Lord, accept our prayer, You who sit at the Father’s right hand, and have mercy on us.
But as for me, my prayer is to Thee, O Lord. At an acceptable time, O God, in the abundance of Thy steadfast love answer me.
Psalm 69:13
The next line of the Doxology addresses one of the most used, misunderstood, rewarding and frustrating aspects of Christianity, the prayer of supplication. Supplication is simply asking God for something. We do this all the time. Sometimes the supplication may be specific—i.e. Lord, help me to get this job I really want. Sometimes it may be more general—i.e. Lord, give me wisdom. There is nothing wrong with asking God for something.
There are two things that are misunderstood about supplicatory prayer. First, many people just go straight to the supplication aspect of prayer, and they forget giving glory to God, thanking God, addressing their own personal shortcomings (repenting of sins) and interceding for others (offering up the needs of others in prayer), the four other important parts. They only go to God in supplication, which means for many people, they don’t go to God very often. They might go a long time without praying and then something really big comes up, like a health crisis, and they run to God in supplication.
The second part of supplicatory prayer that is misunderstood is that many people see prayer like a vending machine. They “order” a specific thing and expect a specific outcome. Like when you put $1 (or is it $2 now?) into a vending machine, punch the number for a Twix candy bar, and requested Twix bar comes out. What happens if we punch the number for a Twix and instead get a Kit Kat? We are angry that our request wasn’t fulfilled just the way we wanted it. And worse yet, what if the machine puts out nothing? We’ve all had that happen at least once. We bang on the machine, complain to management, walk away in disgust, and never use that machine again.
Prayer fits all three of these possible vending machine outcomes. Sometimes we put in a request to God and what we want happens. Sometimes we request something and we get something different. And many times we request something and nothing happens, and we struggle with what to do next, or we get angry, or worse yet, we give up on prayer.
Leaving room for God’s will in our supplication is helpful. The hardest four words to offer in supplication are “Thy will be done.” Asking for God’s will to be done in a certain situation is the best prayer of supplication. This is why the Lord’s Prayer is such an important prayer in the life of each Christian. It asks for God’s will to be done, and follows up with the phrase “Give us this day our daily bread,” which asks for God to give us what we need to have on a particular day, or in a particular situation. This request is always honored by God.
Leaving room for God’s will sometimes does mean a different outcome than what we were expecting. Most of us have had an experience when something exceeded our expectations. We went in hoping for something and we ended up with something even better than we hoped for. And of course, there is the other outcome, when we were hoping for something and we got less. Or maybe we hoped for something, and much later something different happened. Sometimes God doesn’t answer our prayers because He knows that if a wish came true, it might actually hurt us in the long run. I.e. someone prays for a relationship to work out and it doesn’t and it ends up being for the best. But at the moment the prayer is not answered, there is hurt feelings, and some of those hurt feelings might be towards God.
If we pray for our sports team to win, we are also praying essentially for the other team to lose. If the other team also prays to win, then it’s like making God choose sides. The better prayer for the athlete is to play well and to be safe. It’s the same with praying to get a job over someone else. There are many instances of prayer where one person succeeding will mean that another person has to fail. This is why we should pray for God’s will to be done and for us to give our best effort, rather than just focusing on an outcome.
There is one category of prayer that causes the most frustration, and this is the prayer for God to do something good that will affect no one outside of one or two people. The most common example is a prayer for healing of a young child. That child getting healed won’t cause someone else to lose anything. It will just bring joy to that child and his or her parents. Asking God to strengthen a marriage also doesn’t cause someone else to lose anything. It is particularly challenging when these kinds of prayers are not answered. And this is where real faith comes in—when we are disappointed, even confused, but we still keep coming back to God.
The verse from Psalm 69:13 offers so much to us. It reminds us that our prayer is to God, not to ourselves. Prayer is about offering our needs to His will, not putting forth our own will. The verse references “an acceptable time,” reminding us that God’s plans unfold in His time, and that we are part of a grander plan for the salvation of all humanity, including our own, which doesn’t necessarily play out in ways and times we expect. The “abundance of steadfast love” is a statement of faith in God, that even when the outcome isn’t what we are hoping for, that we continue to see God as a source of love. And “answer me,” leaves room open for God to answer us in His way.
Today’s prayer is the Prayer of Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow, which highlights God’s will to be done in whatever we are asking in prayer.
O Lord, I know not what I ought to ask of You. You and You alone know my needs. You love me more than I am able to love You. O Father, grant unto me, Your servant, all which I cannot ask. For a cross I dare not ask, nor for consolation; I dare only to stand in Your presence. My heart is open to You. You see my needs of which I myself am unaware. Behold and lift me up! In Your presence I stand, awed and silenced by Your will and Your judgments, into which my mind cannot penetrate. To You I offer myself as a sacrifice. No other desire is mine but to fulfill Your will. Teach me how to pray. Pray Yourself in me. Amen.
When we make a supplication to God that asks for wisdom, mercy, grace and other intangible things, we will find that God answers these prayers.
