A reminder that George Stutsman’s memorial is Saturday at 2:00. The service will be at Timber Ridge in Talus Hall.
Life with God means faith (dependence and trust), and prayer and faith are almost indistinguishable. They are certainly inseparable, since we cannot really know someone without speaking with them. For this reason, the Bible doesn’t really have any commands regarding prayer, just assumptions. As Jesus says, “when you pray….”
But it’s hard to pray when you’re being a jerk. Like Adam and Eve, when we sin we have an impulse to run away from God, to hide. We feel instinctively the dark distance between our character and his. There’s a breech, and prayer can seem almost like a sacrilege, like we’re denying or ignoring God’s holiness. How can we be who we are and come into his presence?
Remember Rom. 5:8 “while we were still sinners, Christ died for us….” Jesus establishes relationship with us not in the absence of our sin but in the midst of it. Our sin does not break our relationship with God. It is, in a sense, the cause of it.
I say all this to encourage us in saying honest prayers from the midst of the mess. When Moses prays his complaint before God in Numbers 11:12—“Did I conceive all this people? Did I give them birth, that you should say to me, ‘Carry them in your bosom, as a nurse carries a nursing child?’”—he’s exasperated, angry, and accusing. He’s acting like a spoiled child, and he probably knows it. But he’s praying. You have to think about this for a second. He’s not venting to his wife or some hapless Israelite, but to God. Somewhere in his heart he’s made peace with being flawed and being in God’s presence. That is (at least part of) what makes Moses’ prayers the most real in Scripture.
When I was 15 and a new Christian, I still had a foul mouth and a short fuse. Once, after losing my temper out loud, I felt immediately the sting of conviction. And, in what I now understand as a gift from God in that moment, I immediately began to pray, arguing with God over whether swearing was really that big a deal (it is, cf. Col 3:8), and honestly laying out my frustrations in moving from darkness to light. It was one of the most powerful moments of prayer in my life. In part because it was honest.
David wrote, “I pour out my complaint before him; I tell my trouble before him” (Ps. 142:2). I doubt all his complaints were pious and tidy. Like yours and mine, they were fallen and disordered. It doesn’t matter. Jesus solved that dilemma on the Cross. Go to God with all of it. Go now.