Out of the Blocks

As I was growing up in the Memphis area, I was an avid St. Louis Cardinals fan. I wanted to emulate Steve Carlton. My dream was to grow up and pitch for the Cardinals. I had a transistor radio that I kept on the nightstand next to my bed, and I would lie awake at night listening to the Cardinals games. I wanted them to win every game. In fact, I wanted it so much, I would pray everyday that the Cardinals would win. As I listened to the game, if it was close, I would plead with God to help the Cardinals win. Sometimes they won, and sometimes they didn't. If they didn't win, it certainly wasn't because I didn't ask.

Those prayers were the product of childhood innocence and a child's understanding of faith in God. Surely, a mature Christian adult would know better than to pray for something as trivial as the outcome of a sporting event ... right? Well, maybe not. I remember a time in one of my adult Sunday school classes, we were taking prayer requests, and one person asked us to pray that the Browns would win that Sunday. When the request was met with a few chuckles, the person that made the request explained that she had a friend who played for the Browns, and she wanted her friend to win. Although her request was sincere, I don't recall that request being presented to God audibly that morning.

We all sometimes pray for trivial things. We ask for good weather when we're going on vacation or have an event planned. We pray that our friends have a good time when they get together. I've prayed that God will keep my car from running out of gas so I can get to a gas station when I've been running the tank on fumes (one of my favorite challenges). It isn't necessarily wrong to pray for such things. Our trivial requests are not going to hinder God from taking care of more important things. But one question to ponder is, what do you pray for?

Several years ago I heard a message by Andy Stanley on how Jesus taught his disciples to pray. What Jesus instructed is what we know as The Lord’s Prayer, found in Matthew 6:9-13. After listening to Andy break down this prayer, in the way he does so well, I became aware of the difference between the way I have prayed and the way Jesus taught his disciples to pray. My prayers often consist of my asking God to do my will, not His.

It is easy to mindlessly follow along with a congregation reciting the Lord’s Prayer and just blow through the phrase “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” But this one sentence takes us to the very core of what our relationship with God should be: “Your will be done.”

For us to say to God, “Your will be done,” we must first be willing to say, “Not my will, but yours.” This means that we must be willing to surrender our own desires, our own dreams, our own needs, and desire that God’s will be done. We must be willing to see the things of this world as temporary, and the needs of others as more important than our own. We especially must be willing to acknowledge that when God calls something we desire sin, it is sin, no matter how we may rationalize it.