Why Bother Praying?

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash

There’s an old, old story, you’ve probably heard it before, about a pastor who was pottering around in his garden when he heard the meowing of a kitten up a tree. He felt sorry for it, so he put a ladder up against the tree to try and rescue the kitten, but it was too high up and he couldn’t quite reach. So he decided to tie a rope around a low branch, attach the other end to his car and inch away to pull the branch down low enough to reach this poor, frightened animal. 

An ingenious idea. Except it didn’t quite go to plan. As the car slowly moved away and the branch began to stoop, the rope suddenly snapped, and the kitten was launched high into the air. (So never attempt to rescue a cat stuck up a tree by pulling down the branch with a rope tied to your car).

 

Anyway, a fortnight later, the pastor was out visiting one of his church members. As he was about to sit down with a cup of tea, he noticed, to his great surprise, the very same kitten alive and well, stretched out on the sofa. So he diplomatically asked the man, “Just out of curiosity, how long have you had that cat?” “Oh,” he said, “about two weeks, and you’ll never believe how that came about.”

 

Some weeks earlier, his daughter had been asking if she could have a kitten for a pet. She was told categorically ‘no’, but she kept on asking anyway. In the end, not wanting to upset her, the pastor suggested that they kneel down there and then and ask Jesus about it – if it was God’s will, then the Lord would surely provide them a kitten.

 

“You’ll never guess what happened next, pastor! No sooner had we said ‘Amen’ than this little fella flies in through the window! Two miracles at once! Firstly, the answered prayer and secondly a cat that flies!”

 

Praying exposes unsuspecting people to the amazing, extraordinary, awesome power of our mighty God. The thing is, when people pray, stuff happens. I cannot count the number of times God has answered my prayers, sometimes in surprising ways, though I have never asked him for a new pet.

 

Why don’t we pray as much as we know we should? Because we are the lord of our lives. When I am god of my own life, I’ll never pray at all. What’s the point of prayer? I am so awesome. I can manage just fine on my own.

 

In the early 20th Century, a 22 year-old James Fraser travelled to southwest China and northern Burma to preach the gospel, plant churches and translate the New Testament into the local dialect of the Lisu people. When he got there he found, to his utter horror, that they worshipped demons. And here is what would happen: he would lead a family to Christ and, the next day, one would be sick, and a few days later another would die, and the family would go back to devil worship.

He became really frustrated. Nothing in his training had prepared him for anything like this. But he felt God speak to him to not lose heart, but to pray and trust that thousands of Lisu would be converted. He wrote home and asked a prayer group in his church to pray. And Fraser himself began to fervently claim these people for Christ in passionate prayer.

Years passed, with very little progress. Nothing was happening. Was it all a waste of time? Doubts started to creep in and he had to push them to one side and keep believing. Finally, just when he was at his wit’s end, God spoke to him one morning saying simply, “The strong man is bound.” From that very day, whole Lisu communities began turning to Christ - even some that Fraser had never met.

I love what Baptist preacher John Piper says about all this; “Prayer is the open admission that without Christ we can do nothing. And prayer is the turning away from ourselves to God in the confidence that he will provide the help we need. Prayer humbles us as needy and exalts God as all-sufficient.”

 

Some of you reading this may be wondering wearily whether God will ever answer the prayer of your heart. You may have been praying for years and nothing has changed at all. Even a bit to give you a glimmer of hope and a bit of encouragement.

 

I don’t know why God sometimes answers prayers very quickly, and sometimes he delays for months or years, and sometimes it seems that a good prayer is never answered in a whole lifetime. I. Don’t. Know. It’s a mystery.

 

Martyn Lloyd-Jones used to say, "Don’t let the things you don’t know spoil the things you do know." I do know that God is good. And I do know that he is worthy of trust. And I do know that he is all-sufficient for every need. And I do know that the more I pray the more likely it is that I will witness extraordinary things. Maybe not flying kittens. But you never know…

This post first appeared on King's Church Darlington's website.