Prayer

“And everything you ask in prayer, believing, you shall receive.”  Matthew 21:22

Prayer – Have you struggled with the mustard seed syndrome?  Jesus makes some pretty startling claims about prayer.  They’re the kind of statements that get under your spiritual skin because they seem to be impossible.  Our usual response to these claims is to put all the blame on our lack of faith.  After all, if it only takes mustard seed faith to move mountains, then my faith must be about the size of an electron.  The only mountain I ever saw move was when Mount Saint Helens blew its top and that had nothing to do with my faith.

So, here I confront another incredible passage.  “Everything you ask” is a pretty big bunch of stuff.  Jesus says that the only condition is “believing”.  That makes me feel drastically inadequate.

We are confronted with three critical words here: prayer, believe and receive.  But it doesn’t help much for me to tell you that prayer is about supplication, intercession, praise or petition.  The functions of prayer are not at issue.  In this passage, what matters are the results of prayer.  And from Jesus’ perspective, prayer is about power.

The Greek word for prayer (proseuche) comes from two words that mean “to speak aloud toward” or “to utter a wish or vow toward”.  Prayer is speaking in God’s direction.  But we already knew that.  If we’re going to get a better handle on prayer, we need to know why we utter words toward God.  And for that answer, we need to remember that Jesus was not Greek.  When he thought about prayer, he thought about the Hebrew idea of prayer.

Let’s start with just one thought.  Prayer in the Hebrew culture is the verbal acknowledgement of my place within a community that belongs to God.  When I pray, I am saying that I am embedded in the family of the God of creation and history.  This God has been actively engaged in my family since the beginning of time.  The history of my community shows me that He is constantly bringing about His purposes even though I may not be able to see the direction during the process.  All of my family history confirms that God’s answers to prayer depend on His personal counsel and decision.

The first step toward understanding what Jesus says is to realize that prayer is about the history of God with His family, not about me.

Is that what I have in mind when I pray?