6 Prayer Snares and 5 Prayer Pointers

source:Beyond Prayer Requests
buildingsmallgroups.com
article outlines 6 prayer snares and 5 prayer pointers

Groups should consider whether their requests line up with what God is doing.
By Wayne Jacobsen

You'd have thought I'd just cussed by the way the mouths around the
table soundlessly fell open. And all I'd said was "I don't think I can
pray that for you."

The woman who had just asked us to pray was perhaps the most shocked of all.

My home group had just finished eating dinner, and we were sharing
prayer requests. With obvious distress, Kris had told of her
daughter's plan to move in with a boyfriend that weekend, and asked us
to pray that God wouldn't allow it.

I usually try not to take exception to people's prayer requests, but I
have a low tolerance for requests I think God clearly will not answer.
On this occasion, I didn't keep quiet.

Once they all caught their breath, I explained. "I think all of us
here can understand why you want God to stop her from doing that. If
anyone here feels that's what God wants, you're free to pray that way.
I'm wondering, however, whether asking God to override someone's
ability to make moral choices isn't akin to witchcraft."

I could see Kris was near seething at my bluntness, so I hurried on.
"What I suggest we pray for is that God would reveal himself to your
daughter. That he would let her see clearly the choice she is making.
And that God will show you how to trust him and love your daughter,
even if she makes the stupidest mistake of her young life."

I had hardly finished before Kris blurted out through tears, "That's
exactly what I need."

We gathered around her to pray. Instead of praying for the situation
not to take a distressing turn, we prayed for Kris. What could have
been a sympathetic but shallow exercise in prayer became a marvelous
discovery of how God works in difficult situations.

Prayer Snares

At most prayer meetings a host of requests are made, then a handful of
people offer quick prayers until the list is covered. Rarely do we
stop to ask if a particular prayer request is in line with what God is
doing. Rarely do we follow up to find out if God answered.

We are often left praying a list of wishes, as though if we throw
enough darts at the balloons on the wall, we're bound to hit one of
them.

My young son awakened me to the folly of this. We were reading John 15
one morning for a family devotion when he suddenly blurted out,
"That's not true!" I had just read the verse about God giving us
whatever we ask of him. But my five-year-old was already aware that
most of what we prayed for as a family didn't happen. I wondered if
our prayer practices were teaching him, whether we liked it or not,
that prayer is only wishful thinking.

While the exercise of prayer itself offers comfort for the moment, I'm
afraid many prayer requests teach us to use God like a genie in a
bottle. I don't want my son, or my brothers and sisters, to get that
impression. I'm no longer comfortable praying for things that I'm not
convinced are in sync with God's heart.

Here are certain types of prayer requests that reflect more our human
desires than the desires of God. Do these sound familiar?

The trivial: "Let's pray I can get over this cold" or "Give us a
rain-free day for the church picnic." Our comfort and our plans seem
important to us, but might God have something larger in mind? Might
the farmers around us desperately need the rain? Our requests need to
reflect things we truly expect God to do, not just our thoughtless
hopes and whims. I don't want my requests to trivialize the awesome
gift of prayer.

The self-motivated: "My brother's unit just got called up to go to
Iraq. Let's pray he won't have to go." While I can understand the
emotion behind the request, it is still misplaced. If he's in the
military, why shouldn't he go? God's purposes frequently include
hardship and risk. Should we ask him to trump his purposes for our
convenience?

The controlling: As with Kris' request, I think we're spitting into
the wind if we ask God to make other people act according to our will.
He doesn't even force people to adhere to his will. Why should he make
them act according to ours?

The manipulative: Not all prayer requests are directed at God. We're
usually more diplomatic about it than Charissa, who was only four
years old, but knew what she wanted. "Jesus, would you help Bob and
Laurie learn how to spank their children, so their kids won't hit me
when I come over?" I'll admit it worked for Charissa, but I don't
think prayer was intended to send subtle (or not so subtle) messages
to the faithful.

The blaming: A group in my former church was praying for an infertile
woman. They thought she wasn't getting pregnant because her husband
wasn't godly enough be a good father. So they asked God to change him.
She blamed him and tried to manipulate him to change, and by the time
she came to see me, she was incredibly frustrated. I told her I
thought they'd missed the point. None of us qualify for God's gifts.
If God waited until everyone was ready to have a baby, no one would
ever give birth.

The mass-produced: I don't know why we think we have a better chance
of getting prayers answered if more people are in on it. Like many of
you, I receive prayer requests on the Internet begging me to pray for
people I don't know, about needs I'm not involved in. God's answers to
prayer are not based on a tally sheet. Prayer was designed for two or
three faithful believers to focus on, agree, and fervently intercede,
rather than enlisting large numbers of uninvolved people.

Prayer Pointers

Prayer enables us to discover what God is doing, to trace his hand in
the circumstances of our lives. Through the vital communication of
prayer, he transforms us in the process. Prayer, therefore, is not so
much a means of manipulating the master plan, but of being shaped by
the master's hand.

Not all prayer groups are conducive to that kind of prayer. Not all
requests follow that understanding. Consider five guidelines to direct
your prayer times to foster a transformational, ongoing walk with God.

1. Focus prayer on the people involved. The temptation at
"prayer-request time" is to narrow the request to action points we
want God to undertake or gifts we want him to give. That misses what
God considers most important.

When the news arises of a brother sent to war, the opportunity for
prayer is not to ask God to keep him home. That limits the scope of
prayer to events, when it should be focused on people. It also limits
the other pray-ers to a specific request, without offering an
opportunity to discern God's heart in the matter.

Instead, address the fears of his sister, the worry of his mother, and
the faith of the soldier himself. We can pray that God will mold our
courage and our ability to trust, that he will help us overcome fears,
and that the brother will recognize God's presence. These are the
evidences of God's work and the kinds of prayers he answers.

I've discovered that smaller groups give us time to process someone's
struggle and help identify God's work. Even home-sized groups can be
too big for this kind of prayer. I have always found it more effective
to break down in groups of two or three where people really know each
other and give them the time to explore the situation together.

2. Seek God's perspective. Most prayer requests fit what we think is
best, and often run counter to what God is actually doing.

I love how Peter and John responded to the Pharisee's threats that
they stop proclaiming Jesus or face punishment. When they gathered
later with other believers to pray, they didn't pray for what would be
easiest. They could have prayed God would convert the Pharisees or
wipe them from the face of the earth. But they didn't see either of
those options as fitting God's design. Instead, they prayed for
boldness to continue to do what God asked, even when they knew they
might be beaten, imprisoned, or executed for it.

A primary step in prayer should include asking God to reveal what he
is doing in the situation and pausing long enough to let him answer.
One of the things I most appreciate about Henry Blackaby's
Experiencing God is that it invites us to trust God to show us what he
is doing in our lives. Prayer should be directed by talking together
to see if anyone has a specific insight about how to pray for the
people involved.

3. Let trust, and not fear, fuel your prayers. Fear is the death of
prayer because it is the opposite of trust. Most of my prayers, even
well into midlife, were driven by my anxieties and fears.

I remember praying through our finances, and though we had enough to
supply our needs for the present, I was concerned about the long term.
I trusted him enough for today, but kept praying that he would do
something to take my anxiety away for tomorrow. But God didn't want me
to trust in my IRA or the state lottery for security, he wanted me to
trust in him.

What most enhances my relationship with Jesus is my ability to trust
him, no matter what circumstance I'm in. He rarely answers prayers
that ask him to fix my circumstances so that I can trust him less. His
desire has always been that I would trust him more.

Prayers permeated with a faith-filled security in God's love and
confidence in his character will be more effective than petitions for
him to appease me.

When I'm fearful, I've learned to pray first for my fear and for a
fuller revelation of God's love before I pray for the specific outcome
I might want. When I'm praying for others, I do the same.

4. Pray in agreement. I learned this fascinating aspect of prayer from
a group of Christians in the Australian Bush.

The man leading the prayer meeting offered some unusual instructions:

"Tonight as we pray, we're only going to pray for what we agree upon.
If one of you feels led to pray over something, ask the group if
that's something we all sense. If it is, we can pray in agreement. If
not, we'll pass over it for now and move on to other requests." I
asked him later why he gave the unusual instructions. He said they had
learned that praying for someone can become a subtle form of
manipulation.

"If a man is depressed, then others pray for him to be happy. He's
pressured then to smile at the end of the prayer and say, 'Thanks. I
feel better,' whether he does or not. Maybe he doesn't need to 'feel
better' right now. Maybe he needs to learn to cling to God in the
midst of suffering. You don't know unless you ask."

If the person being prayed for didn't agree or understand the insight,
the prayer group would set it aside and see what others might have on
their hearts.

Often, they told me, two or three weeks after someone had declined to
be prayed for in a certain way, he or she would return convinced that
was just the prayer that was needed.

By asking permission of one another to pray in certain ways, these
Australians were able to maintain a more authentic and honest form of
prayer. They also had a chance to share insights and see what God
might be saying. It gave them the freedom to pray with boldness when
they knew that all were seeking the same thing.

5. Follow up. Nothing expresses our concern to someone in need more
than following up with a phone call a few days later to see how they
are doing and what might have happened after our prayer.

I'm convinced we do too little of this because we have so little hope
that our prayers will affect much. But if the goal is to zero in on
what God is doing and see him accomplish his will in our
circumstances, then our initial prayer only begins the process.

If nothing has happened since, we can ask God for wisdom. Is he doing
something else in this situation than we thought? Is he teaching us to
persevere in what we started?

Staying in the process until something is resolved will not only be a
blessing in that instance, but will train us for future opportunities
in prayer. This invites us to make any request of God, but it does not
tell us to expect him to answer them the way we want. God is not our
fairy godmother who waves a magic wand to conform every circumstance
to our whim. Real prayer is the process of getting involved with
someone's need, praying as best we understand God's work, and then
staying in the situation until we see God act.

It is a risk to pray in that expectant way, but it can lead to some
incredible prayers. One of Henri Nouwen's spiritual directors once
prayed over him:

"May all your expectations be frustrated. May all your plans be
thwarted. May all of your desires be withered into nothingness that
you may experience the powerlessness and poverty of a child and sing
and dance in the love of God the Father, the Son, and the Spirit."

While I don't recommend praying that for someone you don't know well,
here is someone who understood God's heart in prayer. Teaching people
to move beyond their own agenda to touch the heart and passion of God
will be a challenge, but it will deepen and enliven your prayer life.

Copyright (c) 2001 by the author or Christianity Today, Inc./Leadership journal.