The Sermon on The Mount - Teaching 21
Speaker Notes Judging Others
Matthew 7:7-11 (NIV)
7 “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. 8 For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.
9 “Which of you, if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone? 10 Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? 11 If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!
David Wells - “Prayer: Rebelling Against the Status Quo”, Christianity Today magazine, November 2, 1979.
So, why, then, don't we pray as persistently as we talk? The answer, quite simply, is that we don't believe it will make any difference. We accept, however despairingly, that the situation is unchangeable— what we see will always be. This is not a problem about the practice of prayer, but rather about its nature. Or, more precisely, it is about the nature of God and his relationship to the world.
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What then, is the nature of petitionary prayer? 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.
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Against all of this, it must be asserted that petitionary prayer only flourishes where there is a twofold 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. Petitionary prayer, therefore, is the expression of the hope that life as we meet it, on the one hand, can be otherwise and, on the other hand, that it ought to be otherwise. It is therefore impossible to seek to live in God's world on His terms, doing His work in a way that is consistent with who He is, without engaging in regular prayer.
Nathan is the Senior Theologian & Associate Directorof The Octet Collaborative at M.I.T.