To Will and To Wish
If you abide in Me, and My words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it shall be done for you. John 15:7
Wish – Jesus’ instruction on prayer is as sharp as a scalpel. “Ask whatever you wish.” It just seems impossible to make such a claim. There are plenty of things I have asked for, even things that apparently are aligned with the larger purposes of God, but they didn’t come true for me. How can Jesus really say such a thing?
Of course, we could spiritualize this claim and deflect its enormity. We could give the typical theological explanation that God does answer – just not the way we thought. Or we could suggest that alignment with God is far more mysterious than we imagine (His thoughts are higher than my thoughts) and we just don’t see the bigger picture. In the end, it all amounts to the same thing – an excuse for those prayers that are not answered according to our wishes.
Jesus does not speak lies. So, if He said this, then He must have meant it to be true. If it’s true from God’s perspective, then the issue is not with God. It is with me. I have to look deeper to see what Jesus really said. And the first thing we encounter is a word we already know – thelo (see February 23). What I wish is actually what will become reality because my wish is for God to bring it about. This is not simply a desire – a hypothetically possible circumstance. It is my personal endorsement of what must be the case, because my wish is for God to execute my request. Job understood the implication. “No plan of Yours can be thwarted.” When I ask for thelo, I am asking for a God-initiated and God-backed reality. Therefore, I must be very careful indeed about what I ask for, for I am asking God to do what I believe to be in the best interests of the entire universe. This is no small matter. I had better be right.
“O, God, heal my brother Lazarus. O, God, restore him to health. Don’t let him die.” Do you suppose Mary and Martha prayed such words fervently? Don’t we echo them? They thought they were praying in concert with God’s will. But they were wrong. To heal Lazarus would have undermined everything about the resurrection power God wanted to display four days later. They asked, but they asked from their perspective, not His.
Is that how we pray? “Lord, please do this. Can’t you see that it is for the good of all? Take care of this, Lord.” Perhaps we need a different kind of prayer.
“Lord, reveal to us Your purposes in this that we might pray correctly, in concert with Your will. Let our thelo echo Your thelema. Amen.”
Oh, by the way, is there any point in praying for our wishes unless we first know His?
