Author: Randy Page 16 of 142

[This is a post in our ongoing series looking at the themes raised by David Crump in his book Knocking on Heaven’s Door: A New Testament Theology of Petitionary Prayer. We began this series here.]

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Several weeks ago, a reader asked in a comment for clarification regarding what we called one of prayer’s ‘limiting factors’. Circumstances prevented a rapid response, so it now seems better to reply here as one more post dedicated to prayer.

The questioner asked for clarification regarding the fifth limiting factor. This suggested that prayer might be hindered by ‘broken and unreconciled relationships’. The kind of relational brokenness in view is pictured here:

Likewise, husbands, live with your wives in an understanding way, showing honor to the woman as the weaker vessel, since they are heirs with you of the grace of life, so that your prayers may not be hindered. (1 Peter 3:7)

As a husband, this verse is sobering. Mistreatment of my wife will not be tolerated by a just and compassionate heavenly Father and may even cause him to turn a deaf ear to my prayers. Crump is very careful in how he develops this, however. One might say that in my weakness, I’m rarely treating Barb in an ‘understanding way’. Am I always to despair of my prayers being heard? Crump anticipates such concerns.

Persistent mistreatment of brothers and sisters in Christ inhibits our ability to communicate with the Father, and this Father never turns a blind eye to domestic abuse. Until the perpetrators repent and seek the necessary reconciliation, their petitions will remain ineffective.

The question whether there are relationships unreconciled in our lives and hindering our prayers is one that is worth asking. Nevertheless we should not become desperately self-critical.

It would certainly be disheartening to imagine that none of my petitions have any hope of ever being heard by God until every aspect of all my relationships are put in perfect working order. If that were the case, all petition becomes hopeless again! Fortunately, by revisiting the original contexts we are reminded that the New Testament writers were addressing deliberate, persistent misbehavior. The sinner refuses to change despite (a) the sin having been openly confronted and (b) the necessary correction having been explained and then ignored. Consequently because the culprit willfully ignores God’s word, the Father may choose to ignore his or her prayers.

Self-examination is always appropriate, but perfection is never in view. God welcomes prayers from his most broken and inconsistent and weary disciples. Just keep praying.

[This is a post in our ongoing series looking at the themes raised by David Crump in his book Knocking on Heaven’s Door: A New Testament Theology of Petitionary Prayer. We began this series here.]

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These sentences from the final chapter of Crump’s book capture the struggle many of us have with prayer. It’s not with form or method or discipline or time. It’s with God.

“What kind of God allows such horrific tragedies to screech their unkempt nails across the cosmic blackboard…. Is there any rhyme or reason to the discordant notes and garbled syllables spat out at us by this occasional nightmare called life?…. There is a Grand Canyon-sized difference between theological answers that satisfy intellectually and a living faith that sustains a broken heart long after all sense and sensibility have evaporated from a tear-stained life.” (278, 279)

My prayer life has been forged over the past several years in a world in which those reflections seem very real. And I know that the same is true for some of you. And sometimes the theological answers that seemed so satisfactory to us at age 19 begin to seem a bit tenuous from the standpoint of a broken and tear-stained life. Are there answers? And where, if at all, does petitionary prayer fit into such a world?

These are the questions that Crump addresses in his final chapter. He proposes answers but in the end, I think there are no completely satisfactory answers other than those that lie on the surface of scripture. God is sovereign. He invites us, in fact commands us, to pray. His prophets prayed as if such praying was the ‘sinew that moved the arm of omnipotence’ (an evocative phrase from another fairly good writer, Charles H. Spurgeon). Jesus prayed that way, and Paul prayed that way. All believed in the absolute sovereignty of God and all prayed as if their prayers moved the hand of God. And if there was no conflict in their minds, how can I let such a conflict exist in mine?

And so, I ask. I ask for things that seem impossible now. I plead for God to bring more of his not-yet kingdom into my already experience. I plead for others that their tears may be taken away and that they might taste at least a small amount of happiness. I beg him to do things that I can’t really see him doing. I ask out of faith, foolishness, confidence and unbelief, and sometimes all at the same time. I do so because he says to do so, and I do so because he is my Father. I do so to hasten the kingdom and I do so to find solace in my own heart.

The one thing that causes me to stop praying is not losing confidence in prayer and it is not my inability to get sovereignty and responsibility to lay down arms. I lose confidence in prayer when I forget that I am loved by a heavenly Father who, for all the mystery surrounding him, loves to give. So perhaps the best place to find rejuvenation, in the end, is here:

“Jesus loves me, this I know,
for the Bible tells me so.”

[This is a post in our ongoing series looking at the themes raised by David Crump in his book Knocking on Heaven’s Door: A New Testament Theology of Petitionary Prayer. We began this series here.]

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The primary reason I have found myself coming back to this book is because it makes me want to pray more. It does so not through anecdotes of great practitioners of prayer (apart from Jesus and Paul) which often leave me overwhelmed and under-equipped, but rather through a careful unfolding of the biblical teaching about prayer.

Crump unfolds this biblical teaching with a detailed attention to what the text means and not to what we might want it to mean. In the process, he elevates the reader’s appreciation for the authority and sufficiency of the Bible. That is a gift.

As well, I appreciate the satisfying blend of scholarly rigor and pastoral sensitivity. I don’t know David Crump – though I think I wish I did – but he has clearly spent time out of his books and in the lives of Christian people stumbling like the rest of us through life ‘with wandering steps and slow’.

Further, Crump weaves into his presentation a knowledge of the fundamentalist/evangelical tradition’s misrepresentation of some aspects of prayer. But he does so with gentleness and respect. He is critical, but not with meanness or mockery. That is a gift. Where possible, he illustrates these aspects and his own wrestling with them with illustrations from his own life, but never to distraction.

But all of this he presents with a style that is accessible and often evocative. In these later chapters, for example, I am captured by some of his phrases.

“[Mark 14’s account of Jesus’ prayer in Gethsemane] confronts its reader with [a dense] constellation of Christological conundrums….” (255)

“Even the best of intentions frequently run aground on the shoals of execution. Commitment fades. Resolve melts away, leaving only the frail skeleton of human vacillation.” (260)

“[God] remains unmoved by selfishness, no matter how emphatically it is launched heavenward.” (276)

Never is his writing unnervingly flowery or trite. It is evocative and thoughtful, and a pleasure to read. (And he does it all without once quoting C. S. Lewis. He may the only contemporary evangelical author able to pull that off.)

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Click to go to the next post in this series.

[This is a post in our ongoing series looking at the themes raised by David Crump in his book Knocking on Heaven’s Door: A New Testament Theology of Petitionary Prayer. We began this series here.]

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The unquestionable benefit of Crump’s book in my life is that as he strips some of the evangelical and fundamentalist encrustations that have been attached to the idea of prayer, I have been left with a greater desire to pray. That is no small feat. But the nagging question of whether prayer ‘matters’ never quite goes away. “If God is sovereign….” is the thought that continually flits around the edges of our praying minds and hearts.

But that question is not one that ever seems to trouble the writers of scripture. They write as if in fact prayer does have an impact upon the movement of God. How and when and why are not addressed. All our questions fall off into the abyss of mystery, but we are told to pray, and we are encouraged to believe, with integrity, that prayer does in fact shape the future. Obviously sometimes, and for some of us it may feel more like ‘all the time’, God answers our requests with a ‘no’. But what father does not?

In concluding his study through the New Testament with a look at the references to prayer in the remaining books, Crump summarizes what we might properly understand to be factors that limit the effectiveness of our prayers, if ‘effective’ is defined as receiving an affirmative answer the the plea. These six factors are worth simply noting here, hoping that those interested enough to have come with me this far will either grab the book or ask me for clarification.

Those six factors are as follows:

1. The failure to ask

2. God’s unwillingness to bless selfishness

3. Foolish prayer

4. Prayer encouraging or arising from disobedience

5. Prayer in the context of broken and unreconciled relationships

and ultimately, of course,

6. The sovereign wisdom of God’s timing

Crump wisely and helpfully reminds us, as he has done often in the book, that these are not ‘rules’ or ‘laws’ of prayer. God is a person. God is not a vending machine into whom we pour the proper coinage. He is a person, and prayer is a conversation between two persons. As he says,

“As in any personal relationship, certain attitudes and behaviors are more or less conducive than others to open communication.” (page 275)

It serves us well to remember that prayer is not the manipulation of the forces of the spiritual or natural world. It is not, as we have said, magic. Prayer is the approach of children to their father who loves to give.

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Click to go to the next post in this series.

[This is a post in our ongoing series looking at the themes raised by David Crump in his book Knocking on Heaven’s Door: A New Testament Theology of Petitionary Prayer. We began this series here.]

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We are very skilled at creating superheroes out of ordinary human beings. We do it with the celebrities of contemporary culture and we do it with the celebrities of our religious tradition. Consider, for example, Saul, a Jewish rabbi from the city of Tarsus. Upon his conversion to Christianity he became Paul the Apostle, planting and nurturing the church in significant cities throughout the Roman Empire and writing letters that form a significant portion of the New Testament canon. We are not content that he remain merely human. We make him into a superhero.

Superheroes don’t have weaknesses. Superheroes are not flawed. And ordinary people cannot identify with what it means to be a superhero much less do the things that he does. So, no doubt Paul in his letters says a great deal about prayer and demonstrates even more, but we can’t be expected to pray like a superhero.

And that is the downside of elevating a flawed person like Paul to superhero status. Paul himself does not do that. In Paul’s engagement with prayer, we find a person, like us, who prays, who struggles, and who points us down paths that we can, in fact, pursue.

First, it is worth noting that Paul, like us, struggled to know how and what to pray. Paul is no stranger to the 2nd person pronoun, but he chooses the first when he says,

“For we do not know what to pray for as we ought…,” (Romans 8:26”).

We are not alone in struggling to know what to pray.

Secondly, though Paul confessed weakness in prayer, he still prayed. A lot. And he prayed expecting that it actually compelled God to act, even though there were prayers to which he didn’t get the answers he sought. Paul prayed as if it mattered, and so should we. Can we put this together in a nice, tight theological bundle? No. David Crump reminds us,

“…we need to acknowledge that a text can answer only what it was written to address, and very few texts ever address all the questions we would like to raise.” (page 210)

We need to be Biblical first and foremost. Paul, the great theologian of the absolute sovereignty of God prayed as if prayer impacted God’s actions. So should we.

The third thing I, at least, learn from Paul is that too often I pray for the wrong things. Specifically, Paul encouraged prayer with thanksgiving; I forget how to be grateful, much less to express it.

Further, Paul prayed time and again that his correspondents would grow in love for God and for one another and deepen in their faith. Those priorities too easily get lost in my prayer life. To pray deeply for another means that I come to know what they really need, not just what they want. It’s often simpler to pray for your new job and or your pesky cold and leave it at that. But Paul doesn’t, and neither should I.

These are not superhero things. They rather picture a man who struggling to pray nevertheless believes in prayer. We can’t be superheroes. But we can be this.

And we don’t even need a cape.

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