Dear God
Dear God, please help me to lose weight. Amen
Have you ever prayed a prayer like that? I mean it doesn’t have to be about losing weight. Maybe you asked for help to stop smoking, or for the courage to stop hanging out with the wrong people, or for the ability to get up earlier in the morning, or to help you get a job, or for the strength to stop eating so many doughnuts. Or whatever it is that you pray for. Its a pretty common prayer. We all ask for things. We all pray prayers just like that. The only problem is that so often we pray for things like “God, please help me to be a better father” then we say amen and turn the t.v. on and ignore our children. Or we say amen and shout our order into the drive through sign. The question is what the heck do we expect from God? Do we really think that God is just going to magically do things for us? I think too often we treat him like a genie in a magic lamp, and if we rub the lamp he will pop up and grant our three wishes. The bible does tell us to present our requests to God.
We pray and say amen then walk away and go back to our daily lives waiting for our prayers to get answered. Then we get mad when our prayers seem ‘ineffective’. The part that I think so many of us overlook or forget is that is says to do so with “thanksgiving” and to “believe and not doubt”. We are supposed to have faith in God’s ability to do the things that we ask of him. Jesus said in the book of Mark that we are supposed to pray for things as if they have already happened. That is the key. Faith. Faith is the thing that so often lacks from our prayers. The bible describes faith as being “certain of what we hope for and sure of what we do not see”. The book of James speaks a lot of faith. He says that “faith without works is dead”, in some versions it says “useless”. James talks about Abraham and how when God made a promise to Abraham, Abraham didn’t just sit on his but and wait for it to happen, but he acted on the promise. Abraham made a move towards the promise. James calls this faith. Perhaps that is what truly lacks from our prayers. Action. Its all well and good to ask for the ability to stop smoking, but if its not followed by some kind of movement towards that goal perhaps it won’t go anywhere.
My question is when you pray, are you waiting for God to act, or is he waiting for you to act?