Here’s a question for you: How long
should you pray for something or someone?
If you’ve been a Christian for a
while, you probably know what I’m talking about. Let’s say you have a
debilitating illness, or a loved one who doesn’t know Jesus. Or maybe you have
a child who’s straying from the godly path you’ve tried to keep them on. Or
you’re stuck in a horrible marriage, and it seems to just be getting worse.
You’ve prayed, asking God to intervene. And again. And again. And again. And as
best as you can tell, nothing has happened.
You might be familiar with Paul’s thorn
in the flesh. No, I don’t know what it specifically was. None of us are
sure. But the point is clear: Paul--undoubtedly one of the godliest men of his
generation (only God knows if he was closer than Peter or any of the other
apostles), the author of a majority of our New Testament--asked the Lord to
take it away. Three times. And the Lord told him no. So there’s that.
But I’d like to draw your attention
to a lesser known lesson we can glean from Scripture about prayer. I was
tempted to talk about this when we were discussing the prophets, but it really
fits better here while we’re on the topic of prayer.
You know that Jeremiah’s known as
the “weeping prophet.” The vast majority of his prophecies were negative: God’s
people were sinning egregiously, the Lord was about to judge and punish them, and
they could either repent or face destruction. And as his nickname indicates,
Jeremiah was far from happy about seeing people suffer and die, even
though they would be suffering because they fully deserved it. Inspired
by his Lord,
he took no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather that he turn from
his ways and live; he
didn’t want anyone to perish, but that everyone come to repentance. There was
absolutely not a trace of Schadenfreude in his soul.
So he prayed for them. He
undoubtedly asked that the Lord move their hearts away from sin and towards
himself, in his
(and Moses’)
terms to “circumcise [their] hearts.” Or like Amos, maybe he just asked the Lord to stay his hand of judgment, to not bring on them the judgment they deserved. He tried to stand in the gap between a holy God and
a sinful people, representing each one before the other.
This tells me something about this
man. The responses he received from the people ranged all the way from indifference
to violent hostility. They laughed at him and threatened him. To our knowledge, after all his preaching and pleading before the people, he successfully gained two converts, as defined as people who actually took his message seriously. His response to their response was to pray for these ungrateful sinners, to plead with God on
their behalf.
And finally, the Lord told him to stop.
Not once. Not twice. Three times the Lord specifically
ordered his prophet to stop praying for the people of Israel. Apparently they
were too far gone, and the Lord would no longer listen to any more pleas on
their behalf.
Now, a huge part of maturity and
wisdom is to recognize the danger of extremes and the value of balance. There’s
very little in this world which you can’t do too much or too little of. Too
much food and you’re overweight. Too little and you starve or at least hurt
your health. There’s such a thing as too little and too much sleep, time with
friends, time with your spouse, playing, working, etc.
It's possible to read your Bible
too much, I suppose, if it’s to the detriment of other things. If you spend so much time reading it that you neglect telling others about Jesus, or your prayer life, or personal worship time, just to take an extremely
hypothetical example.
And it’s theoretically possible to pray too
much for someone. There might come a time, when you’ve prayed for the
salvation of someone over and over and over, that that the Lord actually tells
you the same thing he told Jeremiah.
But let me confess something to you, my
friend. If that was the greatest fault in my walk with Christ, that the Lord had to tell me multiple times to stop praying for someone, I’d be pretty thrilled.
That’s
usually not my problem. My problem is the other extreme, that I give up way too
easily. I ask him to intervene in someone’s life, don’t see immediate results,
and give up.
So
how can we tell when enough is enough? What about the reading from the Gospels,
where Jesus warns us against “[keeping] on babbling like pagans, for they think
they will be heard because of their many words.”
Let’s
be careful of the context here. Pagans would just keep mumbling things over and
over and over, not even thinking about what they were saying. It was a rote
prayer; quite frankly, I think there’s a rough equivalent when someone does a
certain number of repetitions of the “Lord’s Prayer” or “Hail Mary.” Muslims
and others offer rote prayers, and frequently they don’t even know what they’re
praying. It might even be in a language they don’t speak.
No, the example I think of when I
think of perseverance on which our Lord smiles is when a child asks something
from their parent, and he says “We’ll see.” He doesn’t say “Yes,” or “No.” With
our Father, a firm “No” is the end of the discussion. But if he doesn’t say
“No,” then I'd take that as an invitation to keep asking.
Again, I suppose that it’s possible
for us to spend too much time pleading for the salvation of others, but it’d be
awfully hard to do, and on the list of potential dangers in my walk with Christ, that's pretty near the bottom of the list.
I
think I can stand to move further in that direction before I run into any type
of danger. What about you?
Father God, I spend waaaaaaay too little
time before your Throne of Grace, and too much time on things of no eternal
significance. Please help reset my priorities.
No comments:
Post a Comment