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“Do not wait for leaders; do it alone, person to person.” – Mother Teresa September, 2020 We want to know our mail will arrive in a timely manner. We want to know we are being heard and understood. In the Christian life, we want to believe that God is “receiving our mail,” that our prayers are being heard and answered. Before he raised Lazarus from the dead, Jesus said, “‘Father, I thank you that you heard me. I know that you always hear me, but because of the crowd standing here I said this, so that they may believe that you sent me.’” (John 11:41b-42 Christian Standard Bible). But while we can believe God listened to Jesus (God’s “only begotten son”), it might be more difficult sometimes to believe God is listening to us. We’ve all heard of Paul’s “thorn in the flesh,” (2 Cor. 12:7b) even if we don’t know what it might have been. Whatever it was, Paul had an affliction and he prayed three times that God would take it away (vs. 8). But God didn’t. Paul was left with four possibilities: God wasn’t listening, God couldn’t remove the affliction, God could remove the affliction but God didn’t care, or God allowed the affliction to remain for a reason. Paul says God answered, “My grace is sufficient for you,” (vs. 9 CSB). It’s easy to get the idea that Paul heard a voice in the darkness, in which God literally spoke to him, but personally I don’t believe Paul heard an answer at all. I believe when Paul didn’t receive the answer he wanted, he went on to try to understand what had happened. Paul prayed and waited, prayed and waited again, then prayed and waited some more, and finally interpreted the result as his answer and put it into words. The real answer to prayer is the change it brings about in us, rather than our circumstances. Paul’s “thorn in the flesh” didn’t go away but he learned to accept his situation. He wrote to the Philippians, “I have learned to be content in whatever circumstances I find myself. . . . I have learned the secret of being content” (Phil. 4:11b, 12b CSB). He wasn’t talking about his “thorn in the flesh” but he could have been. As the hymn says, “prayer changes things,” but what it really changes is us. Perhaps the best known example is theologian Reinhold Niebuhr’s “serenity prayer:” “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, / courage to change the things I can, / and wisdom to know the difference.” Niebuhr’s prayer doesn’t ask for a change in our circumstances, it asks for empowerment to deal with them. It asks for a change in attitude. That’s what genuine prayer does, it gives us new hearts and minds. God promised the people of Israel, “‘I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; I will remove your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. I will place my Spirit within you and cause you to follow my statutes and carefully observe my ordinances.’” (Eze. 36:26-27 CSB). God’s Spirit can still transform us today. Paul encouraged the Ephesians to What we pray for—and why—says a great deal about us as Christians, about what we value. If we pray for things, money or success, it’s because we value them above other things. If we pray for the well-being of others, it’s because we value them more than ourselves (Phil. 2:3). If we pray to be more like Christ, we can be transformed in his image (2 Cor. 3:18). And our transformation will be clear to everyone around us. “This is the confidence we have before him: If we ask anything according to his will, he hears us. And if we know that he hears whatever we ask, we know that we have what we have asked of him.” (1 John 5:14-15 CSB.) Copyright © 2020 by David Phelps
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