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07.20.08

16th Sunday in Ordinary Time

If-Then Prayer

Genesis 28:10-22; Luke 11:9-13

• The Effectiveness of Prayer
• Low Expectations
• What do you expect to happen when you pray?
• As Christians, we say we believe in the power of prayer
• “The prayer of faith is powerful and effective,” says the writer of the book of James (5:15), but do you really believe that?
• How often have you gotten an answer to prayer exactly the way you prayed for it?
• How often have you gotten an answer that was different from what you asked for or expected?
• And how often does it seem you get no answer at all?
• So, again I ask, what do you expect to happen when you pray?
• It’s been my experience that most people approach the subject of prayer with one of two expectations
• Some people truly believe that prayer is wasted effort, and therefore, there’s no reason to pray
• Either they don’t believe in God—so it’s useless to pray because there is no God to pray to
• Or they believe that God exists, but doesn’t care what happens to us—so why bother praying to a God who doesn’t care about me?
• Or they believe that prayer has no influence on what God does—so it’s senseless to pray to a God who’s going to do whatever God wants to do
• For this latter group of people—those who believe that prayer has no influence on God—the words, “Thy will be done” are often used as a cry of resignation
• It’s their declaration that they believe that they have absolutely no control over anything that happens to them
• When good things happen to them, they mark it up to good luck or coincidence, and when bad things happen, they believe they’re justified in blaming God
• Great Expectations
• The second expectation that I’ve found is the exact opposite of the first
• Some people (and I find it especially true in new believers, although it’s common among those who have been around the faith for a long time as well) approach prayer with the expectation that everything will instantly get better because they’ve prayed
• A difficult situation will instantly disappear, the job they’ve been hoping for will come through, the sick person they love will instantly get better, and even the loved one who has died will be instantly be raised back to life again
• For them, prayer is like a magic wand that, when waved, will instantly change the circumstances they’re in
• The reality is that magic wands only work in fairy tales and for magicians who are skilled in the art of deception
• Little do they realize that the power of prayer is greater than the power of magic because the power of prayer is the power of God, and the power of God is greater than any magician’s sleight of hand
• Or they look at prayer as something like Aladdin’s lamp, which they can rub to instantly get their wishes granted
• But the purpose of prayer is not for granting wishes or for getting us out of a bad situation
• It’s not for satisfying our desires, it’s for attuning our desires with the desires of God
• When they discover that the magic wand or Aladdin’s lamp doesn’t work, quite often they lose their faith, not only in the power of prayer, but also in the power of God
• Bargaining Prayer
• Lest we be too hard on those who have no faith at all or whose faith is weak, or those who are overly zealous because they’re young in their faith, we must also consider that there’s another ploy many of us use in our prayers
• Although we’ve been around the faith long enough to know that God does answer prayer (although not always in the manner we desire), and that we can’t instantly expect to get everything we want from God when we come to God in prayer, we still have a particular expectation that we use when we approach God in prayer
• That expectation is what I call the bargaining prayer or the “If-Then” prayer
• In this approach to prayer, what we do, in essence, is seek to make a contract with God
• Any of us who have ever been employed or have had employees of our own are familiar with how a contract works
• Contracts are loaded with “if-then” language
• If the actual words “if-then” don’t appear in the contract, they’re there by implication
• In its most simple format, a contract states that if an employee does certain things in relation to his/her employment, then that employee will receive certain compensation for the services performed
• Each side in the contractual relationship agrees to certain conditions and the contract is honored when the conditions are met
• As we use this model in relationship to our prayer life, we often use it in reverse, however
• Rather than seeing God as the initiator of the contract and the one for whom cervices are performed,  we see ourselves in the position of power and seek to get God to serve us
• The language of these prayers often goes like this: “God, if you get me out of the mess I’ve gotten myself into, then I promise I’ll be in church every Sunday for the rest of my life.”
• Or, “God, if you let me win that big lottery jackpot, I’ll give some of that money to the church.”
• I think we’ve all been in a position where we’ve tried to bargain with God, so I’m sure that you can fit the “if-then” language of bargaining prayers to many of your own life situations
• The problem with this kind of prayer is that rarely do we live up to the contract we’ve made with God
• Our basic attitude is that contracts are made to be broken
• We sign a contract for a particular job, knowing full well what the expectations are, but once the contract is signed and we begin receiving the paychecks, we find as many ways as possible to do as little of the work as possible that we agreed to do
• If we do it in our employment, or in our rental agreement, and even in our marriages, why do we think we will act any differently when we seek to make a bargain with God
• Somehow, we miraculously get out of the mess we’ve created, but our life doesn’t change one iota—we continue to put ourselves in the same difficult situations again
• Surprisingly, we do win the jackpot in that big lottery drawing, but the money is all spent before we even have the check in hand, and it doesn’t include that big check to the church that we promised to give
• The contracts we make with God are good only for the moment, and once we get what we want from God, we’re satisfied—we conveniently forget our part of the bargain
• We’re always looking for what God can do for us, but we have little concern about what we can do for God
• Contract vs. Covenant
• God’s Covenant with Jacob
• Consider the story of Jacob
• While Jacob was the grandson of Abraham and the son of Isaac, both of whom were faithful men, Jacob himself was not a person of faith at first
• His grandfather Abraham responded without question when God called him to leave his homeland for a place unknown with nothing more than the promise of God that he would become the father of a great nation
• Isaac was the son given to Abraham and Sarah through a miraculous conception, who was spared from being offered as a sacrifice to God through God’s provision of a ram to be offered in his place
• But for some reason, Jacob didn’t inherit the kind of faith that either his father or his grandfather had
• The picture we have of Jacob is that he was a crafty, conniving, deceptive person, out to get all that he could for himself by whatever means he could attain it
• He bargained with his twin brother Esau to gain the birthright that Esau was entitled to since Esau was the elder of Isaac’s two sons, and he tricked his blind, dying father into giving him the blessing that rightly belonged to Esau as well
• In fact, the only time we hear Jacob speak the name of God prior to the story we’ve read this morning was when he was in the process of deceiving his dying father
• When he brought his father the meal Rebekah had prepared, Isaac asked Jacob (presuming he was Esau) “How did you find it so quickly, my son?” to which Jacob (pretending to be Esau) replied, “The Lord your God gave me success.”
• As we pick up Jacob’s story here, Jacob if fleeing from his brother Esau in fear of his life
• So to say that Jacob was surprised to have an encounter with God in this place after all the things Jacob had done is an understatement
• Jacob wasn’t in the habit of thinking about God, so he was amazed that God would express any kind of concern or care for him
• In this vision Jacob had while he slept on a rock at this place called Beth-el (the house of God), God made a covenant with Jacob, and in that covenant God declared all that God would do for him (vs. 13-15)
• A covenant is not the same thing as a contract
• A covenant doesn’t contain any of the “if-then” language that a contract does
• Notice that the words “if” and “then” never appear in the words that God spoke to Jacob
• In that dream, God declared to Jacob all the things God would do for him, and there were no strings attached
• When God makes a promise, God is faithful to keep it
• But we also have to notice Jacob’s reaction to this dream as well
• He sets up his stone pillow as a monument to God because he recognizes that God encountered him in that place, but that setting up of this monument was, by no means, a declaration of Jacob’s faith in God
• Jacob’s true reaction is found in his own words as he reflects upon his dream
• “If God will be with me and watch over me…If God will provide me with food and clothes…If God brings me safely back to my father’s home…Then the Lord will be my God.”
• Only if God proved himself first would Jacob take that step of faith and trust his life to the Lord
• Jacob only wanted from God those things that would benefit him without making the commitment of offering his life in service to God
• This is exactly what we do when we try to negotiate with God
• We want to reap all the blessings and benefits that God has to give without accepting the responsibility for faithful living and service that God desires and deserves
• Jesus’ Teaching on Prayer
• Jesus’ teaching on prayer shows us what the true purpose of prayer is and what our motivation for prayer ought to be
• The purpose of prayer is not to get all that we can get from God, to try to bargain with God, or to seek to change God’s mind about anything
• The purpose of prayer is to change us, not to change God—to change our heart of selfishness into a heart of love, and to change our desire to have God do our will into a desire that we might do God’s will
• And the motivation for prayer, then, ought to be, not to seek all the things we can get from God, but to seek the fullness of God’s Spirit in our lives
• That’s what God desires most to give us
• It’s that Spirit that helps keep us from being selfish in our prayers and that enables us to want what God wants to give us rather than what we want for ourselves
• Several years ago, while I was serving as a hospice chaplain, I counseled with a woman whose mother had recently died
• She was angry at God for allowing he mother to suffer so during the last months of her life, and angry at the church because her priest was unsympathetic during her mother’s long illness
• During our conversation, she said to me that she even felt that prayer was useless, although she was once a great believer in prayer
• I shared with her the story of my cancer and told her about all the prayers that were offered by Janie and my family, by friends and neighbors, by people in churches across the country who were complete strangers to me, and how I felt those prayers helped me survive
• After I finished my story, she sat quiet for a moment then asked me a very pointed question: “Do you think all those prayers changed God’s mind in any way?”
• My response to her was this: “I can’t say whether they changed God’s mind in any way, but they changed me.  They gave me the strength to deal with my illness, and they gave me the faith to believe that whatever happened, God would continue to take care of me and those I love.”
• Jesus encourages us to pray, with the promise that what we ask for we will receive, what we seek we will find, and that when we knock on the door of heaven, it will be opened to us
• But this doesn’t give us carte blanche to ask for whatever we want with the expectation that we’ll get it, nor does it give us the right to seek to bargain with God
• The purpose of prayer is to change us so that we might receive a fuller blessing of God’s Spirit in our life and a greater awareness of God’s love and grace in all things
• Our prayers are to help us, not to help God
• They aren’t to win God over to our side or to push him to do something we want because God already knows what we want
• But we are shaped and molded by what we ask of God, so we should ask for God’s Spirit so that we can become a person who is guided by that Spirit
• That’s a hard thing to do, so perhaps its best that we simply be honest with God
• “Lord, I really don’t want to turn my life over to you.  I want to do my will and not yours.  That’s who I am but that’s not who I am content to be.  Please help me to want your Spirit within me.”
• A prayer that says to God, “I want what I want but help me to want what you want” is a good place for us to start
• From there, God will move us forward and help us to experience the fullness of joy that comes with seeking to serve the Lord