Your Dangerous Prayer Life

I live a life that is intentionally designed around avoiding danger. I wake up at the same time, I eat my meals at the same time, I do my homework at the same time on the same days. I take the same roads, eat the same stuff, and even double check the locks on my door and car, just in case. All of this, I think, is some kind of mechanism my mind has designed to keep some semblance of control in my life and avoid the danger that is out there.

If you're anything like me (and I bet you are), you too try to avoid danger. You wear seatbelts, eat cooked food, don't drive too fast, and rarely run with scissors. And for the most part, the chaos stays out of the way. Or so I thought. In spite of all the things I do to keep myself safe from the world, I unwittingly continue to do the most dangerous thing in the world every day: pray.

Let me explain. Before I go to sleep every night, I pray one simple prayer: "Jesus, help me love you more." It's a simple prayer, and to me it's the core of the faith. I can only love Him more by His grace, so I ask for it every day. And He has answered that prayer, in a way that I could have never imagined in a million years.

When you ask to love Jesus more, God doesn't simply just fill your heart up with love or bump you up a level on the sanctification chart. No, He often does the last thing we expect: He takes away things. Things that you've been holding on to. Things that you love far too much. Things that you think you can't live without. Things that you've actually worshiped. Sometimes, He even wrecks your life.

Then what happens? Well, if you're like me (and again, I bet you are) you get mad at God. After all, He's the one running the show in the first place. He took it all away. He could give you everything back again. He could make it better, fix the world, fix you. Sometimes we follow this route, and we end up in bitterness and anger, all alone at the end of our rope.

But at some point you're going to go one of two ways. First, you can either hold onto your idols and go deeper into bitterness and despair, trying everything you can think of and staying perpetually unhappy. This is what Paul calls the judgment of God (cf. Romans 1:24-26). Or, by God's grace, you can begin to see the unfolding disaster around you as the kind mercy of a loving Father liberating you from things that have been eating your soul. The breaks you didn't get, the things that didn't go your way, the pain that you went through, and everything dear that you lost were all subtle ways in which God was weaning you off of things that were destroying you and saving your heart from more pain by turning it to Him.

And when you being to realize that your greatest loss is actually your greatest joy, then there's no room to be angry at God. In fact, you begin to praise Him for what He's done and what He will continue to do. And...gasp!...then you begin to love Him more and more. Prayer answered, but you might not have noticed it because of all the laughter: laughter of a God who rejoices in a child brought home, and the laughter of a child who celebrates the goodness of a wise Father.

Prayer is dangerous, but not praying is even more dangerous. We would do well to remember that.