Sense & Nonsense About Prayer

What It Is, What It's Not, How It Works

5. Prayer Has To Be In The King James

Utter nonsense. Our black preachers struggling through all of these “these” and “thous,” butchering the poetry of 17th century English—a syntax that requires quite a bit of erudition to reproduce on the fly. Meanwhile, in most white churches the pastor talks to God like He’s his buddy. Like He’s Fred. “Well, Fred, we just love you. Fred we just wanna thank you so much for what You’ve done and what You’re doing, Fred.”

And, you know what? They’re right. Not that God is Fred, but that God is our Friend. He wants to be our friend, He wants to be known to us. Not some obscure, abstract concept. A God Up There Somewhere. That’s nonsense. That’s a song we should never, ever sing again because it is simply not scriptural.

The Bible teaches us that God dwells within us [John 14:17]. He is not unknowable. He is not ‘up there.” He’s right here. In you. In me. We can’t fool Him by putting on a fake accent or talking in the King James. We can’t hide from His presence by putting on our Prayer Voice. We should speak to Him respectfully, sure. But we can use our own words and our own voice.

Pretending to be someone you are not completely undermines the effectiveness of your prayer. God knows you. He understand what you’re saying. God invented language. You can’t trick Him. And the eloquence of your prayer has absolutely no bearing on the effectiveness of your prayer.

6. God Always Answers

Jeremiah 7:13-16: And now, because ye have done all these works, saith the LORD, and I spake unto you, rising up early and speaking, but ye heard not; and I called you, but ye answered not; Therefore will I do unto this house, which is called by my name, wherein ye trust, and unto the place which I gave to you and to your fathers, as I have done to Shiloh. And I will cast you out of my sight, as I have cast out all your brethren, even the whole seed of Ephraim. Therefore pray not thou for this people, neither lift up cry nor prayer for them, neither make intercession to me: for I will not hear thee.

Growing up Pentecostal, I was taught God doesn’t hear the prayers of sinners. Which is right and wrong. God hears everything. That’s what “God” means. Saying there’s something God can’t do limits His omnipotence and confines Him to our human understanding.

What the Bible means when it suggests God doesn’t hear the prayers of sinners is that God doesn’t act on their behalf. This is because the proper way to pray to God is beyond our power or comprehension. As mortal beings, there is absolutely nothing we, in and of ourselves, can do to please God or to know God. This is why Jesus Christ came to us, why He died for us and what He meant when He said that no one can approach or know God unless they come through Christ.

Jesus Christ is our intercessor [Romans 8:34]. Which means he untangles our language, our arrogance. Talking to God is, in and of itself, pure arrogance, the creation demanding things of the creator. Jesus runs interference for us, correcting our grammar, discerning our true intent and knowing our heart. He acts like a spiritual translator, making sense out of our pitiful rhetoric and lobbying God on our behalf.

People who do not know Christ, who have rejected Christ—what we call “sinners,” which, again, is a misnomer since we are all sinners [Romans 3:23]—do not have access to Christ as an intercessor and, therefore, God, presumably, doesn’t act on their behalf.

But, make no mistake, God hears everything. That’s what “God” means.

7. Yes, No, Wait

God always answers prayer. It’s just that the answers are not always what we want or expect them to be. But the answers are always what we need them to be. See, God doesn’t promise us we’ll always get what we want. He promises to meet our needs.

Strauss suggests there are three basic answers (but God is, of course, not limited solely to these three): Yes, No and Wait. Our task is to pray for the wisdom to know His voice when He is speaking and to know what His answer is.

8. Make It Effective

Don’t compartmentalize. Don’t cordon off certain areas of your life for God and certain for things you think God can’t handle or activities you don’t want God to be involved in. That’s spiritual schizophrenia, you becoming a spiritual Sybil, a multi-personality disorder where you’re singing praises to God and cussing out your neighbor with the same mouth [James 3:10]. Where you’re working hard at your church and performing lewd sex acts with someone you’re not married to at night.

Your behavior, your walk with God, has a direct impact on the power and effectiveness of your prayers [James 5:16]. I am regularly and absolutely astonished at the folks I meet who call themselves “saved” but who behave just like those we call “sinners.” “Saved” but running to the club. “Saved” but headed for the liquor store. “Saved” but hooking up at the motel. I’m astonished.

God hears all prayers. But God responds to the prayers of those who love Him. Those who keep His commandments. The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much.

9. Make It Plain

Growing up in the orthodox Pentecostal church (by which I mean we were absolutely convinced we were the only ones going to heaven. I mean, COGIC was going to hell, Baptists were going to hell), I was taught that the only evidence of your salvation was your ability to speak in tongues. Now, mind you, most of those lovely people I grew up with had no idea what tongues were or what speaking in tongues was evidence of. It was all or nothing: speak in tongues or you’re going to hell.

Most of them referrer to tongues as, “The heavenly language.” Which is patently untrue. Tongues has nothing to do with heaven. Tongues are, simply, other languages. An unknown tongue is simply a langue not known to us. It has nothing to do with heaven, for the things of heaven are yet to be revealed to us. The Bible teaches us that eye has not seen nor ear heard the wonderful things God has planned for us [I Cor 2:9]. To suggest you can, somehow, tap into this stuff contravenes scripture.

When people are speaking in tongues, truly speaking in tongues, it is, likely, an ancient language and, perhaps, a known one like Aramaic. The Bible requires that there also be someone with the gift of interpreting tongues [I Cor 14:6-14], that’s not all Bubble Bubble Boil and Trouble babba babble going on. God is not the author of confusion [I Cor 14:33], so when you hear all these folks going in, presumably speaking in tongues, my personal guess is perhaps 1 in 1,000 is actually speaking in tongues. The rest are either rehearsing or repeating something the Spirit gave them a long, long time ago, or they’re just faking it.

None of which has any impact, any whatsoever, on prayer.

Praying in tongues does NOT mean your prayer is more effective than my English prayer. The effectiveness of prayer is not measured by the eloquence of my speech or even the language I speak in. The effectiveness of prayer is measured by the quality of your walk with Jesus Christ.

Unless you’re planning to be a missionary to some remote and obscure land, tongues is one of the least effective gifts of the Spirit. Tongues edifies you more than it edifies God who can, after all, understand not only our language but our motives. Speaking in tongues is a neat parlor trick, and some wear it like a badge of honor— I speak in tongues therefore I am better or holier than you—but, truth is, there’s a laundry list of spiritual gifts that are more useful to God [I Cor 13:1-3]. I’ve been baptized in the Holy Spirit. I have spoken in tongues. I do not speak in tongues with any regularity, but I do under the anointing of God. But it was not a gift I actively sought. Once I learned more about God, more about the Bible, I prayed to God not for tongues but for wisdom [Proverbs 4:1-13]. I told God, at age 15, “Lord, if I could choose my spiritual gift, I’d rather have wisdom than tongues.” I said those very words, literally, to God.

I don’t claim to be wise. I make a lot of mistakes. But I value learning. I value instruction and teaching. I love logic and wisdom. I love to sit and listen to elders, old men who love to be Dad, who love to teach. I am available to God, learning as I go. I do not claim the gift of wisdom, as I claim no gifts. Spiritual gifts are from God. They are for His purpose and for His season. They are, in many ways, like shoes you rent from a bowling alley. They don’t belong to you. You just wear them for a little while. You don’t brag about bowling shoes you rented from the counter. This is, principally, why I greatly disapprove of people running around calling themselves “Prophet” this or ‘Prophetess” that. No prophet in scripture ever called himself a prophet—other people called him “prophet” because those gifts were in effect.

I don’t claim the gift of wisdom, I just work within that gift and let others make up their own minds about who or what I am. The Bible teaches us our gifts will make room for us [Proverbs 18:16], which is to say, rather than run around calling yourself Prophet So And So, just prophecy. Just work. Just do the things that God has ordained in your life. Let other people decide what to call you or what hat you should wear and all of that.

10. He Heard You The First Time

I’ve heard many Christians brag about how long they’ve been praying and how hard they’ve been praying, begging, rolling on the floor, slobbering, beseeching God for whatever it is they’re praying about.

Well, that's very nice.

God heard you the first time. God doesn’t need all of that snot and slobber. All that yelling. All that tearing of clothes and knocking stuff off of table and all that drama. That’s not for God, that’s for you. That may be what you need to do, what your process needs to be, in order to get you to a place where your flesh, your humanity is humbled enough for your prayer to be effective. I’m not suggesting there’s anything wrong with these prayer-a-thons, but I am suggesting that God doesn’t need it. Maybe you do, maybe we need to certainly get our humanity, our flesh, under submission. But never think it takes 36 hours of hollering to get God’s attention. He heard you the first time.    CONTINUED

Ways And Means

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I had lunch with a friend the other day who, as she always does, continued to twist my arm trying to convince me to join her church. Now, I’m going to be careful because she tends to browse through here every now and then, but it is worth noting that I’ve been affiliated with her church, in one capacity or another, for fifteen years. So much so that the notion of her (a) referring to it as “her” church and (b) twisting my arm to join it just amuses me to no end. It goes completely without question or challenge that I’ve been an integral party of that ministry for nearly one-third of my life now. Her major complaint seems to be that I am not there on Sundays. “Well,” I asked, “What would I do there on Sundays? What purpose would that serve?” They already have a bunch of preachers. A bunch of musicians and singers. A bunch of deacons and ushers and dancers and administrative staff and people who run the vacuum after service is over. How would my physically being there on Sunday be anything but redundant. “You accomplish a great deal simply by being there,” she replied. Which is a good point. Here’s mine:

For those of us with a calling on our lives, simply being there is not enough. We need to be where we are sent. I spend, on average, between 30 and 50 hours per week involved with "her" church. God has not directed me to be there Sunday mornings. “You don’t have to always be down front,” my friend admonished, “you could come and just sit.” Just sit. First of all, even at my own church, I am rarely down front. My co-pastor and I are busy, from the moment we get there. Second, it would never occur to me to ask her pastor to leave his pulpit Sunday morning to come watch me perform my ministry and just sit. Because, while he’s just sitting, the work God has ordained for his hands is not being accomp-lished. Sure, his just being there would, I suppose, somehow be pleasing to me and others I serve with, but it would be both selfish and impractical, and it would ultimately violate the covenant this pastor has made with God. “God has granted me these gifts,” Gospel soul singer Adrianne Archie said in our interview. “For me to not use them would be irresponsible.”

I'm a pastor —something else my friend disagrees with, as I’ve recently dis-solved the remnants our downtown ministry. “You’re not a pastor,” she said, as if an airline captain stops being a pilot between flights. As if, every single day, she couldn’t see with her own eyes, hold in her own hands, evidence of God’s anointing and the effective work I do at “her” church. It’s dangerous to go around demoting God’s generals. You tempt God by calling Him a liar, which is why I give honor to even the most patently ridiculous and brazenly un-Christlike “pastors,” because it is simply not my place to say that they are not. I’ve been pastoring for over thirty years. Sunday is a work day. As God gives me the occasional Sunday off, it is my great pleasure to visit with others—to go and sit in any one of the hundreds of churches here. But those days off are few and far between. Simply being there is not enough. If you have the call, you have to be where you are needed, where you are called to. You have to be effective.

As a professional writer (which I’m sure she doubts as well), I’ve learned that, in order to be a good editor, you have to be an at least mediocre writer. In order to recognize good writing, you yourself must, on some level, be capable of it. Otherwise you just hire your buddies and publish a bunch of bad stuff. The same is true of Christian ministry. In order to recognize anointing, you yourself need to experience it. Your relationship with God (or lack thereof) will ultimately tell on you.

Many of us are simply too ignorant of the ways and means of God to recognize anointing when we see it; when it walks through the door, when it sits down at its instrument or clears its throat. I tremble in awe at the mere sight of so many of you, the anointing of God being so evident and so obviously upon you. I don’t need to guess. I don’t need to see your credentials. I don't need no 3D glasses. I can see it with my eyes, hear it with my ears, hold it in my hands: God’s anointing, the ways and means of God. Meanwhile, I myself am routinely dismissed, most regularly by my own people: received in the time-honored half-assed, slipshod Persian Bazaar fashion: the orchestration of deaf mutes who neither see nor recognize the anointing of God at work, or who in fact do see it but are either jealous of it or convicted by it.

When that stops happening, then, sure, maybe I’d consider becoming a “member” of “her” church. But, as long as that’s going on, I’ve got much better things to do with my Sundays. This is the lesson of Luke 10:6, our biblical obligation to not go and “just sit” somewhere where your anointing is not recognized. God never called you to cool your heels, to be irresponsible with the gifts He’s given you or, for that matter, to allow other people—even those with the best of intentions—to tell you who or what you are. Sunday is a work day. Saddle up.

Familiarity & Contempt

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"Familiarity Breeds Contempt"
This saying has its origins in one of Aesop’s fables:

When first the Fox saw the Lion he was terribly frightened, and ran away and hid himself in the wood. Next time however he came near the King of Beasts he stopped at a safe distance and watched him pass by. The third time they came near one another the Fox went straight up to the Lion and passed the time of day with him, asking him how his family were, and when he should have the pleasure of seeing him again; then turning his tail, he parted from the Lion without much ceremony.

"Familiarity Breeds Contempt"

The lesson is that the fear of something, fascination and awe, is reduced through getting to know it better. Matthew 13:57: “But Jesus said unto them, “a prophet is not without honour, save in his own country, and in his own house.”” This verse is explained by a poster at http://www.phrases.org.uk: “there is the problem of a prophet being without honour in his home town - that people who know you well are not so inclined to recognise the exceptional in you”. I can really relate to this – when I play guitar to somebody for the first time, they are usually impressed (I won’t go as far as to say they’re in awe), but when I play to somebody who hears me play all the time, like my uncle or my brother, it’s nothing exceptional. In the same way, I have a friend who’s quite well known, and he’ll have people come up to him and go, “oh! You’re so and so from so and so aren’t you!” but to me, he’s just Craig.

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