Word of Encouragement (1/4/2021)

This year, we are calling our members to a life of prayer. We believe that the hardships and challenges we are facing are God-given opportunities for us to grow spiritually, especially in our prayer life. We all agree, I trust, that a good prayer life is vital to our Christian life and we can all grow in our prayer life. But why is it that so many of us have difficulty enjoying and benefiting from our prayer life?

I believe that one major reason is fear of disappointment—in God and in our faith. What if we pray hard and long and God doesn’t answer our prayer? Many of us are afraid to try our best because, if we try our best and fail, we will feel like an utter failure. How do you live after that? If we don’t try our best and fail, at least we have the hope that, if we try our best next time, we might succeed. Rejection is hard to take, especially from God about something that matters a lot to us. If we pour our hearts out to God for something we want badly and God doesn’t give it to us, how can we handle the disappointment? As long as we don’t take that risk, we can always believe (however little) that God answers prayer. (I hope you see how ridiculous such thinking sounds!)

Another possibility is that, instead of getting disappointed in God (how dare we!), we get disappointed in our faith. We believe that God is all-powerful and nothing is impossible to Him. So, if we pray long and hard for something and we don’t get it, it must be because our faith is small. After all, Jesus promised, “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you” (Matt. 7:7). If our best shot in praying proves to be not good enough, what does that say about our faith?

I believe that these are common problems for many Christians. So, they sit on the fence for a long time when it comes to prayer. Yes, they will pray for things that they think God will answer easily because it’s not a big problem or it is the kind of thing that will “naturally” get resolved, such as praying for someone to recover from a minor illness or injury. But they may be too afraid to pray for something “big,” something that really matters to them. Isn’t that sad? But what do we do about that?

I think the real issue here is trust. The trust I’m talking about is not whether or not we believe in God’s omnipotence. I don’t think any of us disagrees with this theological truth about God. The trust I’m talking about is trusting, really trusting, that God is good and He loves us more than we love ourselves. Even in this, I don’t think it’s a doctrinal problem for any of us. How can we deny this doctrine of God’s goodness and love? It is a practical problem. But why? Why is it difficult for us to trust that God is good to us and God really loves us?

The main culprit is the many idols we have in our hearts. Because we want them more than the good God has for us, and because we define what is good in terms of these idols, we have a hard time trusting God because we have this deep suspicion that He will not grant them to us (out of His goodness!). But what would happen to our prayer life if we really trust God’s goodness to us so we can say, after pouring out our hearts to God about what we desire, “But not my will but Your will be done!” with all sincerity and confidence? I believe that we will be able to pray about anything and everything, no matter how big or impossible it may seem, because what we are seeking is God’s good will, not our own. So, we are no longer afraid of God not giving us exactly what we want. We want something bigger and better than what we happen to want at the moment according to our limited knowledge and wisdom. I want to assure you that this has freed up my prayers and enriched my prayer life. I hope this helps you to start to pray and dare to pray for many things, big and small!