Shameless Insistence

I was struck by a couple of lines in the blog update for Stephanie Vest recently (http://stephanievest.com/ ). “Please pray loudly, boldly, on your knees, with cries, tears, whatever it takes… we need Stephanie’s lungs to heal. It is OK to ask God for the same miracle multiple times - in a day, in an hour, and even in a minute! So keep the prayers comin!” [They now need her heart to heal further too, I might add, before they can continue the chemo treatment she needs so desperately.]

If Christ’s apostles needed instruction on prayer, maybe we do, too.

Obviously the pagans had a different idea of prayer than God’s people (1 Kings 18:26,28; Matt 6:7). Even among God’s people, the Pharisees had a different idea than the Publican (Luke 18:10-13), and even than Jesus (Matt 6:5-6). But the Bible’s instruction on prayer is not given by precept but by practice. Consider.

Paul’s judgment was that David was a man after God’s own heart (Acts 13:22). Take all the requests David made in Psalm 119, make them your requests, and now you are praying with the heart of God. Or further, take the Lord’s praying in John 17, occupy your own heart with his requests, and you find out something about how to pray.

Human nature, contemporary culture, and our skewed or missing view of God’s kingdom all contribute to our ignorance about true, biblical prayer. There are also the false-prophet (profit?) faith persuasions that blame your lack of faith for the failure of their “word of knowledge.”

So how can we learn how to pray? Study the “Lord’s Prayer” in Matt 6 and Luke 11. Its focused requests about the kingdom balance praise with daily bread, and receiving forgiveness with forgiving others.

Study the stories. Jesus taught on prayer by talking about the friend at midnight and the father who gives his children good gifts. He taught us how to process personal injustices by narrating the tale of the widow and the judge. But maybe the lesson most apropos to our societal situation is the contrast between the self-focused absorption of the Pharisee and the smitten self-awareness of unholiness in the Publican.

Pray loudly, boldly, on your knees, with cries, tears (see Jesus in Gethsemane). It is OK to ask God for the same miracle multiple times (see the story in Luke 11 of the man who asked with importunity—earnestly with shameless insistence).

Continue praying for Eric and Stephanie and their kids. Healing her is like God delivering no more than a loaf of bread. But it is receiving more than a loaf of bread to us.