Prayer as Partnership

I’ve written two posts on the possibility that we shouldn’t always (or as often) pray for release from our circumstances (here and here). So now I want to suggest a way to think about prayer that will lead us into better practices, and show some (more?) Scriptural support.

The central issue, in my opinion, should be settled by the account of the creation of mankind. Quite simply: God created humanity to rule—to subdue the earth and to multiply to fill the earth. Humanity was not created primarily to ask God for things. We were created to actually do something ourselves for God. While this activity had to be performed as subordinate creatures to the Creator, and thus entailed prayer as part of that relationship and mandate, it still doesn’t change our purpose. God didn’t make us to ask but to act.

Additionally, the creation story tells us that we are dependent on God but it doesn’t seem concerned with our asking for things. Rather, God gives before we can ask. While that doesn’t mean we aren’t supposed to ask for help, again the emphasis of creation lies elsewhere.

To repeat: none of this is meant to say we should not ask for things we need or want. Obviously, we should do so (Matthew 7:7). But such prayer is supposed to fit in the context of us as God’s vicegerents who are ordered to take dominion.

Indeed, many prayers in the Bible are prayers for future success in planned endeavors.

• “For God is my witness, whom I serve with my spirit in the gospel of his Son, that without ceasing I mention you always in my prayers, asking that somehow by God’s will I may now at last succeed in coming to you” (Romans 1:9–10; ESV).
• “You also must help us by prayer, so that many will give thanks on our behalf for the blessing granted us through the prayers of many” (2 Corinthians 1:11; ESV).
• “To that end, keep alert with all perseverance, making supplication for all the saints, and also for me, that words may be given to me in opening my mouth boldly to proclaim the mystery of the gospel, for which I am an ambassador in chains, that I may declare it boldly, as I ought to speak” (Ephesians 6:18b–20; ESV)
• “I thank my God always when I remember you in my prayers, because I hear of your love and of the faith that you have toward the Lord Jesus and for all the saints, and I pray that the sharing of your faith may become effective for the full knowledge of every good thing that is in us for the sake of Christ” (Philemon 4–6; ESV).

While we are dependent on God for our being and everything else, God does not make us only to ask him for things. He made us to act in faith (and thus, with prayer, for the future we are trying to bring about with his help). Indeed, I think the stories about God’s rescuing people from their circumstances are oddly limited. For instance, after Gamaliel talks the rest of the council down from killing the disciples we read this:

So they took his advice, and when they had called in the apostles, they beat them and charged them not to speak in the name of Jesus, and let them go. Then they left the presence of the council, rejoicing that they were counted worthy to suffer dishonor for the name.

Acts 5:39b–41; ESV; emphasis added.

The disciples get supernaturally delivered sometimes but they also get beaten and even killed at other times. Obviously, the supernatural rescues did not put the church in substantially better circumstances. At any point the authorities might imprison, beat, and kill them without any divine rescue. Thus, the deliverances as a whole served to assure them of God’s presence with them. In the big picture, God wanted the Church to “drink the cup.”

Likewise, in Israel’s history, we see mixed stories of Israel being delivered entirely by God so they needed to do nothing, Israel being given supernatural signs of God’s aid in victory, and Israel being assigned to deliver themselves with no apparent supernatural rescue.

God deliverances seem almost more like training wheels than the vehicle for transport to fully new and better place. Of course, we all depend on the death and resurrection of Christ for a real rescue from our sin and misery, but that makes my point. For almost all the world, life the week after Jesus died and rose didn’t seem any different from life during the previous week. Deliverance came through the obedient efforts and patient suffering of the church.

GOD CREATED US TO IMAGE HIM

If we think a bit about what it means that God created human beings in his image we might begin to see that an emphasis on the prayer as a plea for rescue from circumstances would defeat his whole purpose in making us. The whole point was to put us in undesirable circumstances!

We are finite replicas of the infinite God. As finite beings we have limitations. Our job as humans is to display how God would act under those various sets of limitations. True: one way of dealing with limitations as finite replicas of the infinite God is to ask him to remove the especially onerous limitations. But that would only be one way. Emphasizing that method of dealing with limitations would imply that God really couldn’t survive in those finite circumstances with his character intact.

But God would be more than a conqueror in all those circumstances. He proved it himself in Jesus but that was still only one set of circumstances. There are billions of other sets of circumstances and we are each called to one such set to show how God would act.

God could have micromanaged the universe himself. Instead, he made us to rule it for and under him. Like Jesus, we often must rule by taking up our cross. We have to show what God would be like if he were us. We should do all things to glorify God, and suffer all things, and navigate all situations wisely to that same end.

God wants to show his character in various circumstances and it is our honor to do that for him. While, as His sons and daughters, we have access to ask for relief and should avail ourselves of that privilege, we need to do so in a way that is not shirking from our task. Getting to represent God as an abandoned spouse, or as the parent of a wayward teen, or as a chronically unemployed head of household, or a person in ill-health, is a privilege and an honor. God applauds us for it (Romans 2:39b).

Pray for release, but also for strength and wisdom. Pray as God’s special agent who has been given a unique, difficult, and glorious mission.

Pray like you’re God’s partner who has a role to play in His drama.

Don’t pray like a reluctant servant who only complains that his job is too hard.