What About Prayer?

When a Christian embraces releasing and/or inquiry, he or she must consider the role of prayer. In fact, even without releasing and inquiry the role of prayer must be questioned.

Word of Faith

From around 1998 to 2005 I was heavily into a branch of Christianity which is known as Word of Faith. I bought most of the books on faith by Kenneth E. Hagin. Hagin often wrote in his books that everything that pertains to life is written in the Bible; any need that you have, if it is written in the Bible, you can have it if you believe it and claim it. Hence the nickname “Name it and Claim it”.

Up until the moment a Christian gets hold of this faith teaching, they are inclined to use prayer as a means of asking God for things. But faith teaching focuses on Bible verses that tell you what you already have in Christ. For example, 1 Peter 2:24 NIV says, “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed.” So if you were to pray along the lines of this verse, you might make the following declaration, “1 Peter 2:34 says that by Jesus’ wounds I was healed. Christ bore my wounds on the cross; He bore my sickness so that I don’t have to. I therefore declare that I am already healed.”

Back-up Verse Theology

The problem with Word of Faith is that you end-up living your life by anxiously finding Bible verses to back-up everything you do or want. Darin Hufford of the The Free Believers Network calls this concept, "Back-up Verse Theology". Christians really can get rather obsessive with this concept, to the point were they can’t even go to the grocery store to buy some milk, without first having a back-up verse to support it.

Back-up Verse Theology disconnects the heart and gets a person into making decisions based on written text. Furthermore, a person can basically make scripture mean anything they want it to: if you get six different people to read a Bible verse, you could get six different interpretations. People might disagree with that statement, but I have seen it happen time and again. It is like a lot of other things in life, in that you only hear what you want to hear, you only see what you want to see and you only believe what you want to believe. A person’s interpretation of scripture, therefore, is largely determined by their needs, aspirations, fears, and pride and life experiences thus far. Human beings are essentially selfish by nature; we tend to want what is best for us and our nearest-and-dearest.

Prayer and Blessings

Kenneth E. Hagin’s books on faith were just like the extravagant claims made by many evangelists today: Hagin would quote a scripture text, his interpretation of the text, how he prayed or confessed that text and what happened as a result. This inevitably leads some Christians to believe that they can pray the same prayer and be blessed in a similar spectacular fashion. This approach fosters fanaticism and fantasy – leading people into an alternate existence that is far removed from reality.

Prayer is not a “magic wand” that you can use in order to get blessed how you want, when you want. Despite this, preachers know how to manipulate a crowd of predictable, desperate Christians by playing the crowd according to their needs. Preachers will often use clichés and pep-talk to stir-up the crowd’s fantasies. They will say things like, “God doesn’t just want to do something good in your life – He wants to do something amazing!” Okay, there might be an element of truth in that, but I cannot help but feel that it can get you away from reality and into a realm were you have your head in the clouds expecting something miraculous to happen, rather than just getting on with your life in the here-and-now. Miracles can and do happen, I won’t doubt that, but we can run into difficulty when we are “believing God” for this or that.

Prayer is not a means of “blackmailing” God into giving you what you want. Some Christians will pray something along the lines of, “Lord, Lord, Your Word says that if I sow diligently then I will reap a harvest. Now you know Lord that I’ve been making a lot of effort serving in the Sunday school at church for two years now. So I now demand that I reap the reward for the good work that I have sowed…” Basically, blackmailing God doesn’t work!

It never ceases to amaze me how long a person can be held captive by the promises of charismatic preachers. It is tempting to believe that if you could just pray the right sequence of prayers persistently enough – you could experience the same kind of miracles that you hear about in the lives of other people in the church. But it is only when years have passed by in your life and nothing significant has happened that you finally being to consider that perhaps none of these amazing, way-out things you’ve been hoping and praying for are actually going to happen. At that point it is quite possible to lapse into despair or perhaps get angry towards the church, and maybe God, because you feel that you’ve been duped.

For more information on this subject, check out Darin Hufford’s blog on Spiritual Porn Addiction and the The Free Believers Network podcast The Lust of Sensationalism, April 14, 2010.

The Grace Message

Since 2004 or 2005 I came into what is known as the “grace message”, which moves away from rule keeping and into the love of God. Most Christians, who come into the grace message, first go through a season of religious legalism. This season of religious legalism can often last for several years. It seems that the legalism, which represents the Old Testament, seems to prepare the heart for love, by providing a contrast of what love is not.

The grace message moves away from religious performance and focuses more on knowing that you are right with God, just the way you are, without having to keep rules and modify your behaviour. This is a huge relief to those people who have believed that they need to maintain a certain standard of holiness; otherwise, they would be cursed by God.

The grace message looks back upon Word of Faith teaching and explains why it does not work and what faith really is. From this perspective, we can see just how much of an effort it really is to accurately identify what you genuinely need, find a Bible verse that says you can have it (or that it is already yours) and then confess it until you receive it. Wouldn’t it be so much better to be blessed by God when you don’t even expect it?

The grace message focuses on the words of Jesus in Matthew 6:31:33.

³¹ "Therefore do not worry, saying, 'What shall we eat?' or 'What shall we drink?' or 'What shall we wear?' ³² "For after all these things the Gentiles seek. For your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. ³³ "But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you.

Matthew 6:31-33

So it seems that the secret to getting your needs met and living in abundance, seems to be to not worry about things. Despite this verse, we still tend to worry about basic provision. As soon as we feel anxious about what we need, we start to plan and figure things out – we are worrying about it. A lot of so-called prayer is motivated out of worry. Some people pray because they worry that God won’t provide for them unless they do. We get this impression that God is sitting at a desk in Heaven, stacked high with prayer requests and that we need to convey to God how important our need is, otherwise, we will just be ignored. It is truly exhausting to have to pray about every little thing in your life and for the lives of others.

Real faith comes when we embrace the concept that God loves us and knows what’s best for us; that we just need to trust in Him and not worry about things and that He will meet our needs, as and when they arise, without us having to pester Him about them.

Prayer as Heart-Felt Expression

So is prayer is not required to get our basic needs met – what is its purpose? There is always a motive behind a prayer. Fear and lust can motivate a person to pray, to an extent. But fear and lust tend to not last that long and eventually you get worn out. Love is the more powerful motivating force that enables a person to endure with a situation or activity for however long it takes. When a person prays out of fear or obligation, they tend to just “worry their prayers”. Prayer as a religious obligation tends to be awkward, repetitive, predictable, mechanical and ineffective.

It is only when prayer is expressed naturally from the heart that it becomes something intimate and powerful. Prayer is therefore, an expression of the heart towards God, as part of an intimate relationship with Him. Prayer is not a means of “getting stuff”.

The best example of prayer in the Bible, I believe, is King David in the book of Psalms. David often cries out to God, expresses himself naturally and lovingly. David obviously had a strong relationship with God and experienced the presence of God and His favour on his life, firsthand. David prayed boldly; he knew what he wanted and did not pray according to a formula that someone else had recommended.

When Prayer Does not Seem to Work

I think one of the definitions of madness is to do the same thing over and over again, expecting the same result every time (when it actually never happens). We are told in James 5:14 that if someone is sick, you can call for the elders of the church to pray the prayer of faith and they will be healed. Well, it seemed to work every time for Jesus – but it does not seem to work a lot of the time for most Christians. Despite this, we will still pray the same prayers over and over again, expecting the same result.

I reached a point whereby I just got fed-up with prayer and just stopped doing it. Christians get prayer requests all the time from people on the internet or in church. I tend to just ignore prayer requests now, because I know it just won’t work. This sounds like I don’t have faith, but I just don’t want to feel that sense of disappointment when my prayer does not get an answer. I’m not alone in this and I know that many Christians feel the same, but won’t admit it. Fortunately, The Free Believers Network hosts have expressed these same feelings about prayer as I have.

I cannot tell you the amount of times I’ve tried to pray and nothing has happened. Despite being single for many years and reading lots of books on faith and prayer – still I find that my mind goes blank a lot of the time when I sincerely attempt to pray about something. It reminds me of a blog entry on the hugely popular blog Stuff Christians Like, entitled Treating our quiet times like magic spells.

I do believe that prayer does work and it is powerful. But unless you are like King David in the Bible with a strong, intimate relationship with God – prayer could very well be a struggle for you. Prayer can actually become something that works against us in that it becomes an excuse to rail against God and to express your fears and anger towards Him, in a way that seems acceptable, even Biblical. Prayer can also be a bit of a cop-out, a platitude, an excuse that we use to avoid something, “Don’t worry brother – I’ll pray for you…” This reminds me of the The Free Believers Network podcast episode, “Using the God Card To Avoid Intimacy”, 11^th December 2009. In this podcast, the hosts discuss the ways in which people blindly use Christian lingo as a way to hide from intimacy with others.

Sometimes people need our practical help more than they need our prayers. As James 2:14-16 points out:

¹⁴ What good is it, my brothers, if a man claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save him?

¹⁵ Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food.

¹⁶ If one of you says to him, "Go, I wish you well; keep warm and well fed," but does nothing about his physical needs, what good is it?

James 2:14-16 NIV

Perhaps then, it is best for insecure Christians to actually leave prayer for a while until they believe that they are loved by God and right with Him? Knowing that everything flows from there, including met needs. I don’t want to try to lay down a spiritual “template” here and try to establish rules and guidelines. If you really want to pray, then by all means, pray! But I think it helps if we can somehow get the right perspective on prayer and to really examine our motives behind it.

Inquiry – The Only Prayer You Will Ever Need?

I think the transition from prayer to inquiry has been greatly facilitated by the realisation that God is not waiting for me to pray, ask, claim or attract things, before He will move in my life and bless me with something. Neither is faith based around concepts, such as believing in the virgin birth, miracles, the rapture and so forth. Faith is not a means of “believing God” for something, like a new car or a spouse. God knows what we need and is more than willing to provide us with those things. But I am convinced that what gets in the way of this process is our own thinking, more to the point, our worrying; worry is, of course, an expression of fear. When we worry about having something, we really don’t believe that we can have it. Yet faith says that we already have something.

Genuine faith believes that God is good and that we are accepted by God just as we are. When you come out of religious legalism, you can still have some rather restrictive beliefs that prompt anxious thoughts. Inquiry is the idea means by which we can question those anxious thoughts and come to see that they are not true.

The truth of the matter is that to a great extent, none of us really know in the long run where our lives are going to lead, and therefore, what we really need in this moment. We could be praying for things we don’t need or things that would not be good for us at this moment.

Inquiry works by inquiring into the anxious thoughts that arise in the moment, the thoughts that insist that we need a certain thing or that a certain person or situation needs to be changed. Rather than taking an anxious thought and trying to reverse it or find relief from it by wishing, hoping and praying for something else – it would be better if we simply questioned that thought in order to find relief from it that way. But it would seem that we are often reluctant to resist and relinquish these anxious thoughts that insist we need this or that. A thought that cries, “I need more money”, can prompt many anxious prayers to God demanding that very thing. It takes a certain spiritual maturity and a change of perspective to question that thought using inquiry, knowing from the outset that the conclusion, the turnaround, is going to be, “I don’t need more money.” It is the freedom from these thoughts that brings lasting peace and the ability to live your life as it was meant to be lived – until you find relief from anxious thoughts – you may never truly know what that is. I do believe that there is scope for asking God for things in prayer, the Bible seems contain many such instances. But until I reach the kind of level of boldness, intimacy and trust towards God – my prayers are likely to be nothing more than expressions of insecurity or dull rituals.