27 March 2011                                                                            Matthew 7: 7-12

Last week I told you that today, in our consideration of the Sermon on the Mount, we would look at the way in which we can truly help people we care about.  Once we come to share in Jesus’ own heart for people, especially within the fellowship of the Church, we want to do them good.  Of course, there are impulses to do good in almost every human heart, and there are many kinds of good we can do to others that are not too difficult to understand and need no special explanation.  If people are hungry we can give them food; if homeless, we can help them find shelter. 

But what if they need advice and are behaving in ways that are destructive to them and hurtful to others?  Once we are no longer dominated by our anger or our lust, nor are trying to find our security in our possessions; once we have laid aside pretense and manipulation, we can approach these other kinds of needs.  We saw last week that several common ways of trying to get people to do good are self-defeating.  We cannot blame or condemn people into doing what is right, nor can we force things on them for which they are not ready.  So today we get our answer: “Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you.” 

This is the method of the request: the approach Jesus asks us to take, especially in the Church, but elsewhere, too.  We simply ask for what we want.  If we ourselves have a need that others can meet—or if we are seeking help for others; if we have information or wisdom or insight we want others to receive; we seek, we ask.  And then we stand back and respect their right to say “yes” or “no.”  You might think that these words of Jesus are primarily about our prayer: how to ask God for the things we need.  In a secondary sense, this is true.  Dallas Willard insists, however, that these words of Jesus are meant above all as a description of the way in which his followers deal with each other, especially in those interactions where brothers and sisters need things from each other or want to help each other. 

The idea is that, once you practice this way of dealing with people in the fellowship of the Church, you will start to understand how to do it in “out there” in the world as well.   It is a description of how we can all be of the most help to each other and to those we are trying to influence for good and for God.  Only the request, the asking, respects the freedom of the person we are dealing with, so only the request takes her or him seriously as a person created in the image of God, able to make decisions.  Just as we saw in an earlier part of the Sermon on the Mount, when we refuse to strike back at someone who has injured us, the possibility is opened up for a reassessment of the situation, so when we freely ask someone to change or to do some good thing and willingly agree to accept that decision, we are no longer trying to drive or blame them and genuine communication may result. 

In one way of looking at it, a request seems like such a weak thing when there are so many urgent things to be done.  Yet, the power of a request is very great.  Sometimes we avoid encountering people who we know are going to ask us for something, so difficult it is to say no.  And we know that the dynamics of the request are altogether different from the demand.  The request is a free act respecting the freedom of another, who may choose to say yes or no or even to respond with a generosity that goes way beyond the request that was made. 

Of course, there is the problem of not getting what we think we need from each other.  Then what do we do?  The only way we can consistently respect the freedom of others to say no to us is if we are grounded in a secure relationship with God in which we are sure that our needs will be met.  This means that our ability to live the life of the community of the Kingdom will depend on the quality of our prayer—that is, the reality of our intimacy with God, our ability to allow God to exercise his will effectively through us.  And that gets us to the underlying issue of issues here.  Jesus notes that even people who are not particularly good still generally respond positively to the requests of their children.  If that is true, then do we really trust God to give us the good things we need when we ask Him for them? 

It looks as if the key to treating others with the freedom to say yes or no to our requests is a relationship with God in which we practice the same method.  As Willard puts it: “To understand Jesus’ teachings we must realize that deep in the orientations of our spirit, we cannot have one posture toward God and a different one toward other people.  We are a whole being, and our true character pervades everything we do.”  What he is getting at is the prayerfulness that must pervade all of our lives as followers of Jesus.  The same spirit in which we pray to God for our needs and those of others is the spirit in which we respond to our neighbors: “do to others as you would have them do to you.”  We cannot keep the Golden Rule unless we have a deep sense of confidence in God that has been nurtured in regular and persistent prayer.  Without that we soon find that our rule is: “do to others before they get a chance to do to you.”  Or, as Willard puts it: “We need to love our neighbors as ourselves, do to them as we would be done to.  Receiving the good news of the kingdom will enable us to do that, for it obliterates scarcity and win-lose relationships.  Then in deed as well as in prayer we will seek their good as well as our own.  A life of prayer shows us the way to what we need and harmonizes the desires of everyone in the group.  Because we are living in the kingdom of the heavens, we are released from absorbing desires that would deflect us from what is really good.  In many ways it is the life of prayer that discovers a space in which all can live.” 

A couple of weeks ago we spent some time with the Lord’s Prayer, the Our Father.  One of the things we learn in this prayer is that God wants us to speak with him about our daily bread, the needs of the day.  But we also learned about the Kingdom context for our praying, that the Christian’s prayer always takes place within Christ’s Kingdom mission—Your Kingdom come; your will be done.  Another way of speaking about prayer in a Kingdom context comes from an old writer named J. N. Ward in his book, The Use of Praying.  He says this: “Religion is the attempt to live life according to the facts, according to how things are.”  What is the great reality of this world?  There are scientific truths, of course, and sociological truths, literary truths, artistic and perhaps economic and political truths.  If we are to be true to reality, we cannot ignore these things.  But the great truth, which stands behind all others, is that God created this world and has redeemed it through His Son, and is in the process of transforming it into his Kingdom, the ideal society He intended in creation.  The Church is Jesus’ witness to this reality: as the Body of Christ, its words and life are meant to reflect the life of the Kingdom.  The Church is a fellowship of people who love God and each other and through the union of those loves, pours that love out on everyone within reach.  This is the deepest truth about the nature of the world we live in.  When we seriously attempt to live the life of the Kingdom of God, we are doing nothing less than living in accordance with the grain of reality, the way things truly are, beneath all appearances. 

But we will never perceive this reality apart from prayer.  For “the purpose of prayer is to train the mind to function in accordance with the facts.”  (J.N.W.)  Prayer teaches us a total orientation to life.  The more we pray, the more all of life is unified in a single spiritual outlook. We eventually realize that we cannot be one way with God and another way with other people.  We have to be one way with the whole universe—the way of being related to the Father through the Son in the power of the Holy Spirit.  Much of our prayer, then, will be of the nature of reading and meditating—on scripture, on the lives and examples of the old saints, on the great spiritual teachings of the Church.  Only in this way can we come to grips with reality. 

It is this reality we discern in our praying, then, into which we bring our requests and petitions—our seeking, asking, and knocking.  We begin in our praying where we are—with the things that concern us.  Do we think that God does not know about them already?  No.  Is he not already concerned for these things before we tell him?  Of course he is.  Then why are we spending time telling him these things?  Well, we want Him to do something about them.  Isn’t he already doing something before we ask him?  But what if He is waiting for us to ask?  And, in fact, what is it that we really want God to do?  Well, we want him to answer our prayers.  But what answer do we want?  That he simply give us whatever we ask?  Do we know enough for that?  Are our desires pure enough so that we should expect God to do for us whatever we want?  But you might say, I thought God already promised to do that for us?  Jesus did say something like that, but he said “whatever you ask in my Name I will give you.”  What does it mean to ask God in Jesus’ Name?

To pray in Jesus’ Name is to pray in union with Him, to share His purpose, to share His will and desire, which He shares with the Father and the Spirit—in other words, to take the Kingdom context seriously.  If we allow it, the Spirit will create within our own hearts this heart of Christ for the Father’s will.  As we pray for the particular things that concern us, we bring these petitions and intercessions into union with the eternal purposes of God.  In so doing our asking is changed and our desires are purified.  Our needs and the needs of others are sanctified as they are brought within the love and will of God.  And we are changed as our prayer opens us up to be the means through which the love of God can act.  For we better not pray about anything at all, than to pray for something and not be willing to be a part of the answer to that prayer. 

We continue to pray until our will and God’s will come into unity on whatever issue concerns us.  By the time we are clear on that, it is likely that what we originally wanted is very changed indeed.  The result of our praying is that we are transformed to become the agents of God’s loving in the world.  And the nature of reality is such that everything is related to everything else.  If I am right with God, aligned with his will, then the whole world is more right than it was, and love has been set forward, and God has drawn me into his mission.  “The prayer that is mere request, without self-offering, is not prayer ‘in his name’ and is not worth the time it takes to say.”  (J. N. W.)

So for the Christian who prays, a gradual prayerfulness will envelop his whole world.  His relationship with God will spill over into his relationship with family and friends.  He will be able to relate to no one apart from that prayerfulness which enfolds his whole life.  He will approach other people in the same way he deals with God—prayerfully and with respect—making requests, seeking, knocking, and allowing the freedom of people to say “yes” or “no”.  And what does the Christian get out of this way of praying?  Does she pile up “answers to prayer” in her prayer notebook, so that she has something to tell her friends about how successful in her prayer she is?  Of course she feels “answered.”  She feels answered because her whole life is taking on the form of prayer and she knows a deeper ability in herself to love and care for other people.  She has developed and is developing a Christian character—a combination of freedom and power with service and love.  As Dallas Willard put it: “What God gets out of our lives—and, indeed, what we get out of our lives—is simply the person we become.”  That’s the project we are engaged in, which will be fully realized only in the world to come.

I conclude, however, by considering two problems in prayer.  First, we can understand when we don’t get what we want from another person, but what do we do when we don’t get what we want, or feel that we need, from God?  There are three considerations here: 1) If there is something we can do to change a situation, then we should be doing it, rather than praying for it to change.  2) We stick with an issue in prayer, until we perceive a resolution, always seeking to align ourselves with God’s desire.  3) If there is no change forthcoming, then we learn accept the situation we did not want and try do God’s will there, as he makes it clear to us.  We know that the way of God’s will is the way towards our true joy, yet it may require a lot of patience to find this joy, a maturity that we don’t yet have.

Second, what do we do when we don’t get what we want for others?  There are several issues here, too.  1) Even if we are sure that the good we are praying for another is God’s will, when another person is involved, or many others, everything is complicated by the willingness of others to accept what God wants to do.  2)  This means that we must often wait a long time for some prayers to be answered.  3) We may not perceive the value our loving prayer is having, but we are still convinced that everything is connected in the Body of Christ.  4)  Sometimes all that is left is a sharing in the agony of Christ Himself over a world that refuses His love.  There are, in the end, crosses to be borne.

Yet, our praying really does make a difference in what God does or does not do.  The presence or absence of Christian prayer in any situation is one of the factors that determines how God acts.  As J. N. Ward put it: “God wills to give himself in answer to our requests for each other, as well as our requests for ourselves, so that we may belong more closely to one another, in being in some degree responsible for each other.”  That is what it means to live in reality.