Prayer 4: Answers

Don: How do we know if our prayers are answered? The Book of Judges gives some guidance, where Gideon asks for authentication that god is indeed the entity communicating with him:

Judges 6:12: The angel of the Lord appeared to him and said to him, “The Lord is with you, O valiant warrior.”

Gideon’s response is what perhaps many of us would have said:

Judges 6:13-14: Then Gideon said to him, “O my lord, if the Lord is with us, why then has all this happened to us?

This is the universal cry of Man: “If you are with me, then why am I sick? Why did I lose my job? Why am I having trouble in my marriage?…” and so on. He continues:

And where are all His miracles which our fathers told us about, saying, ‘Did not the Lord bring us up from Egypt?’ But now the Lord has abandoned us and given us into the hand of Midian.”

This is another common cry of mankind. The scripture continues:

The Lord looked at him and said, “Go in this your strength and deliver Israel from the hand of Midian. Have I not sent you?”

Gideon then begins to bargain with god concerning the authentication of the message, of the assurance that god will be with him:

Judges 6:16-19: But the Lord said to him, “Surely I will be with you, and you shall defeat Midian as one man.” So Gideon said to Him, “If now I have found favor in Your sight, then show me a sign that it is You who speak with me. Please do not depart from here, until I come back to You, and bring out my offering and lay it before You.” And He said, “I will remain until you return.”

After some intervening activity, Gideon makes a specific demand for authentication. Even though he receives the authentication, he is still not satisfied and asks god for yet another sign:

Judges 6:36-40: Then Gideon said to God, “If You will deliver Israel through me, as You have spoken, behold, I will put a fleece of wool on the threshing floor. If there is dew on the fleece only, and it is dry on all the ground, then I will know that You will deliver Israel through me, as You have spoken.” And it was so. When he arose early the next morning and squeezed the fleece, he drained the dew from the fleece, a bowl full of water. Then Gideon said to God, “Do not let Your anger burn against me that I may speak once more; please let me make a test once more with the fleece, let it now be dry only on the fleece, and let there be dew on all the ground.” God did so that night; for it was dry only on the fleece, and dew was on all the ground.

How can we be reassured, as Gideon was?

Billy Graham once requested on his website that people share with him the things that they pray for. People prayed: That a son who had died be allowed into heaven; to be given enough faith so that one’s prayers are answered; for help with financial trouble; for prosperity, wisdom, and courage, a good husband, to make a difference; to help a loved one who is an addict; to save a man from prison; to help a grandson who failed a hearing test; to treat a metastatic breast cancer; to protect a brother about to undergo surgery; to get god back in control in America; to close a business transaction; and to have a better life and become a millionaire.

I had a patient, Elizabeth, a young woman with a very serious pancreatic tumor. She belonged to an evangelical church, which organized special prayers for her. To my great surprise, as a surgeon who knew that such cancers as hers usually lead quickly to death, she responded very well over the following months to chemotherapy and then to surgery, in which I excised the entire remaining cancer. There was no residual tumor. She was of course overjoyed, and gave videotaped testimony at her church of the power of prayer, a copy of which she gave to me. She was fine for about 16 months, but then a CT scan revealed she had multiple tumors and died within 6 weeks. When she told her church that the cancer had returned, they asked her to confess her sins and to consider what she had done to deserve god’s revoking of his answer to her prayer. She was of course utterly devastated, in every way.

How do we know that our prayers are answered? Is it even important to know? It is intoxicating to think that we can harness god’s power on our own behalf. But if our prayers don’t appear to be answered, does that indeed mean that he is not answering? Are there tests we can administer to validate our communication with god, as Gideon did?

Elizabeth’s initial recovery from her cancer was not a miracle to me, because I knew how chemotherapy works and that it was working in her case. But it was a miracle to her, since she did not know how chemotherapy works.

David: The notion that god will respond to prayer in celestial Santa Claus fashion is a forlorn one. Most of the prayers on the Billy Graham website had to do with a better life, or being healed; there were no prayers at all for what Jesus has told us would make us truly blessed: Lord help me be poor in spirit, for then I shall see the kingdom of heaven; let me mourn, so I shall be comforted; let people insult and persecute me, so that my reward in heaven will be great. Should we not pray, above all else, to be blessed?

Harry: The Gideon story seems far-fetched. I find it hard to believe it was a true story. The reality is that we are all going to die, so why pray for a longer life? The tragic story of Don’s patient shows the futility of believing in fables such as the Gideon story. Prayer is more a matter of reflection.

Robin: The Book of Psalms is nothing but prayer. In Gethsemane, Jesus asked the disciples to pray with him. Why would Jesus demonstrate the importance of prayer if prayer were useless? It’s a matter of faith that one’s prayers will be answered.

Jason: In Mark 11:23-24, Jesus asserts:

“Truly I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and cast into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says is going to happen, it will be granted him. Therefore I say to you, all things for which you pray and ask, believe that you have received them, and they will be granted you.”

This seems pretty unambiguous, and it does not seem to relate to a response of god’s grace. If you want to curse a fig tree, just believe it, and that tree is a goner! But still, Jesus follows up immediately (in verses 25-6) with what seems to be a condition:

Whenever you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against anyone, so that your Father who is in heaven will also forgive you your transgressions. But if you do not forgive, neither will your Father who is in heaven forgive your transgressions.”

Harry: Maybe the moving of the mountain is a metaphor for forgiving others. That would make a lot more sense than the notion that god will do anything you want. It’s hard—miraculous, perhaps—to be able to forgive.

Jason: Gethsemane is in stark contrast to Mark 11, which on the face of it is about getting what you want. In Gethsemane, god asks specifically, three times, not to die. Yes, he says “Thy will be done,” but still, his prayer not to die was clearly rejected, or not heard.

Don: The dilemma is that while nobody wants to serve a powerless god who will not help us, we often cannot see that god is in fact helping us. So to me, the purpose of prayer is not to harness the power of god for personal use; it’s purpose is something entirely different. That misunderstanding has been the cause of so much anguish and sorrow and loss of faith. I think of Elizabeth and how she suffered because of her belief in the former kind of prayer.

Ada: As human beings, we expect immediate responses. We need to be patient, and we need to accept that the answer, when it comes, may not be what we expect.

David: We have so anthropomorphized god that he is no more than a big cuddly teddy bear with enormous power. But to me god is a much bigger concept; an entity utterly unconcerned with our prayers for “stuff” not because he doesn’t care but because he knows that they don’t matter. If prayer is an expression of hope, as I think someone here has suggested, then prayer is an essential aspect of life. If (as I believe) we cannot live without hope, and if prayer is hope, then we cannot live without prayer.

Alice: It seems there are prayers initiated by us, and prayers initiated by god. The former include prayers said ritually, or out of habit. But in my experience, god will sometimes touch my heart, through fear or sadness or hope or some other feeling, urging me to call him, to pray.

Robin: John 11 gives another example of Jesus praying, thanking god for the resurrection of Lazarus. It was said for the benefit of the bystanders.

Alice: Prayer is a game of patience.

Harry: By all means pray if it works for you. I have a basic form of prayer, just talking to him while I am driving to work. It’s a far cry from formal prayer, and I have to remind myself to do it, and I have to be in the right frame of mind, but I generally feel better when I do it.

David: I recall an old Peter Cooke and Dudley Moore movie (Bedazzled) in which Cooke plays the Devil and offers Moore three wishes in return for his soul. So to test him, Moore demands an ice cream cone with sprinkles on it (or something like that.) He, and the audience, expect the ice cream cone to materialize right then and there, but instead, the Devil takes Moore on a long walk around the neighborhood until they chance across an ice cream van, from which the Devil buys the cone and presents it to Moore. Moore is not impressed. It’s an illustration that we cannot really know when our prayers (to god or the devil) are answered.

Don: The physiological effects of prayer are the subject of intense investigation. We touched upon this a couple of weeks ago. Scans of Buddhist monks, Franciscan nuns,  and others engaged in meditative prayer have revealed very positive physiologic outcomes, including better oxygenation, enhanced T cell proliferation in immune response, increase in blood flow, slowing of the heart, and so on. Is this how we should measure the outcome of prayer, rather than measuring whether people received a million dollars or not?

Harry: If prayer helps you alleviate your fear, that alone is a miracle. Fear is so destructive. And on another matter: SDA churches are so plain and boring. Catholic churches, with their rich architecture and iconry, seem to me to be more conducive to putting one in a mood for prayer.

Don: I don’t want to leave the subject of prayer without having some sense of its value. Jesus made it a central part of his life, and humans have always practiced it. So it has to be important. There must be value in it. What’s in question is what prayer is, how it should be taught and practiced. It seems that bad prayer is worse than no prayer at all. I am thinking of Elizabeth, hurt so badly by prayer of the wrong sort. The chaplain for the US Senate, Barry Black is an Adventist, and he is now praying that the government shutdown be averted. This is a political prayer. Is this the kind of thing god wants us to pray for? [Postscript: The shutdown has since been averted. Was this because of Chaplain Black’s prayer?—DE]

David: The chief reason we pray the wrong sort of prayer is Judeo-Christian scripture itself. It is so contradictory. The scientific validity of the positive effects of meditative prayer suggests that perhaps we all need to become Buddhist in order to pray properly!

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