How Christians Devalue Prayer

When they reached the crowd, a man approached and knelt down before him. “Lord,” he said, “have mercy on my son, because he has seizures and suffers terribly. He often falls into the fire and often into the water. I brought him to your disciples, but they couldn’t heal him.”

Jesus replied, “You unbelieving and perverse generation, how long will I be with you? How long must I put up with you? Bring him here to me.” Then Jesus rebuked the demon, and it came out of him, and from that moment the boy was healed.

Then the disciples approached Jesus privately and said, “Why couldn’t we drive it out??”

“Because of your little faith,” he told them. “For truly I tell you, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will tell this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.”
—Matthew 17:14-20

I like horror films. One reason is they remain one of the few contemporary media where good and evil retain their clear delineations. What is more satisfying than good triumphing over evil?

I watched the horror-thriller Heretic over the weekend. Hugh Grant plays an older man who invites two female Mormon missionaries into his home, whereupon he plays a cat and mouse game with them regarding issues of faith, belief, and the source of all human religion.

At one point in the film, one of the missionaries gives a speech detailing science’s dismantling of the efficacy of prayer, equating prayer to nothing more than well-wishing and a harmless activity to bond people together in some common concern. She thinks it has value socially—even if it’s all supernatural hooey in the end.

In the days following the film, which I thought merely OK, I’ve pondered a disturbing trend I see among fairly orthodox Christian believers regarding prayer: Prayer merely as psychological comfort.

Nothing I read in the Scriptures reduces prayer to being little more than a balm for the soul. To me, diminishing prayer in that way warps it into an unnatural and impotent function that verges on self-talk.

And yet I see that mentality everywhere in the contemporary Western Church. I read material that reinforces the idea that prayer’s main function is to change our minds about the thing we prayed for, so we can come to grips with our prayer failing to do anything.

“Don’t expect any miraculous answers to prayer, because prayer is about changing you to be OK with trusting God anyway when that ephemeral bubble of praying for a need ultimately pops.” That seems to be where we are.

As if Jesus didn’t make his point clear enough in that Matthew passage above, here He restates His position a little later:

Early in the morning, as he was returning to the city, [Jesus] was hungry. Seeing a lone fig tree by the road, he went up to it and found nothing on it except leaves. And he said to it, “May no fruit ever come from you again!?” At once the fig tree withered.

When the disciples saw it, they were amazed and said, “How did the fig tree wither so quickly??”

Jesus answered them, “Truly I tell you, if you have faith and do not doubt, you will not only do what was done to the fig tree, but even if you tell this mountain, ‘Be lifted up and thrown into the sea,’ it will be done. And if you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer.”
—Matthew 21:18-22

Where is Jesus conceding any point on the efficacy of prayer? When does He say prayer is REALLY just about God wanting to spend time with us, even if nothing we pray for ever comes to pass?

Frankly, I despise that mentality, and yet it is everywhere among people who call themselves Christians. It’s such a distorted, nihilistic perspective to think that God values spending time with us even if He really has no intention to do anything about our prayer concerns. It’s crazy that prayer becomes solely a means to cope rather than how we go forward in power in Jesus’s name. It’s ludicrous that prayer’s main goal in the minds of many is to convince ourselves to be OK with God failing to do what we ask in His name.

James never understood prayer to function in that deprecated way. He saw it like this:

The prayer of a righteous person is very powerful in its effect. Elijah was a human being as we are, and he prayed earnestly that it would not rain, and for three years and six months it did not rain on the land. Then he prayed again, and the sky gave rain and the land produced its fruit.
—James 5:16-18

If prayer ever becomes a way for us to convince ourselves that our earnest beseeching of God was accomplishing nothing more than hanging out with Him and enjoying Him regardless, then we have lost our faith. People who preach and teach such a thing have lost their faith. Stop listening to them.

Image: “The Sacrifice of Elijah Before the Priests of Baal” (1622) by Domenico Fetti

The 25 Most Visited Posts on Cerulean Sanctum 2018–Today

Want to know what people are searching for in life? The posts listed below were the most often returned on Cerulean Sanctum, reflecting what web searchers have been looking for here since 2018.

The 25 Most Visited Posts on Cerulean Sanctum (from most visited to least)

Hell’s Road and Good Intentions

“When an unclean spirit comes out of a person, it roams through waterless places looking for rest, and not finding rest, it then says, ‘I’ll go back to my house that I came from.’ Returning, it finds the house swept and put in order. Then it goes and brings seven other spirits more evil than itself, and they enter and settle down there. As a result, that person’s last condition is worse than the first.”
—Luke 11:24-26

“The road to hell is paved with good intentions” is likely not a favorite aphorism of many—mostly because it may be more true than any of us would care to admit.

Exorcising a demon out of a man may, on the surface, seem about the most positive thing that could happen to that man, but Jesus said that unless other events transpire, that demon may return and bring more noxious demons with it. And so, an act of good becomes something much worse.

Because we lack a crystal ball to scry the future, and because we often don’t know or can’t manufacture the necessary next ingredient to keep a good situation from souring, we need to be more sober about what happens to us and whether that positive happening is only good in the moment, with its gotcha component still to come.

I don’t know what it is about American Christians today that we can’t get over exclaiming, “It’s a God thing!” whenever some positive event or windfall occurs. Fact is, we don’t know that—at least in the most basic way. Maybe it’s just a thing and we need to reserve judgment, allowing time to reveal its future aspects.

Winning the lottery would sound like a “God thing,” but when you read the horror stories of lottery winners whose lives crash and burn post-windfall, you start to wonder. Did God bless them with money only to destroy them later because of it? That’s a theodicy I don’t want to wander into, and yet many people do carelessly. How they manage to reconcile such dichotomies leads me to believe they never attempt to, and they just move on as if nothing happened, living in perpetual denial.

In contrast to the “from blessing to doom” pathway, we have this in the life of the patriarch Joseph:

Then Joseph said to his brothers, “Please, come near me,” and they came near. “I am Joseph, your brother,” he said, “the one you sold into Egypt. And now don’t be grieved or angry with yourselves for selling me here, because God sent me ahead of you to preserve life. For the famine has been in the land these two years, and there will be five more years without plowing or harvesting. God sent me ahead of you to establish you as a remnant within the land and to keep you alive by a great deliverance. Therefore it was not you who sent me here, but God. He has made me a father to Pharaoh, lord of his entire household, and ruler over all the land of Egypt.”
—Genesis 45:4-8

Joseph was beaten by his brothers and left in a hole to die. He was sold into slavery, had a brief respite, and was later thrown into prison to rot. Everyone forgot about him, even the ones he asked not to.

But eventually, God not only restored Joseph, He elevated him to the second-in-command of the Egyptian empire, where his insight and blessings of God upon him resulted in saving a majority of the world from years-long famine.

The hubris of many of us American Christians is acting as if we know everything God is doing. But we don’t. In fact, we have almost no idea what God intends out of this happening or that circumstance. One day you get a promotion to an executive leadership position at work, and a month later you are indicted along with the rest of the leadership team for securities fraud. Welcome to the federal pen. Must be a God thing.

Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will travel to such and such a city and spend a year there and do business and make a profit.” Yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring — what your life will be! For you are like vapor that appears for a little while, then vanishes.
Instead, you should say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.”
—James 4:13-15

I write all of the above to leave with this: Consider being more circumspect of pronouncing such and such as a positive or negative. Consider being more wary of the surface appearance of good that comes your way, for underneath the tip of that cool, refreshing iceberg may lurk something catastrophic. Likewise, today’s doom may set you up to save your life and the lives of many. Not everything bad today is bad forever.

Most of all, pause to allow for time to reveal all things. There is no evil in saying you will reserve judgment until you know more. “We shall see” is not a pronouncement of faithlessness but one of a right mind governed by godly sober thinking.

Image: “The Struggle of Good and Evil Spirits” (1875) by Ivan Tvorozhnikov