Peter Lewis encourages us to realise that seeking God’s face is never a waste of time
It must have been a strange sight.
A blind boy flying a kite with his father’s help. A friend of the family who was watching dared to ask him a question: ‘What do you get out of this when you can’t see the kite?’ The answer was simple. The boy replied: ‘I can’t see it, but I can feel the pull.’
Christians might make a similar reply to the question ‘Why pray to a God you can’t see?’ The answer might well be: ‘I can’t see what’s happening, but I can feel the pull.’
Eye contact with God
The foremost characteristic of Jesus’s prayer life was the relationship that he had with God. This is the first lesson for us too. Above all else we must be mindful that our relationship with God is a personal one. The metaphors of Scripture include God as parent, husband, lover and friend. God is ‘a thou to whom we speak, not an it that we talk about. Prayer is the attention we give to the One who attends to us.’
Prayer has been called ‘eye contact with God’. In Scripture it is called ‘seeking the face of God’. There are few things that challenge and humble us as our efforts to pray do. They are so often crossed with wandering thoughts, weakened with tiredness and cooled by neglected disciplines, that we are tempted to think they can do no good and that God thinks as little of them as we do. Yet the most wonderful thing about prayer is that God has provided for all our inadequacies: there is grace to cover all our prayers as well as all our sins.
The Three who listen to us
We believe that God is the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit: the three persons of the Holy Trinity. And in prayer we are always in conversation with the Three; they hear us, help us and surround us with their blessing. I marvel at my heavenly Father who has loved and chosen me, kneeling before the Son who died for my sin and rose for my justification, and opening my deepest heart to the Holy Spirit who, with amazing patience and love, is making me holy too.
When we worship One, we are including All. John Calvin wrote: ‘That passage of Gregory of Nazianzus vastly delights me: “I cannot think on the one without quickly being encircled by the splendour of the three; nor can I discern the three without being straightway carried back to the one.”’
Whenever we pray, we have a listening Father, a praying Christ in heaven and a praying Holy Spirit on earth.
In Hebrews we learn that the Christ who prayed for us on earth (John 17.20) still prays for us in heaven (Hebrews 4.14–16; 7.25). And in Romans we are told that as the Lord Jesus is praying for us in heaven, the Holy Spirit is praying for us on earth, praying in our hearts, praying in our prayers, inspiring our longings with his own desires (Romans 8.26–27).
So there is this great river of prayer flowing between the persons of the Trinity: the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. And our prayers are being taken up into the flow with its mighty current. Is that not a staggering thought? We become part of the eternal conversation; our prayers are used to fulfil the sovereign plan.
When you realise this and take it deeply into your prayer life then, however small a part your prayers may form of the heavenly intercession of Christ or the mighty movement of the Holy Spirit in his ministry of prayer on earth, they are hugely significant and truly effective. Yet it’s not always easy. Why?
Christlike in persistent prayer
Jesus urged his followers to ‘Ask… seek… knock’ and ‘it will be given to you… you will find… the door will be opened to you’ (see Matthew 7.7). We need such reassurance in the face of an unbelieving world and many setbacks.
There are to be two great forces of prayer in a world of injustice and suffering and rebellion against God: the prayers of Christ in heaven and the prayers of God’s people on earth. So Jesus told his disciples a parable to show them that ‘they should always pray and not give up’ (Luke 18.1). And in the parable that follows the persistent widow’s cause triumphs.
‘What is the nature of petitionary prayer?’ asks David Wells, in a major book on world mission. He answers his own question: it is in essence rebellion – rebellion against the world in its fallenness, the absolute and undying refusal to accept as normal what is pervasively abnormal… Petitionary prayer only flourishes where there is a two-fold belief: first, that God’s name is hallowed too irregularly, his kingdom has come too little, and his will is done too infrequently; second, that God himself can change this situation.
Prayer becomes rebellion against the rebellion of earth. It fights for God and it knows that it is fighting on the winning side.
God and one man’s prayers
The most memorable demonstration of such persistent prayer that I have heard of occurred some years back with two people I have known well.
A few years ago Elsie received a letter, relating to a time in their early career, about 35 years earlier. To understand the context, you need to know that John and Elsie had a very profound and sustained intercessory prayer ministry.
In 1969 they were living and working with The Leprosy Mission in the Kathmandu Valley. In those days no one was allowed to witness to Christ to the Nepalese. Expats in the hospital could have their own church services, but there was to be no evangelism whatsoever. It was a closed country.
During their work, John and Elsie became increasingly concerned about the nearby Lille Valley. For all its natural beauty, it was a place of great spiritual darkness. One day a mother brought a child to the leprosy hospital for some attention, though neither had leprosy. This child was very dirty and scruffy, and as John was talking with the mother and the child, he felt a tremendous conviction that this ten-year-old would be used to open up the notorious Lille Valley to the gospel.
It seemed a ridiculous thing, but John felt the assurance of the Holy Spirit that it would certainly happen, so he covenanted with God to pray every day for the child and this outcome. He prayed for 17 years, every day without fail, even when the Harrises left Nepal to take up leprosy work in Congo.
‘What was her name?’
In 1986, when visiting Nepal, they heard from a paramedic friend named James that the Lille Valley had indeed opened up to the gospel. Soon afterwards, James wrote with details that entire families had become Christians through the witness of one woman. John asked simply, ‘What is the name of this woman?’ ‘Daya’, his friend said – and Daya was the very person John had treated so many years before!
Not long after John died, Daya wrote to Elsie to say that James, the paramedic, had told her that it was John who had treated her as a girl and prayed for her down through the years. Neither she nor her mother had ever known of John’s conviction, but she was writing to Elsie to say that there were now whole groups of worshippers in the Lille Valley. Later Elsie received another letter from her to say that they were standing strong in the faith of Jesus Christ. A small church has been formed where before only idol worship was allowed.
That, it seems to me, is a modern example of what we read in the Acts of the Apostles: the power of the Spirit at work in a deeply spiritual person, God sharing his secrets with a praying man and taking him into partnership, and God doing mighty things through believing prayer.
