The Qualifiers

Jesus gives to the disciples a promise regarding prayer that sounds not unlike finding a bottle that contains the magic genie: “And I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. You may ask me for anything in my name, and I will do it.” ~John 14:14 Any believer who has first read this promise has certainly given it a go. I’ve had a number of church members over the years ask if I might pray along with them that they would hit the lottery. Most of them quickly follow it up with, “I will give a tithe of it to the church!” After telling them I will hold them to it, and offering a few perfunctory grunts about the poor odds of winning, I wish them well. I seldom, however, offer prayers. I find the thought that simply because I’m a Pastor I might have some special favor with God both untenable and a wee bit irksome. I can fail with the “least of these” when it comes to gaining from God the winning lottery numbers.

We mentioned a few notes back that a key to understanding this promise lies with the embedded qualifiers “…in my name” and “…that the Father may be glorified in the Son.” Those are not insignificant. If we pray according to his nature and for the Father’s glory we are given great assurances. And learning to pray in this way is not insignificant. We are learning to pray according to a will not our own. Apart from our basic needs, it seems that Jesus is asking us to train our minds, hearts and prayers toward something bigger and certainly more eternal than ourselves. It doesn’t mean that our personal desires and needs are in any way pedestrian to heaven, but it does seem to indicate that they are subordinate. To the extent we find that depressing reveals how far we’ve yet to go.
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And there’s this. When we give this promise a bit of thought, it becomes logically impossible to read it any other way. C.S. Lewis made this prescient observation: As regards the difficulty [of unanswered prayer], I’m not asking why our petitions are so often refused. Anyone can see in general that this must be so. In our ignorance we ask what is not good for us or for others, or not even intrinsically possible. Or again, to grant one man’s prayer involves refusing another’s. There is much here which is hard for our will to accept but nothing that is hard for our intellect to understand. The real problem is different; not why refusal is so frequent, but why the opposite result is so lavishly promised. ~C.S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer