Faith in Focus:
Jackpot Prayer?
A woman who was on a diet came into work with a huge chocolate cream cake. When her friends asked if she had stopped dieting she told them that God wanted her to have the cake. "I saw it in the bakery and prayed to God to let there be a parking spot outside, if he wanted me to have the cake. And on the 10th time round, there was the parking place!"
Prayer is a strange thing. Some people feel the need to tell God a shopping list of things that they want, as if he didn't already know what they need! And often we ourselves don't realise what we really need and we pray for things that we think will make life better, but which everyone else knows will be our ruin. The same happens when an alcoholic prays for a bottle of whisky.
There are those who tend to think that prayer is like a religious fruit machine, a divine one-arm-bandit. You put your request in, pull the handle and eventually you hit the jackpot. Of course, this would be to treat God like some sort of robot that did not have our welfare at heart. It's the sort of prayer that people make to win the lottery.
So it's hardly surprising that people talk about unanswered prayer. The very thought that God would completely ignore us when we turn to him is ridiculous. But scripture tells us that sometimes we are asking for the wrong thing or with the wrong motives and that's why we don't receive what we want. Prayer is always answered; it's just that sometimes the answer is "no", or it comes in a way we didn't expect.
When we look at the prayer that Jesus taught us, the Our Father or the Lord's Prayer, we notice that there is a lot of emphasis at the beginning on God's will being done in all things, and the values of God's kingdom permeating our thoughts and actions. Maybe if we remained open in our prayer, telling God of our needs and desires, but asking him to help us become conformed to his will, then we would start to change our approach to prayer, wanting to be part of God's plan rather than getting him to change his plans to suit ours. Prayer would become a request to change us.
And maybe that's why we have to wait until the second half of the Our Father before we get round to asking for things…
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