those irksome whispers, “Are you sure? It doesn’t usually work like that. That seems dramatic.” are thinly veiled jabs at the ability of the Almighty to intervene definitively and miraculously in our circumstances. The God-given vehicle for asking is prayer, and Jesus himself tells us to “believe and do not doubt” when we pray. In Ephesians, Paul urges us to remember that God can do “exceedingly, abundantly more than all we can ask or imagine.” That’s some strong language. God is omnipotent; nothing too hard for him. Whatever we can imagine, he can do more. If that’s the kind of God we serve, I have no business entertaining the notion that my seemingly insurmountable circumstances are outside the scope of his power.

He doesn’t want to.

If there’s not an explicit “right” way to pray, and our God can do exceedingly, abundantly more than we can ask or imagine, we confront our very worst fear of all: God doesn’t want to help us. He can help us, but he won’t. This last doubt casts the most horrible of all aspersions on our Heavenly Father, for it paints him as a cruel and unfeeling God, a God who is not moved by our plight, a God who is not trustworthy. Illustrious tomes written by brilliant minds have been devoted to this subject, yet this deep-rooted fear about God’s character persists from generation to generation. The “why do bad things happen to good people” and “why didn’t God heal or save or spare that person” all fall under the umbrella of struggling with the belief that God is really good. If we pray with the mindset that God doesn’t want to help or heal or provide, we’re believing that we can’t trust God to take care of us. An untrustworthy God is not a good God.

So why do we have such a hard time believing that God is good? I think it’s precisely because there is no exact formula for prayer that we struggle with believing God is good. When we pray, things often do not work out exactly as we’d like. Timing is difficult, or the answer to our prayers is not the one for which we’d asked. We frequently encounter loss, pain, or inexplicable anguish. We live in a broken, fallen world. We serve a God who allows us to experience suffering, but who promises to one day make all things new. The temptation, then, is to quit asking specifically in prayer to protect ourselves from disappointment. Or even, perhaps, to give up praying altogether. If I petition specifically and fervently for the Lord to help me and the answer is hardship, or he appears deaf to my requests, questioning his goodness seems unavoidable. Indeed, sometimes it feels much safer to forgo asking than to risk disappointment.

This place of confusion is exactly where the enemy would like to keep us, for a church that does not pray is no threat to Satan’s dominion. Prayer is the way in which God has chosen to commune with us, whether we like it or not. Prayer requires faith, which is being sure of what we hope for, and certain of what we do not see. When I try to look at prayer through the lens of my own construct of reality, these questions about prayer will always seem irreconcilable. But God is not bound by time or space or my finite human limitations. What does not seem good to me may actually be his kindness. He is good because his Word says he is good, and his Word is true. He invites me to ask, and I can trust that invitation even when it seems like nothing is happening the way it should.

I continue to wrestle with these questions before the Lord because I know he is not afraid of my doubt. I often call to mind a phrase from a sermon on Job, “Sometimes we do not have all the answers, but we must remember that he is God and we are not.” Since he is God and I am not, I will continue to persist in prayer and cast away my doubts, remembering the promise of 1 Corinthians 13:12 “ For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.”