Does God Need My Emotions? Man, I've got some serious problems facing me. I've got to pray. I should have been praying 24 hours a day, starting yesterday. Problem. I don't feel like it. I actually suspect that God's about to let something bad go down, with me in the middle of it. I definitely don't have the wherewithal to generate one of those intense, sincere, heartwarming prayers that God really likes. I just can't. Forget praying, I'm going to play basketball and forget about my problems. At least for the next three hours.
When I was just starting college, going to campus prayer meetings and Bible studies, I felt a lot of admiration for people who could generate prolonged intensity while they prayed. A raspy, desperate petition, punctuate by a lot of "Father-God!" expressions, would hold me spellbound. Likewise people who paced while they prayed, pouring on the urgency.
My response was immediate and visceral: I wish I could pray like that.
This was a worthy aspiration, and in the years that have elapsed since, I guess I have learned to pray like that upon occasion. However, I've also realized that saddling prayer with an unnecessary emphasis on good feeling can have crippling effects. Here, in slightly exaggerated form, is how I used to think:
There were brief periods where my hoops game became really sharp because of all that non-prayer. It wasn't a trade worth making, though. Because I believed that there was a minimum emotional requirement I had to meet when I prayed, prayer became a frustrating proposition. I thought I had to gloss things up before I sent my thoughts Godward. Forcing myself to generate the prerequisite pious, trusting feelings became a real drag.
I now know that God wasn't enjoying it either.
Because of my misconceptions, I was making prayer into a kind of emotional good deed. I thought I had to churn out some good feelings to back my words to God, like I had to add a special personal ingredient to make prayer really work.
The time I spent at the end of myself, worn out, mad, and pursuing with various distractions, would have been perfect chances to bring everything to God. I wish I'd seen it sooner.
Looking back, I think I was lacking something vital that would have allowed me to see the reality of prayer with vivid clarity. I thought God needed my emotional reinforcement in order to 'get' my prayers, but that was wrong. The real missing piece? Humility.
I think it takes an at least slightly humble person to see that God doesn't need all the emotional embroidery that we add to our devotion. Of course, God wants our hearts. Demands our feelings, in fact. He invites us to approach him with joy, with wild gratitude, with outbursts of wonder, and if we don't, something's missing.
But God has no minimum emotional requirement for prayer. We can't invest prayer with any more meaning than God has already given it. When we pray, God has agreed to listen. This is one of the incredible things Christ does for the people who end up knowing him. End of story. We should pray when we are strong and full of faith. And we should pray when we are down and full of vitriol.
No matter how zealous, content, or sincere I feel, I can't improve on God's arrangement here. This is a surprising blessing, but it takes a humble person to grasp it. At least someone who's willing to give humility a try, despite the discomfort.
Friday, March 31, 2006
Humility & Prayer Collide
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3 comments:
Amen. Humility in prayer is something I've struggled with recently...just not feeling like it. You make a good point though. God doesn't need me to fake emotion, he just wants me to pray.
Rebekah
Wow. I like what you said here. Last Sunday, a small group of us prayed over a couple of folks right after the service. I started the prayer, and my first words were, "Heavenly Father, we come to you in humility..."
The emotion comes as you approach the prayer in humility - it is then when you begin to feel the prayer. I don't know what I'm going to say - it just comes, and is a reflection of what I'm feeling in my heart at that moment.
Let Him direct you in prayer.
"It's easy to micromanage "God's will for our lives." That was always my biggest frustration, trying to figure it out..."
I'm very much in agreement on this point, Lily. The current obsession with "finding God's perfect will for my life" could be defused if people would read the Bible carefully and stop searching for extra, inside information.
God doesn't make it hard for us to obey him. It's not some epic, spiritual hide-and-seek game, us searching desperately for "God's will..." Am I in it? Have I lost it? Is my life cursed if I'm not in the perfect bull's eye center?
But having said that, the Bible does assure us that God has person-specific plans that he has foreseen for each of us. That part's not in doubt. What we have to come to terms with is our limited ability to see God's plans. He doesn't intend to let us see all his cards, so we should stop trying.
God does give us the ability to make free decisions, but even in this he hasn't left us to careen around like spheres in a pinball machine. I'm grateful that we don't live in a Deistic universe, and that Christ can redeem even poor choices.
Thanks for the thoughts, guys.
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