What Can We Pray For?

Matthew 18:19:  “Again I say to you, that if two of you agree on earth about anything that they may ask, it shall be done for them by My Father who is in heaven.”

Matthew 7:7-12: “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened. Or what man is there among you who, when his son asks for a loaf, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, he will not give him a snake, will he? If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give what is good to those who ask Him! “In everything, therefore, treat people the same way you want them to treat you, for this is the Law and the Prophets.”

Don: In light of these passages (which are just two of many similar passages in the bible), what can we ask of god—what can we pray for? And what kind of responses should we expect? They have had both positive and negative effects and have generated quite a controversy in American culture and in Christianity in general. On the one hand, skeptics say the passages show that at least parts of the bible are obviously not true, that it is manifestly evident that you are not going to be given whatever you ask for. We can all probably attest to the truth of this from personal experience—I know I can! One website, evilbible.com, explicitly calls god a liar.

Another view holds that god means what he says and will do what he promises—he will give the things you ask for, he will open doors for you, and so on—in these passages, which have been called “the prosperity gospel.” This is an ancient belief. Blessings came from god, and if bad things happened to you then you must have something to deserve it. But in the story of the blind man in John 9 the first words out of his disciple’s mouth is “Whose sin caused his blindness? The man himself or his parents?”

As a boy I used to watch a Detroit televangelist called Reverend Ike, who believed that every believer should have a Cadillac in his or her driveway, and that to get one, all you had to do was to ask god for it and then to expect and believe that it would arrive. Oh, and by the way, sending ten percent of your income to Reverend Ike might speed things up a little. He was just an early version of a long line of prosperity gospel preachers, such as Oral Roberts, who proclaimed in the 1980s that god would strike him dead by a certain date if Oral’s followers did not contribute some enormous sum by then.

In his best-selling 2000 book The Prayer of Jabez: Breaking Through to the Blessed Life, prosperity preacher Bruce Wilkinson wrote about this topic. The prayer itself comes from 1 Chronicles 4:9-10:

Jabez was more honorable than his brothers, and his mother named him Jabez saying, “Because I bore him with pain.” [Jabez means “pain.”] Now Jabez called on the God of Israel, saying, “Oh that You would bless me indeed and enlarge my border [give me more land], and that Your hand might be with me, and that You would keep me from harm that it may not pain me!” And God granted him what he requested.

This book was so popular, I have been given at least eight copies as gifts from well-meaning friends. It was the talk of American Christendom, and a rallying cry for prosperity preachers. In order to be a recipient of prosperity, however, you must believe. So if you don’t get what you want, the problem must be with you for not having the right relationship with god.

So what does Jesus mean by his categorical statements “ask and you shall receive, seek and you shall find, knock and it shall be opened”? Is he really talking about health and wealth and literal prosperity? What should we ask for in our prayers? Jesus immediately follows up the statements with “When your son asks you for bread, you don’t give him a stone; when he asks you for a fish, you don’t give him a serpent; if he asks for an egg, you don’t give him a scorpion.” Bread, fish, and eggs are qualitatively different from Cadillacs and Rolexes. Is that significant?

Harry: Matthew 7:7 can be translated from the Greek in two different ways. Jesus was addressing the poor and downtrodden. He is trying to get them to seek a better life, and that takes effort. But we humans prefer to get a better life through magic rather than through effort. And it is this interpretation that the prosperity preachers love. The other way the passage could be translated is “Keep asking, and you will be answered; keep seeking, and you shall find; keep knocking, and the door will be opened.” This implies perseverance, and effort.

David: Matthew 7:11: “If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give what is good to those who ask Him!” [emphasis added] implies that what is asked for has to be something that a loving father would regard as “good” for his son. Is a Cadillac a “good” thing in and of itself? Is it a “good” gift to give a son? I suspect not, but who am I to decide? Do I really know what is good (both in and of itself, and for me in particular) and what is not? Of course not; at least, nowhere near as infallibly as god knows what is good (and good for me) and what is not.

Ada: There is god’s time and there is our time. Perhaps our prayers are all answered, but in god’s time, not in ours. We need patience.

Harry: Would we be disappointed if god did not answer our prayers but instead had given us the ability to solve our own problems?

David: An old saw says: “It’s better to teach a person how to fish, than to give them a fish.”

Don: Don’t we truly expect miracles from god? What is prayer worth otherwise?

Alice: The “Thy will be done” in the Lord’s prayer sheds light on these verses. It’s not what we pray for, it’s how we pray. If he wanted us to pray for things for ourselves, why would he want his will to be done? Since we cannot know what his will is, all we can do is completely surrender to it. Asking, seeking, and knocking imply only those actions; they do not imply that you can just reach out and grab what you want. If what you ask aligns with god’s will, then you can be sure it will be done. But it takes a lot of trust and faith, since you cannot know his will.

Jason: In the Lord’s prayer, “Thy will be done” comes first, before we ask for our daily bread, forgiveness of our trespasses, etc. Alice is right. By omitting the all-important will of god, the bible writers or translators have left us with a prosperity gospel, perhaps because that is what they as humans wanted! If they had included the primacy of faith, god’s will, and god’s time, it would be very different.

Emma: Positive thinking in prayer is a gift of god and brings positive results.

Michael: What is good to ask for? I tend to think that god has a list of basic human rights that he will give if we ask for them. An example is health. Even more basic is happiness. But money does not seem to fit in such a list.

Don: Romans 8:26 says we don’t know how to pray and we don’t know what to ask for:

In the same way the Spirit also helps our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we should, but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words; and He who searches the hearts knows what the mind of the Spirit is, because He intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.

Whatever we pray for will be filtered through the holy spirit.

Alice: The holy spirit knows the will of god and will “adjust” our prayers accordingly. It will pray for the right thing for us.

David: Praying for material things is hardly unique to Christianity. In China, people pray to specific gods for specific things.

Don: We’ll talk more about this next week.

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