Spiritual Survival Guide
6: Keeping It Going: Moving Beyond Survival Mode
please help me?” God is eager to hear all of those things from you, so try to keep balanced.
the torment that this affliction was causing him, but that God’s answer to him was “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:7-10). God was giving him a thorn to prick him so that he wouldn’t be too elated. Let’s be honest here: This is not a message that most of us want to hear. Who likes thorns? We’d prefer grace and the specific thing we want! But St. Paul found that this affliction was turning out to be a good thing; because of it, the power of Christ was even more effective through him. The connection between being persistent in prayer and respecting God’s No is one word: Yet. When Jesus was facing the prospect of betrayal, imprisonment, ridicule, torture and death, he turned to prayer. Again and again and again he prayed that he might avoid taking that path (he referred to it as a cup of suffering). He told his heavenly Father, “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me…” He was honest and said what he wanted. He was persistent in praying for what he wanted. But because he was also tuned in to his heavenly Father’s will, he completed his prayer by saying, “… yet, not my will but yours be done.” We’ll know that we’re making huge progress in our own relationship with God when we can honestly echo Jesus by saying, “God, I really want this— and yet, not my will but yours be done.” 8. Expect dry spells. Every one of us has some inconsistency when it comes to prayer. We go through seasons. Sometimes, it can seem like spring or summer—that God’s right with us in our cell, both sur- rounding us and welling up from inside us. It can feel as if God’s love is gushing up in us. But at other times our prayer life can feel dry as dust. It can seem like a November day—gray, empty, sterile, lifeless. It can sometimes feel like we’re praying into nothingness. Here’s the bad news: There’s no way around spiritual dry spells. You just have to go through them. Even the greatest saints and spiritual warriors in church history talk about dealing with dry spells. That means that there
6. Be persistent. And 7. Respect God’s “no.”
These two need to be taken together. On the one hand, Jesus tells us to be persistent in prayer. He was always praising people who relentlessly asked for what they needed. He encourages us to ask, and seek, and knock. He didn’t tell us to pray once and then let it go. It’s important to remember Jesus’ command to be persistent, because we often find ourselves becoming discouraged or weary in prayer. It’s hard to keep asking for the same thing over and over. It’s emotionally tiring to keep seeking guidance time after time and still come up with no clear plan. That’s why the Bible keeps urging us to be “devoted” in prayer and to “pray without ceasing” (1 Thessalonians 5:17). The Christian writer Philip Yancey gives some good advice when he says “keep it short, keep it honest, and keep it going.” At the same time as we need to keep it going, we also need to respect God’s answer if it happens to be No, or Not now, or I have something different in mind for you. We all know that not every prayer request is answered by an immediate Yes on God’s part. What we don’t know is why. The Bible tells us that sometimes God refuses to hear our prayers because they are selfish, inappropriate, or ask him to do something against his nature. The letter of James nails it when it says, “You ask and do not receive because you ask wrongly, in order to spend what you get on your pleasures” (James 4:3). But sometimes we ask for apparently perfectly appropriate things that God just seems to say no to. This is when prayer gets really tough. St. Paul once talked about how he had some affliction that he called a “thorn in the flesh.” He tells how he repeatedly asked God to take away
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