Recently, as I watched my eleven-month-old make a mad dash for the open dishwasher, it struck me as remarkably similar to how we can approach God in prayer. Our hearts, like my son’s hands, desire to have, hold, and enjoy. Earthly objects appear good and precious before us. We reach for them through prayer — unaware of whether we reach for a spoon or a knife.

The God to whom we pray is our sovereign and kind Father. He cares whether his material gifts do service or harm to his children’s souls, and he truly knows the difference between spoons and knives, bread and stones, fish and serpents (Matthew 7:9–11). So, whenever necessary, his love says, “No.” His hands gently pull us back, shutting the door.

All the while, he assures us that he is not a Father who delights to withhold but to fulfill — fully, finally, and forever, with the only Object in all existence that can really satisfy us: himself (Psalm 16:11). Here I am; here is fullness of joy. What you wanted would have hurt you by giving you less of me. Fear not. I have not withheld myself. You shall be full.

But we are often too busy wandering around the base of a dishwasher to hear him.

Pray for God

Do you feel like one prayer after another is going unanswered? Is prayer an exercise in disappointment, sorrow, or even bitterness — not faith, fellowship, and joy? Jesus sees you, and he wants to free you from experiencing prayer as frustration. But to do that, he will ask you to stop asking mostly for more of his gifts. He will ask you to ask ultimately for more of him.

He says the same to all his sheep: “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28). Goods and kindred will not do. The good shepherd does not make us lie down in green pastures so that we can become sick on grass. Times of comfort, along with valleys of death, are for communion with Christ. He alone knows how much is too much — of both ease and affliction.

Our prayer life reveals whether our spiritual taste buds prefer certain circumstances above everlasting satisfaction in Christ, the Bread of Life and Living Water (John 6:35; 4:10). As J.I. Packer puts it, “I believe that prayer is the measure of the man, spiritually, in a way that nothing else is, so that how we pray is as important a question as we can ever face” (My Path of Prayer, 56). Does prayer mostly leave us hungry for any goods we didn’t get? Or, whatever the outcome, is it satisfying enough for us to know that as we pour out our hearts in prayer (Psalm 62:8), we pour them out to a Father infinitely more invested in those hearts than even we are?

Our nearsighted, half-hearted requests do not surprise him. He has given us a way to steer our prayers and, with them, our desires aright: “Until now you have asked nothing in my name. Ask, and you will receive, that your joy may be full” (John 16:24). In When I Don’t Desire God, John Piper paraphrases Jesus’s words this way: “In all your asking look for the fullness of joy in me. In this way all your asking will glorify me” (148). Whatever you request, request it with an eye to lasting delight — request it with an eye to getting more of me, whatever else you may get.

In response to prayers for God to glorify himself by satisfying us in himself, his answer is as timeless as his Son: yes. Jesus says so: “If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you” (John 15:7). If whatever you wish is that your joy would be full — that you would get God, come what may — that wish will be granted. It simply will.

“Prayer cannot survive by prayer alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.”

Not by a genie, but by a Father who gave his only Son so that you could and would believe in him (John 3:16). Be satisfied in him. Trust him. Treasure him. Genies give gifts. God gives himself (even in his gifts). He gives exceeding joy and gets exceeding glory for being our exceeding joy. The more we pray to this end, the more our prayers will be answered, and the less we will sit sullen and confused before an over-rubbed lamp (or before a dishwasher, in my son’s case).

Hear to Speak

Notice the all-important if in Jesus’s words in John 15:7: “If . . . my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.” If our prayers are going to power joy in Christ, Christ’s words must power our prayers. And if his words are going to power our prayers, we must open our Bibles.

So often, our prayer-problems (and therefore our joy-problems) begin not with delayed speech but with impaired hearing. Whether in the midst of Eden or east of it, humans have never started conversations with God, but he with us. Stop at any point in redemptive history, and you will find God already there — speaking.

Every atom in existence, especially those that form you and me, can be traced back to the One who said, “Let . . .” When Adam and Eve fell and then tried to flee, God’s voice chased after them: “Where are you?” (Genesis 3:9). Though he cast humankind from his holy presence, still he would not cease to reveal himself to us. Now he would do so “by the word of the Lord” (1 Samuel 3:21). In time, this Word would miraculously take on flesh and dwell among us (John 1:14). Today, anytime Christians pray in faith, it is because Christ the Word already dwells richly in us by his Spirit.

So, prayers spoken in faith do begin not with our mouths but with our ears and remain in lifelong orbit insofar as the Scriptures, and therefore the Son, remain at the center of the Christian solar system. Prayer cannot survive by prayer alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God (Matthew 4:4).

Psalm 56 illustrates this powerful pattern of God’s words drawing out our words. As David composed this poem, he lay captive to the Philistines. Yet David’s danger strengthened, rather than squashed, his resolve to pray: “When I am afraid, I put my trust in you” (verse 3). David is afraid, so David is praying. And the reason David is praying is because David has been hearing: “In God, whose word I praise, in God I trust; I shall not be afraid. What can flesh do to me?” (verse 4). The praiseworthy word of God is the basis for David’s deep trust in God. And so he prays.

Our own voices will cry out like David, “God, I trust you!” to the degree that our hearts grasp the utter trustworthiness of God like David. Also like David, only God’s own voice can draw such trust and its attendant prayerfulness out of us. When we try to pray from thin air, our minds feel fuzzy, and our voices are quick to crack. But when we pray in response to and alongside God’s voice — it’s like going from ten thousand feet above sea level to standing on the shore. Our prayers will enjoy enough oxygen to last a lifetime.

Impossible Prayers

Whether we’ve walked with God for one year or fifty, no one is above lessons in prayer. Just as the first disciples asked Jesus to teach them to pray (Luke 11:1), so should we. Left to ourselves, our prayers tend to trail the path of unbelieving prayers, requests that flow from hearts interested only in getting gifts (James 4:3), not in getting the Giver himself within every gift (James 1:17).

If we want our prayers to be a means to unshakable soul-joy, we will ask God to do what he wants within all our wants. And if we want God’s wants to become ours, we will learn the words and lean into the Spirit of the only Man who desired and delighted in God perfectly all the days of his life.

If we pause for a moment to check the pulse of our own delight in God, we may be tempted to tremble with the twelve disciples. “Who then can be saved?” (Matthew 19:25). But such fear is only for those who would refuse the God-appointed means to making the impossible possible: prayer. Ultimately, we cannot think, read, or even meditate our way to joy in God. Joy in God is a gift from God. If we are to have it, we must ask God for it. We must pray.

As we imperfectly pursue him, he will perfectly answer our prayers for earthly circumstances and material goods. We will watch him direct scalpels and OBs, provide last-minute funds and 24/7 friends. We will marvel as he restores broken marriages, returns wayward children, and resets quarreling churches. May we never doubt our Father’s eagerness to hear from us and give to us (Matthew 7:11).

But our Father is not mostly concerned with preserving his children’s comforts. No, he is dead set on safeguarding his children’s souls. The Hound of Heaven will not be reduced to Earth’s Vending Machine (or a Divine Dishwasher). Hallelujah! We cannot tell whether what we request is a spiritual razor blade or a rich blessing. But our sovereign and saving God can. He will give only what is good for us and glorifying to him — everything we need for our joy in him to be full.

Man is a creature who hardly knows himself. “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?” (Jeremiah 17:9). Even as a Christian with a new heart, I continue to discover within myself new contradictions, fresh perplexities, strange paradoxes. Take, for example, the cohabitation of a desire for a sturdier faith in Jesus Christ, with a quiet and competing preference for a scrawny faith.

On the one hand, I grimace as I watch Jesus routinely chide the disciples for their “little faith” (Matthew 8:26). Lord, I am too much like them. Fix my eyes firmly on my King. Strong faith, even when unpossessed, is not undesired.

But then I discover an Achan in the camp, a Judas among the twelve with his hand in the moneybag. A skulking and smiling and sinister wish that sabotages progress in the faith. C.S. Lewis first warned me of his presence.

I’m not sure, after all, whether one of the causes of our weak faith is not a secret wish that our faith should not be very strong. Is there some reservation in our minds? Some fear of what it might be like if our religion became quite real? I hope not. God help us all, and forgive us. (Essay Collection & Other Short Stories, 137)

At first, it seemed absurd. Who wouldn’t want to move mountains? Who wouldn’t want to bludgeon unbelief? I tried to move on. I tried throwing my conscience a different bone. But it wouldn’t budge.

“Some fear of what it might be like if our religion became quite real” — that sentence drew the blood. Did I not want all of this to become more real? Was I afraid of what it might be like farther off from the shore? Are you?

Afraid of True Religion

What might Lewis mean by this dread of strong faith, of a religion too real and near?

He means that some of us suspect, deep down, that if we meet the real thing more often, if we galloped too forcefully toward eternal realities, they would unhorse us. And what would follow? If our faith were too solid, we might lose much in this world. We might become the oddities we wish to avoid. They might shackle us and carry us off we know not where, and pressure us to risk more than we would mind losing.

Our relationships would change. Our priorities would change. This world would start to fill with devils, with immortal souls, with warfare. Nature would kneel before supernature.

“The richness and depth of our world comes from the relationship between ordinary pleasures and transcendent beauty.”

God would grow. Death would stare. We might hear Satan laugh. Would the weight of it all crush our finitude? It could certainly stampede some dreams. If Christianity became entirely real, which of our Isaacs are safe? What sacrifice would be too great, or trial too burdensome, to endure for his glory? If the roots went all the way to the bottom, then my life really is not my own, is it?

Hell — how could we conceive of it? Heaven — how could we live for less? Gospel — how could we ever withhold it? Time — how could we ever waste it? Christ — how could he be less than all in all?

Such unbending realness, we can now begin to see, might secretly wish to be kept at bay. Jurassic Park is pleasant until the electric fences go out. We have done a fine job today creating our theme park and barriers where forces from the next world might be seen from time to time grazing safely on the other side of our passions and amusements. Yet, for all of that, we fail to realize that the electricity was never on.

High and Perilous

Strong faith knocks powerfully as an intrusive and demanding visitor. Is he not the great culprit in Hebrews 11, sending those saints forth to be swept off to otherwise unpleasant, inconvenient, and sometimes fatal adventures?

This faith is like pesky Gandalf to our hobbit holes. Austin Freeman comments,

Gandalf intercedes in the culture of the Shire because the hobbits had begun to forget their own stories of daring and danger and therefore their sense of the world’s greatness. They needed to renew their memory of the high and the perilous. The hobbits must be reminded of an element of danger in order to appreciate what they have. (Tolkien Dogmatics, 80)

Haven’t many of us lost much of what we once had? Haven’t we also grown stale, forgetting the greatness of the world — the greatness of this Story that God is writing around us? Too often, we have edited out the high and perilous, the epic and the eternal, the glorious and the numinous. Or at least we relocate dangers to chapters before and after our own page. Not in our doctrinal statements, perhaps, but in our daily sense of what is most ultimate, most urgent.

Freeman goes on to depict how the unpredictability and hazard of such faith actually becomes invaluable to our soul’s happiness.

The good things that make hobbit society valuable, such as freedom and peace and pleasure in ordinary life, require a greater and more dangerous world outside their borders in order that they not grow stale. The richness and depth of our world come from the relationship between the ordinary pleasures, such as food, drink, and family on the one hand, and the longing for transcendent beauty, quests, and noble sacrifice on the other hand. (80)

“Our secret wish for little faith, should we indulge it any longer, will only rob us in the end.”

Domesticity must dance with dragons. The richness and depth of our world comes from the relationship between ordinary pleasures and transcendent beauty. Reality, without consulting us, sings a duet: the ordinary with the extraordinary. This world lodges firmly in the shadow of the next. Yet, the transcendent is often gone — not from our Bibles or from our actual world — only drained from our bloodstream.

Befriend and Obey Reality

Weak faith contents itself to have it so. Weak faith minds the times and stands no taller than is necessary. Weak faith knows that a host of awkward conversations, probable persecutions, and unquenchable sorrows are restrained on the other side of the dam.

Yet without such a torrent, we live half-lives (if that). Again, “The richness and depth of our world come from the relationship between the ordinary pleasures, such as food, drink, and family on the one hand, and the longing for transcendent beauty, quests, and noble sacrifice on the other hand.” Reality will have her vengeance. Remove the spiritual, the beautiful, the sacrificial, and you flush all the wonder and meaning from the superbly ordinary.

But should we dress in the whole armor of God and war against spiritual powers, when we savor our food and glorify God as we drink, when we raise families and care for neighbors and serve a local church full of normal saints, when we sacrifice and suffer and wait and worship — bowed smilingly beneath the lordship and love of God our Father and our Savior Jesus Christ — we live, really live.

Our secret wish for little faith, should we indulge it any longer, will only rob us in the end. Reality, to the Christian, is a best friend to be fully embraced, a captain to be dutifully obeyed. The unseen is more real than we think. Christ is more worthy than makes us comfortable. Death is nearer, hell is hotter, heaven more heavenly, sin more sinister, the church more dear, the gospel more atomic, the Father more holy, compassionate, and just than little faith wants to imagine. The real thing is the only reality that is, the only reality that will be, and the only reality that Christians will ever truly wish to be.

http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/15904984/the-punishment-of-eternal-destruction