ASNN: "ask and ye shall receive"

February 12, 2007

"ask and ye shall receive"

In the sermon yesterday, our preacher referenced a story from John Ortberg's book, "If You Want to Walk on Water, You've Got to Get Out of the Boat." It came with a challenge, which I tend to dismiss as preacher's parlor tricks. This time, however, I think I'm going to take him up on that challenge. This blog post will serve as my "stake in the ground" so that I can see (along with you, faithful reader) what happens with it all...

The story from Ortberg's book goes something like this: Bob doesn't believe in prayer. He is challenged to pray for six months on a topic of his choice, so he chooses Kenya. A few months pass, and he meets a gal who runs an orphanage in Nairobi. He travels there, convinces US pharmaceutical companies to donate millions of dollars worth of medicine, ends up in the company of the president of Kenya, makes an offhand comment regarding political prisoners, and inadvertently accomplishes something the US State Department has been trying to negotiate for years: the release of a number of Kenyan political prisoners.

The story is intended to demonstrate the power of prayer and the culmination of the various verses in the Bible that go something like, "ask and ye shall receive." I have a few problems with this story and approach:

I have been, as of yet, unable to find corraborative evidence that this really happened. I'm sure it did, and I'm just a faithless heathen for wanting names and dates. But it smacks curiously of a preacher's story — you know the kind where it's not really true, even though it's True.

After hearing about it in the sermon at church, I searched for it online. The first place I found it referenced was CBN... not exactly the bastion of rigorous Christian doctrine. Again, this is little more than circumstantial evidence.

Everyone I've ever heard preach on "ask and ye shall receive" has gone one of two directions: either "name it and claim it" pseudotheology, or "if you don't get it, you aren't praying for the right thing". Neither of those satisfies me when (for example) I've prayed for two years for my mother- and father-in-law, and they're no closer to a meaningful relationship with Christ. Something else has to be going on. Maybe nothing happens because I've miss a day or two, even a week at a time, in there... :-P

There's a lot in there that I need to continue struggling with, but that's not why I'm writing. I'm writing because in spite of all of that, I am going to take the "Bob challenge". My wife and I are both praying over the next six months for God to open up some way in which Vanessa would be allowed to stay home as a full-time mom. This is not a "name it and claim it" type thing (no matter how sexy she'd look with baby car seats in our new Escalade). This is not an unreasonable thing to pray for — clearly God values family, and clearly families tend to be stronger when at least one parent is around and actively involved full-time. And this is not an outlandish thing, where we might be asking for a scad of money to support our $1500/day fabergé egg habit.

This seems to be the kind of thing God honors. It seems to be a noble thing. It seems to be in line with what God wants for families. We know the way He solves this might not be what we're expecting. But it's something we want, and I don't really see any way we're going to get there. So we're going to give this a shot and see what happens.

Have you ever done anything like this? I'd love to hear what happened, if anything. :-)

Posted by pcg at February 12, 2007 12:21 PM

Comments

Read the book, remember the story. I've never been disciplined enough to pray for something that long, so really can't offer any insight or anecdotal support. I can, however, offer encouragement for your goal and my own prayers for your family.

Please post updates.

Posted by: steve on February 12, 2007 11:54 PM

I feel very similarly to you in that I typically want names and dates when I hear stories like that. Not necessarily because I don't want to believe it, but because I really really want it to be true.

I've never prayed for anything specific for a tremendous length of time, except for praying for my sister to have a baby. She had been trying for a long time, and I prayed for her for a while. Maybe not 6 months, but at least 4. She eventually tried invitrio (sp?), and it didn't work. I don't know if I've ever seen her so heartbroken, and it crushed me.

Since then I've never really felt like I blame God for that, but it does confuse me, because I just wonder what he's doing there. The thing that frustrates me more is not that God is working in ways I can't understand, but that other Christians feel the need to say either a) you weren't praying for the right thing, b) well God has a plan for her to prosper that would have been better than this anyway, or c) she must have done something wrong. No one has said c to me, but a and b can be very frustrating.

So unfortunately the only example I have is when it didn't "work", but I guess I'll never really know what it means for it to "work" anyway.

Posted by: Morgan on February 15, 2007 10:56 AM

Steve: I know what you mean about praying for long periods of time. I've already woken up in the middle of the night, remembering to pray. You could say it's pretty heavily on my mind.

Morgan: wow, that really resonates with me. My aunt and uncle tried to have children off and on for something like 10 years before they adopted. I cannot even imagine the pain that must be involved with that process.

Your option b) sounds like so many sour grapes. The fact is that when God doesn't answer prayers (or, rather, answers them in a way we don't expect or understand, or answers them by saying, "No!") no one knows the "why". We can't even begin to imagine it; God simply has His own ways, and that's that... I guess...

Of course, that still doesn't seem to sit well some of the other stuff in the Bible:

"You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit--fruit that will last. Then the Father will give you whatever you ask in my name." (John 15:16)

And yet, He doesn't seem to do that. At least, not all of the time. So yeah, it's all very confusing to me. But to quote yet another spiritual platitude, "we are not called to understand God fully, we are called to obey Him." *sigh*

Posted by: pcg on February 15, 2007 11:48 AM