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Quaker Life
January/February 2003
Justifying God Amidst the Ruins
By Ron Selleck
"The greatest sin is prayerlessness," declared British theologian
P. T. Forsyth in The Soul of Prayer, penned during the First World War.
When the World Trade Center towers came down, many prayers went up. If
Forsyth is right, then we can be grateful that God worked for good what
man intended for evil. Tragedy overcame our prayerlessness. Prayerlessness
is the sin behind every sin. Therefore, whatever removes prayerlessness
becomes one of God's greatest gifts to us.
Prayerlessness, however, can hide behind much praying. Jesus criticized the Pharisees because they believed their many words would cause God to hear them. They coveted the reputation for devotion, but inwardly they were prayerless. As the recent priest scandals have demonstrated afresh, in our praying and religious activity, we too can become prayerless.
The basic prayer in all true prayer is "Thy will be done." Eloquent words may gain the approval of people, but God understands even our wordless sighs because he knows our hearts. Emotional, sentimental prayers may make us feel good, and may evoke similar feelings in others, but seldom accomplish great good because such prayers are apt to strengthen self-deception rather than expose it. True prayer reveals our deepest trouble and sets about to repair it. We cannot truly pray and remain blind to the ravages of sin.
Prayerlessness often begins in what looks like great spiritual achievement. Lurking amongst our good deeds is the restless desire to secure ourselves by our own efforts. When we lose the capacity to rest in God, we lose the capacity to pray in God's will. Rest is more basic to Christian life than activity. The Sabbath reminds us weekly that we do not subsist by our own efforts, but by the grace of God. Our efforts, at best, are merely grateful responses to what God has already promised to us.
If our anxious fretful efforts lead to success and popularity, we gradually lose interest in how we stand before God. Then we can become ripe for public humiliation because that may be the only way God can restore us to himself. We become spiritually stupid.
Prayerlessness and spiritual stupidity go hand in hand. This is not a matter of intelligence or natural endowment; spiritual stupidity is a moral consequence of our break in communion with God. This stupidity afflicts many who are otherwise highly educated, productive and highly esteemed in the world, but it marks the beginning of God's wrath. Paul calls it the "depraved mind." It is spiritual stupidity to restlessly strive to satisfy our wants when we do not want what satisfies. We work to fill ourselves with that which cannot fulfill us. True prayer relieves our spiritual stupidity.
True Prayer is a Gift
Our nature, by itself, is incapable of true prayer. We are religious enough, but all that our fascination with spirituality generates is varieties of idolatry. Most books about prayer are "How to" books offering recipes for acquiring and deploying spiritual power to achieve our own self-determined goals. We want a religion we can control, but this is more akin to magic than to Christian faith; we abhor a religion that provides us no basis for congratulating ourselves.
Genuine prayer begins with the recognition that before God, we are empty vessels of clay that cannot utter even one word aright. In the recognition of our neediness, we become receptive to God's approach to us in the Spirit of Jesus Christ. We recognize that he must breathe himself in, in order to draw us out.
Tragedy awakens our latent hunger for God. If we persist in prayer in those dark times, even when our prayers go unanswered, we discover ultimately that God has given us something far better than we had the sense to seek, the Answerer. God's greatest gift to us is himself in the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit reveals God's love for us and implants in us the desire for God that binds our soul to him in holy affection. True prayer, as Augustine says, "is affection for God articulating." This kind of prayer calls us out of ourselves to the only place we can find fulfillment, in God. The Holy Spirit prays in us, reconstructing our desires and appropriating God's promises for our concrete circumstances.
True Prayer Appropriates God's Moral Strength
Whoever seeks to follow Christ must prepare for opposition, struggle, hardship and hostility. Those who follow Christ for their own selfish aims lose both Christ and themselves. Paul glories in those weaknesses that make him contemptible to the Corinthians. "When I am weak then I am strong because then the power of Christ is revealed in me," he tells them. This kind of glorying requires supernatural strength.
When we place ourselves under the sign of the cross, we find calm, strength and restoration sufficient for our task. This moral strength is a gift, but like manna, a gift we must gather daily and use or it will rot.
The Promised Land was a gift but Joshua had to exercise faith for a lifetime and then, at the end, to fight. God spares us from many troubles, but he imparts his moral strength only in the midst of trouble. Sometimes we would gladly seek a shady spot to wait out our war but God calls us to fight and risk to obtain the promise. At those times, we must labor with all our might, while entrusting the outcome to God who promises victory to those who persevere.
Although we find ourselves stripped of all we hold dear, and despair even of life itself, yet so long as we continue in prayer, we secure our existence as Christians. Prayer restores our sense of self and enables us to go forward. Paul says that at Ephesus he was brought to the point of despairing even of life itself. "But this happened so that we could learn not to rely on ourselves but on God."
Real prayer restores our innermost sense of purpose. It puts us right morally and cannot fail to produce great effects. Here we discover, as Job did, that our meeting with God restores what our view of circumstances had destroyed—our inner capacity to form good purposes. Having laid our case before the judge of all the earth, we can go forward in confident expectation that he will vindicate our cause. The vision of God restored Job's broken soul. It can also restore ours.
God transformed Jonah's moment of greatest darkness when God at last broke through Jonah's stubborn prayerlessness. Then the belly of the fish became a sanctuary and Jonah's tomb became a sign of new life. Jonah acquired the strength to succeed at the task he most abhorred. If God restored his prophet who did not seek him, how much more will he restore us if we continue to ask, seek and knock?
Because darkness is often a prelude to theophany, we never know enough to give up on life or on God, though we may often have to let go of people or circumstances as a sign to them and as stewardship to the gifts God has given to us. This kind of giving up requires God's moral strength. Our insecurity can cause us to cling, when God would have us cling only to him.
True prayer, Forsyth says, "involves the thought of God pressing into action." We cannot truly pray and remain idle. Eventually we find ourselves active, but our activity has a different quality about it. We do works of faith rather than pursuing our own disorderly desires.
True Prayer is Communion
Prayer begins in need, want, sorrow and guilt, but if we persist in prayer, we will find that instead of praying ourselves out of trouble, the Spirit troubles our way into prayer. We are no longer the same. Our life has become reordered. No longer is prayer the means to life, but life has become the means to prayer. The conversation with God has become the orientation point for everything else. Then we come to realize that all of our times are in him. We no longer feel compelled to control outcomes but only seek to align ourselves with God's timing. We no longer feel the need to see the distant scene; one step is enough. We come to realize that the greatest pleasures in life are the simplest—daily bread, forgiveness, something to do and companionship.
We come to realize that what the world calls happiness and what Jesus calls happiness are not the same and we begin to seek happiness where Jesus says it is most to be found, in spiritual poverty. We come to realize that where there is no pain, gain seldom follows. By nature, we seek happiness as far from pain as possible.
By grace, we learn that the highest prayer we can make in trouble and distress is to ask that God turn our pain into a sacrament—that is, an efficacious sign of his presence. Then, the more we are troubled, the more firmly our souls are bound to Christ. Then, like Job, we become able to justify God amidst the ruins.
Ron Selleck earned his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and is a Recorded Minister. He is Professor of Philosophy and Ethics at John Wesley College and Assistant Dean of the Houston Graduate School of Theology/North Carolina in High Point.
Copyright (c) 2003 Friends United Meeting
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