Author: Randy Page 18 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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Years ago, I heard a man speak whose church had grown phenomenally. He attributed this growth to his commitment to spending hours daily in prayer, a commitment in which his church had joined him. A correlation was drawn between the number and persistence of people praying and the success of the church’s ministry. I was moved by the man’s faithfulness. I was challenged by his model. But I was never able to duplicate his devotion or his success. I am left to wonder: if I’d prayed one more day or had one more person join me, would we have tipped the scale in our favor?

What, that is, is the price of a miracle? Or is that even a proper question?

Some have read Jesus’ parables in the gospel of Luke (chapters 11 and 18) to suggest that prayer not only requires a special quantity of faith but as well particular investments of time, repetition, and emotional fervor. And such quantification seems to put a price tag on the miracles we seek. Is it really true that what God will not do if only ten are praying he will do if there are eleven or twenty? To have many praying, and praying long and hard is a good thing. But the line between doing what is good and attempting to manipulate God can be invisible to us if we are not careful. Crump unpacks these parables and in so doing helps us see our way beyond this creeping mechanistic view of prayer.

The point of the parables of the friend to who seeks bread from his neighbor at midnight (Luke 11) and the widow before the judge (Luke 18) is not that we can with our persistence irritate God into action. Rather, the point is that we should come to God at any time and with whatever need without shame and without hesitation.

We are to let nothing prevent our bringing our petitions to God. We will be persistent and we will pray without ceasing because we care about the matter at hand. But we do so not to pay a certain ‘price’ for a miracle. Our Father is always and ever willing to hear and to give what we most need.

The encouragement of these passages is to pray. We are encouraged to pray not so as to up the ante against God so that he must respond, but to pray knowing that he loves to give good gifts to his children, even when all we can see is darkness. Faithfulness in prayer is what is encouraged, and faithfulness is always more precious than a mechanistic persistence. The child who asks and asks and asks her father for a snake will not get it. But the child still asks, and the child will get what she most needs. But she asks not to up the pressure on one who will not give, but she asks simply because he is her father.

“The point is this: will I continue to bring my life before God in prayer when all tangible, empirical—and even all personal, experiential—evidence demands that I abandon prayer as worthless?” (page 88)

I want my answer to be, “Yes.”

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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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When do we eventually entertain the idea that Jesus has lied to us? Few would confess to having this thought, but many face it.

We read in the Bible that Jesus said, “Truly, I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and thrown into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says will come to pass, it will be done for him.” (Mark 11:23) And so we pray, with earnestness and fervor and persistence and faith. And the “mountain” remains.

When we ask, “Why?” some will tell us that we don’t have enough faith. Others will tell us that we’ve not prayed long enough. Still others will urge us to gather a team to pray. But at some point when our guard is down the thought will flit across our minds, “What if it is in fact not true?”

We may not exactly accuse Jesus of lying, but we will judge the text to not be true, which effects the same thing. And left unchecked, the thought will find a place to roost, and grow, and soon we will stop praying. Or worse.

But the problem is this: what other conclusions can we draw? Jesus says one thing and our experience reveals another. The fault is either in us not praying right or in the promise being faulty. What is it?

Gently, Crump points us in a third direction – that we have misunderstood the nature of the promise. He takes us back to the texts in which the apparent links between faith and prayer and the work of God are drawn and helps us see them in fresh ways, hopefully in the way that Jesus meant them to be understood.

Crump walks us through the texts to see if it is in fact possible for Christians to cause mountains to ‘do backflips’ into the Mediterranean as easily as Jesus caused the fig tree to wither. Crump helps us to see that Jesus’ point was not that a physical mountain would move, but that the personal God would act. The common believer has access through prayer to the full power of God. There are no limits.

“Anyone who places arbitrary, naturalistic limits on what a disciple can reasonably expect of God in this world should stop to consider whether that person’s God is the same deity that Jesus turned to when he said to the fig tree, ‘May no one ever eat fruit from you again’ (Mark 11:14).” (page 33)

The point is that we ought to expect that our prayers do connect us to all the power of God, no matter how weak our faith. But that does not seem to be helpful. Why do the mountains not move when I tell them to? The answer is, “God.” Regardless of what we ask, it is his decision to act in all the wisdom that is his.

No where in the Bible does ‘greater faith’ receive greater answers and ‘lesser faith’ lesser. Scripture invites every believer, no matter how weak his faith, to believe in the absolute power of God. There is no guarantee “expressed or implied”. There is a future sense in the promises of the Bible and, as hard as it is to accept, sometimes the answers to our prayers await the coming of the kingdom in its fulness.

The challenge here is to avoid the cynicism that says God cannot or will not ever bring the impact of that kingdom to bear upon the present. We are encouraged to ask things of God, believing that he, as God, can do what we ask. But God is not bound by what we ask. Greater faith or (as we will see) greater persistence does not obligate God.

“The Gospel writers carefully insist that faith itself is not the cause of miracles. God is.” (page 45)

That is the point we need to hear. Faith does not change things, and prayer does not change things, but God does. Prayer is taking what little faith we have and what little we know of prayer and asking the God who can move mountains to act. Even when we cannot receive what we ask, as Jesus’ prayer in Gethsemane demonstrates, we are to pray. But we pray believing that he can if he chooses do all that we might desire. He who is truthful in all else that he says is truthful here as well.

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Prayer is life for the Christian. It is the spontaneous and necessary cry to God arising from the struggles and hopes and failures and dreams of living in a broken world. Prayer is something we cannot imagine being without. At the same time, prayer is a mystery. It is a discipline and it is hard.

And for most of us prayer is a weakness which becomes, in the end, a burden.

But is prayer a weakness because it is hard and unnatural for us, or do we find ourselves weak in it because of a misconception of what it is to be? If one trains to be a painter using a faulty and impossible standard, even though he may be good he will judge himself to be weak because he is using erroneous evaluative criteria. Perhaps we are overly critical of our practice of prayer because we are building our critique upon a false model of prayer.

Any book that would seek to correct our false ideas of prayer could, in fact, free us to pray. Such is, in my opinion, the value of David Crump’s Knocking on Heaven’s Door. It’s not well known, but surely any book whose title riffs on a Bob Dylan song is deserving of at least a glance.

A glance was all I needed. The book’s subtitle promises that this is “A New Testament Theology of Petitionary Prayer”. David Crump, a professor of religion and theology at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, sets out to ‘explain’ prayer as it is presented in the New Testament, which means rescuing prayer from the misconceptions of a well-meant but often mistaken evangelical and fundamentalist heritage. Crump treats that heritage with respect, but his commitment is to Scripture, and it is in opening the Bible to careful attention that he excels and is most helpful.

In reading (and then re-reading – VERY rare for me) I found his explanations of the biblical text careful and thorough and his conclusions convincing. And this book did what few other books on prayer have been able to do. It made me want to pray. In this case, it made me want to pray not because of the effect prayer has had upon some great saint, and not because of some great promise made about prayer. It made me want to pray because I was able to better see it for what it is, and God for whom he is.

I want to spend the summer walking through this book giving readers of this blog a glimpse into Crump’s arguments and conclusions. I want us all to think more clearly about prayer. As well, I want this book to be more widely known. The content is good, the writing accessible (though, at times, more ‘scholarly’ in feel than some may want), and the exegetical model is exemplary. As with any book, I cannot agree with everything in it. But what is here has shaken my world in a good way and is inviting me to change the way I look at and practice prayer as little else has done. Crump’s goal and mine, as I attempt to summarize his work in these posts, are the same:

“May this study so transform both the author and the reader that we will learn to ‘always pray and not give up’ (Luke 18:1)” (page 19)

Yes. May it be so.

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Click to go to the next post in this series.