1.21.2025 PBPC Family Bulletin
PBPC Family,
When it comes to entering more deeply into prayer, it's helpful to clarify what prayer is not. Prayer is not wish fulfillment. Prayer is not a tool God gives us so we can get what we want - like an Amazon Wish List we periodically update with our latest desires. Prayer is not transactional - we say the prayer and then God does our bidding. But I understand why people see prayer as transactional. Jesus explicitly teaches that his followers are to ask God for things and they will receive what they ask for.
"Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened." Matthew 7:7-8
I remember my first youth ministry job (I was 18 at the time), we were studying this passage and a student said, "I want a Lamborghini. So according to Jesus word's, I should ask and God will give it to me." (There's always THAT student).
At the time, I knew his logic was ridiculous but I didn't know why. I couldn't explain to him why he was wrong - I couldn't articulate the deeper Scriptural teaching around prayer. Partly because, at the time, I believed that prayer was a form of wish fulfillment. I wanted things (less selfish than a Lamborghini) and believed that if I prayed hard enough and long enough, God would grant my requests.
Nuance is necessary. God responds to us and answer our prayer requests. God wants us to bring our needs, and even our wants, before God in prayer. But this is only one aspect of prayer, not the whole picture. Jake Meador, in an article titled The Perils of Positive Thinking, writes;
According to the wisdom of Scripture and mother church, prayer is a way of laying our fears and concerns before God. But it is not a self-help technique or a kind of celestial snack machine we visit whenever we are hungry. Prayer is a way through which human creatures enjoy communion with their creator and through which they are renewed and restored to what they were made to be. If you spend any length of time considering the way the Scriptures demonstrate prayer, you will quickly discover that prayer is often brutal and raw and even "negative." The prayers of David are filled with angst and fear and despair. [...] Often prayers seem to go unanswered, not due to using the improper technique but, as the Scriptures tell us, because God's ways are inscrutable to us, and the work of prayer is not so much to yield the results we want, but to align our fallen and imperfect will with God's will so that we might be caught up in closer relationship with him.
God invites us to bring our requests to God through prayer, but this is always under the larger purpose of being drawn into a deeper relationship with God. Prayer is a crucible in which God forms and shapes us into the image of Christ. In prayer, we encounter and are encountered by God and we come away changed.
What have you been asking God? What have you been praying for? I invite you to continue to ask God for those desires of your heart, but also to ask God to be drawn into God's heart, to be caught up in a deeper relationship and communion with God. When we are caught up in God's heart, we are changed, as are our requests.
I'll be praying for you this week - that God would meet you and transform you as God sees fit.
Looking forward to worshipping with you all on Sunday!
Grace and Peace,
Pastor Calvin
"The Radical Other"
John 2:12-25
Calvin Sodestrom
