12 Mar Working With God in the Family Business
If you truly trust the Lord, why would you ever pray anything except, “Thy will be done.”
If you truly believe that God loves you, that He has only His best in mind for you, if He knows more than you know and can do more than you can do, then why would you not simply submit to whatever the will of God gives you, and say, “So be it.”
Yet that is not what Jesus did. Nor is it what He taught.
Jesus taught us to “importune” Him for the things we want
First, in the Garden of Gethsemane as Jesus agonized over what He was facing, He repeatedly prayed to be delivered from the upcoming trials. Of course He followed that up with, “Thy will be done,” but not until He had first prayed, “Let this cup pass from me”!
Then, in Luke 11 and Luke 18, Jesus invites us to importune God (persist, pursue, implore, insist, beg) for the things we want.
Why would He do that? Why would He not rather instruct us to just quietly trust God in all things and submit to whatever His loving will might be?!?
Luke 11:5-8 invites us to hammer on God’s door for the things we want. In this parable, a man knocks on his neighbor’s door asking for a loaf of bread after the neighbor has gone to bed. The sleepy neighbor refuses. But the man keeps hammering, so the neighbor gets up and gives him the bread because of the man’s insistence.
Luke 18 tells the story of a lady who importunes a judge to give her legal protection against her opponent. The judge agrees because otherwise, she will wear him out by her continual coming back to him.
Jesus taught this parable “to show that at all times they ought to pray and not lose heart” (Luke 18:1).
But, again, why would God invite us to importune Him for the things we want?
- Do we have to wear Him down?
- Do we have to inform Him of things He might not know?
- Do we have to prove our devotion by this form of self-flagellation?
None of these things can be true!
Why would God encourage us to importune Him?
But why would God encourage us to hammer on His door for the things we want if He loves us and will only do what is good for us?
Some reasons might include:
- God wants to change us by our praying.
He wants to purify our motives, to clarify our requests, to highlight the fact that – when we get an answer –it was God who answered, and not just a stroke of good luck.
- God wants to nurture our relationship with Him.
In the Old Testament we see Abraham, Moses and the prophets arguing with God, contending with God for a course of action. Sometimes, the Old Testament saints got what they wanted from God and sometimes they didn’t. But God did not seem to resent the argument.
James Packer wrote, “God loves to be argued with” (Praying the Lord’s Prayer, p. 17).
Philip Yancey wrote, “Why would God, the all-powerful ruler of the universe, resort to a style of relating to humans that seems like negotiation – or haggling, to put it crudely? God wants me to stop groveling and start arguing. I dare not meekly accept the state of the world, with all its injustice and unfairness. (Prayer, p. 97).
Later, Yancey writes, “God wants to relate to us personally, to love and be loved” (Prayer, p. 103). By inviting us to importune Him, to wrestle with Him regarding answers to prayer, God invites us to enter a relationship in which we can get to know Him, learn how He works, and deepen our walk with Him. He invites us to love Him and be loved.
- God wants us to give us the “dignity of causality.”
Also, God wants to give us, as C.S. Lewis said (quoting Pascal) “the dignity of causality.” He wants to honor us by using our prayers to move God to a course of action. “This is how (no light matter) God makes something—indeed, makes gods—out of nothing” (The World’s Last Night, p. 8).
- God wants to make us Kingdom partners
From the very beginning, God has recruited humans to oversee His work on earth. Starting with Adam in the garden, down through the Old Testament and into the New, He is continually delegating to humans what He could do better in the twinkling of an eye. Jesus said “I will build my church” (Matthew 16:18). How? Through us.
The commission to take the gospel to the ends of the earth was given to us (Matthew 28:19-20). God wants to do His work in the world through us, and “importuning prayer” is God’s invitation for us to become part of the process. Rather than simply saying, “Yes Sir!” He invites us to talk about it.
Again, Yancey writes, “I understand prayer as a partnership, a subtle interplay of human and divine, that accomplishes God’s work on earth” (Prayer, p. 113).
God wants us to work with Him in the family business.
Imagine an earthly parent who owns a large and thriving business, who then brings a son and daughter into the family business to learn it from the ground up.
Over the years, the siblings start by sweeping the factory floor, then learn to make widgets, after which they learn shipping and receiving, followed by customer service. Finally, they are brought into the front office where they learn accounting, marketing, management and leadership.
The goal is to equip them to run the business, not merely for financial reasons, but also because they are family… because of the joy of working with them, fostering the closest possible mutual destiny with them.
So God wants us to learn His “family business,” training us for where we can make our highest contribution to His Kingdom.
This cannot be because we could run the business as well or better than He. It must be because God likes us, that He wants a close relationship with us, to foster the closest possible mutual destiny with us.
Of course, he is President and Chairman of the Board. He’s the one with absolute knowledge, so when He turns down our requests, when he doesn’t accept our suggestions, we must agree. When that happens, we say, “ Thy will be done.”
But until we know that He has turned our request down, we are free to hammer on the door, believing that the hammering process will enable us get to know Him better, walk with Him more closely, trust Him more fully… and help us more fully enjoy the pleasure of our mutual destiny with Him.
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