I was missing, of course, the connection between the Bible study and the prayer. I was missing an understanding of how people in the Bible prayed, what they talked to God about and what they asked him for. As Alistair Begg points out in his recent book Pray Big, none of the prayers in the Bible use those two little words that we so often rely on: ‘be with’.
I grew up in a Christian home attending a good, solid, Bible-believing church. We were taught from the Word every Sunday, and in the middle of the week would meet in homes to study it some more and to pray.
The prayer part was interesting. Which is to say it was usually very dull, but interesting from an anthropological standpoint. The prayers rarely seemed to pick up on the themes of the study (except when someone felt we hadn’t agreed sufficiently with his/her point and tried to convince God to make it clear to us), but would most often be rather feeble requests of the type that asked us to pray that God would heal Aunty Ethel’s elbow, which had been giving her trouble again.
I couldn’t articulate this back then, but certainly by the time I was at uni I was beginning to feel that this wasn’t 100% what prayer could be. It was supposed to be powerful and effective, wasn’t it? There were people who could do it for hours, and find it meaningful and worthwhile. What was I missing?
I was missing, of course, the connection between the Bible study and the prayer. I was missing an understanding of how people in the Bible prayed, what they talked to God about and what they asked him for. As Alistair Begg points out in his recent book Pray Big, none of the prayers in the Bible use those two little words that we so often rely on: ‘be with’.
If you were to record my prayers, I have a sad suspicion you’d hear a lot of “be with”: “Dear Lord, I pray you will be with Tom as he goes to work, and be with Mary also, who’s having her wisdom teeth removed on Tuesday, and be with… and be with… and be with… and be with us all. Amen.” This is unimaginative. It’s limited. It’s certainly not spiritually ambitious, like Paul is. And it is, I think, unnecessary. Jesus said, “Behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matthew 28 v 20). He’s promised to be with Tom and with Mary. It’s a bit of a waste to make the sum total of my prayer for them the request that Jesus would do what he already said he’d do, and has already started doing.1
Furthermore, Tim Keller tweeted last year, “It’s remarkable that in all of his writings Paul’s prayers for his friends contain no appeals for changes in their circumstances.” Instead “he prays for what they really need. He prays not for a change in their circumstances, but a change in their hearts.”
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