You Don't Know What You're Asking For!

So often, I pray for things that seem right to me:

“God, I want to be more humble, so break the pride in me.”

“God, I want to trust you more. Please increase my faith.”

“God, my life is yours. Please use me to bring you glory.”

I pray these things with the end in mind, but never once taking into consideration what it might require to make these things true of me. Perhaps I think that God will just magically zap me with humility or faith. Yet, as I survey the lives of those who have asked similar things of their God, I quickly begin to see that God’s response was usually neither instantaneous nor comfortable.

Take James and John, two brothers who got to travel with Jesus and watch him minister first hand. At one point in the journey, they asked Jesus to let them sit at his right and left hand, the places of greatest honor, once he came into his glory. Yet, Jesus replies: “You don’t know what you are asking. Can you drink the cup I drink or be baptized with the baptism I am baptized with?”(Mark 10:38). These two young men thought they were asking to share in Jesus’ honor when he overthrew the Roman occupiers and established his reign over the Kingdom of Israel. They had no idea what following their Lord really meant. Regardless of how many times Jesus tried to warn his disciples that his path to glory was paved with suffering and death, they were still shocked when he was handed over to the Roman authorities to be beaten, mocked and ultimately executed next to common criminals. James and John longed to join Jesus in his glory and went so far as to ask for it outright, but they had no idea that to follow him would mean to share in his suffering.

Or consider Mother Teresa, whom we hold up as a paradigm of the faith. She asked God to allow her to join him in his work, to be used for His glory, and she was answered with…silence. Her personal journals reveal that throughout five decades of ministry to the poor in Calcutta, she felt an immense loneliness and disconnection to her God. What makes this silence so remarkable is that it came right on the heels of God’s call for her to move from the relative comfort of teaching in a convent to living amongst the sick and destitute in the streets of Calcutta. One priest who has studied Mother Teresa’s life closely shared that “for this woman who loved God above everything else, loss of the divine presence was the ultimate sacrifice that emptied her soul but mysteriously energized her mission.”

As a father, I have often prayed for my son, asking God to bless him with things like strength, maturity, and a strong faith in Him. But I have to admit that I rarely, if ever, think about how God will develop these qualities in my son. Recently, a close friend of mine related the following experience to me: He had just put his children to bed and was spending some time praying for each of them. As he prayed for his son, asking God to make him a strong man of faith who was a strong and mature leader, he distinctly heard God say: “You know I’m going to have to hurt him, don’t you?” My friend admitted that upon hearing this he physically shrank back, as if trying to protect his son from God. “No,” he thought, “bless him but don’t hurt him.” Yet, as he thought about it, God revealed to him that trials and pain really are the most direct path to growth. No athlete can prepare for competition without experiencing the pain of practice. And no soil can be prepared for the seed without the sharp sting of the plow. Similarly, it’s through pain and hardship that we develop perseverance and strength. It’s in the midst of trials that we develop maturity. And it’s only when we realize that our own strength and determination are not up to the task that we learn to lean on God and faith is developed.  It’s easy to ask for things like strength and faith, patience and maturity without thinking about the ways in which God will develop these things in us.

John Newton experienced this fact first hand. He was a converted slave trader who longed to grow in his spiritual maturity and intimacy with God. Yet, as his poetic confession reveals, he never anticipated the way God would answer his prayers:

I asked the Lord that I might grow
  In faith and love and every grace
Might more of His salvation know
  And seek more earnestly His face

‘Twas He who taught me thus to pray
  And He I trust has answered prayer
But it has been in such a way
  As almost drove me to despair

I hoped that in some favored hour
  At once He'd answer my request
And by His love's constraining power
  Subdue my sins and give me rest

Instead of this He made me feel
  The hidden evils of my heart
And let the angry powers of Hell
  Assault my soul in every part.

Yea more with His own hand He seemed
  Intent to aggravate my woe
Crossed all the fair designs I schemed,
  Cast out my feelings, laid me low

“Lord why is this?” I trembling cried.
  “Wilt Thou pursue thy worm to death?”
"’Tis in this way" The Lord replied
  "I answer prayer for grace and faith"

“These inward trials I employ
  From self and pride to set thee free,
And break thy schemes of earthly joy
  That thou might find thy all in me."