St. Francis of Assisi was an Italian preacher of the thirteenth century.  The one obsession that rose above all others was that he might be able to imitate Christ.  His prayer shows it was the direction he wanted to move.  It is a prayer that in this almost eight centuries has become one of the best known in Christendom.  It is sung.  It hangs on walls.  It is found on Christmas calls.   It is repeated as the prayer at secular meetings.  Why?  Eight times he uses “me” or “I.” But in all but one it is outgoing.  It is to achieve the will of Christ.  It is to minister to the needs of people.  It is to build a world of peace.  The last one is that I might have eternal life.

          Compare this to the prayer of the Pharisee in the temple.  He used “I” only five times, but each time it is about him.  It is a boast.  It is to speak of his righteousness. It is an inventory of his virtues, not really of prayer.  But if we should pray like St. Francis, if we offered that prayer, what does it profit?

          This is a question we raise about all praying.  Although there are millions of people who never raise the question, there are millions of others who do ask the question.  And even those who believe in prayer with a deep and abiding faith at times wonder, “What’s the profit in praying?”

          One of the friends of Job was explaining to him about righteousness, helping him understand his sins being responsible for what had happened to him.  And he says that these will suffer.  The wicked, his riches will be taken from him.  His profits will not bring him joy.  The heavens will expose him.   And the earth will rise up against him.

          Job out of his pain and misery replied, “But the wicked do prosper.  They are established.  Their houses are safe.  They spend their days in prosperity and do not desire the knowledge of the Lord.  What is the Almighty that we should serve him, and what profit do we get if we pray?”  So in spite of the tremendous faith of a man like Job, there comes the question, “What profit if we pray?”

          A very simple answer is to turn to the Sermon on the Mount and listen to Jesus.  For he says, “Ask and you will receive, seek and you will find, knock and it will be opened to you.  For everyone who asks, receives and he who seeks finds and to him who knocks, it will be opened.”

          That cannot, however, answer the question.  For I cannot prove to you today that if you ask you will receive.  And somebody who doesn’t believe it could give as much proof that it isn’t true as I could give that it is true.  We have no way of proving it.

          When we go about to prove that prayer is profitable, to establish evidence that can’t be contradicted, we get farther from the truth, farther from God.  We have more questions raised than we can answer.  If you try to prove the love of another person for you, if you believe that he or she loves you, you will find all the proof in the world.  If you have doubt, when you have finished you will doubt the more because suspicion will be raised at every point.  C.S. Lewis in The Screwtape Letters says, “When the great archangel came before God to question him, the moment he asked his question not in humility to understand him but in order to compel God to give an account, he found himself an infinite distance from God.”

          We quite often make much of God answering our prayers by holding up specific results which are just as we asked.  Let me not at this point discredit that.  I believe in it.  I can hold up specific incidents of God answering prayer.

          I remember a number of years ago when one of our sons had polio.  All of the circles of our church prayed, and the doctors found a little different diagnosis when he was carried a hundred miles away to a special hospital, and he got well.  God answered our prayers.

          But another child in our congregation died of polio.  There were prayers offered for each.  Prayers offered by the same people, in the same church, in the same faith, in the same love.  Of course we must say, God answered our prayer.  But if we use that as the proof, then the other family has the proof that God did not answer prayer.

          As soon as we start trying to prove the profit in prayer by dramatizing the results which we have achieved, we pose the dilemma that caused Job to come back and say, “But I have some proof on the other side,” for standing in the misery of his life that tumbles in.  Job knew that the meaning of God had to run deeper than saying “The wicked suffer and the righteous prosper.”

          If we are to understand and find the full meaning of prayer, we have to go deeper.  How are we to explain, “Ask and you will receive, seek and you will find, knock and it will be opened to you?” Everytime somebody dies, everytime something tragic happens in a life, everytime a marriage is troubled and breaks up, does a prayer go unanswered?  Who of us has not asked and did not receive, who of us has knocked and always had the door opened?  Jesus prayed, “Father if it be possible, let this cup pass from me, but of course, not my will but thine be done.”  And it had to be the Lord’s will.  Ask and you will receive is followed by these words of Jesus, “What man of you if his son should ask for bread will give him a stone, or if he ask for a fish will give him a serpent.  If you being evil know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more will a loving heavenly father give good gifts to his children.”

          Jesus doesn’t say you get anything you ask for.  It means, it seems to me, that he will never give us anything that harms us.  If you and I will not give our children that which harms them, and we will always give them what we believe to be best, then we must assume that a wise God will give the best to his children.  A child wants to play with a knife.  It’s sharp.  A parent will not give him what he wants.  He will give him something else, something better for him.  We are God’s children, and we have to commit our lives and our desires in to His hands.

          The response of the Father to our prayers is deeper than what we want because he wants for us something better than what we want.  As I was trying to find answers for my children as they grew up, I remember an occasion when one of my children came and wanted to do something, and I had to say “no.” And I explained why I was saying no.  I said, “I so many times say yes, but sometimes I have to say no.”

          It would have been better, and I think both of us would have been happier at the time if I’d said yes.  But I wanted more than the happiness of the moment.  I wanted something inside of a boy growing so that as he got older he could say no within himself--that he would have the character and stability to face the no’s of life.  So I said, “I must say no sometime so you learn all of this,” and he accepted it at the time.  A couple of weeks later he wanted to do something else and I said no.  He said, “Daddy, is this wrong, or is this for my character?”

          God answers us sometimes for our character.  He wants something better for us than we want for ourselves.  I ran across a newspaper clipping which had a prayer on it.   It was about a ten year old girl from Brownsville, TN, who was praying that she would not lose her hand.  An operation seemed necessary to keep her bone cancer from spreading.  A wealthy anonymous man, I believe from Boston, responded and offered to fly her anywhere and provide her the best services available.  The article has his letter too.  He tells how her prayers and faith had influenced his life, and the loneliness had gone out so he could help someone.

          This is what was in his letter. “Now it is wonderful to have faith when we are praying for something we want.  But it is much more wonderful to have faith when we are denied what we want.”  God can’t always answer our prayers our way.  Sometimes He has to answer them his way.

          I think this must be the way Adoniram Judson, one of the great missionaries to Burma, felt about prayer.  It seemed to all appearances that his prayers were coming to naught.   He prayed to be sent to India as a missionary and he was sent to Burma.  He prayed for his wife to live and she died.  He prayed that he might not have to go to prison, but he was in prison in horrible conditions for 11 months.  In his diary he wrote, “I never prayed for anything sincerely and earnestly but it came in some shape and some time, probably the last I should have expected.”

          I think we pray as did Jesus, not my will but thine be done in the recognition that God can and God does know better.  It means that these words with which I am expressing my desire are the words to express a desire for the best for a person, for a cause included in my prayer.  I do not know what is best.  A lawyer once said, I have prayed all my life and I’ve had a long life, and the thing I’ve discovered is that if I had gotten what I had prayed for, almost everytime it would have been the wrong thing.

          The Spirit takes what we want--our intentions, our desires--and puts it right, and this is what becomes our prayer.  Paul said, “We do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words and he who searches the hearts of men knows what is the mind of the Spirit because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.”

          When I pray for someone, what I ask for them may not be the best thing within the will of God who’s thoughts and ways are so much higher than my own.  The Spirit takes my intention, the desire, and this is what God answers.

          Meaningful prayer is a dangerous adventure and costly.  We must recognize that we cannot just offer words.  Prayer is a relationship.  I think there must be a good relationship between a man, a woman, a child and God.  It is not what we say, it’s what’s coming out from us in our desires in this relationship.

          Sometime we kill prayer in our talking.  I recall a farmer who didn’t talk much.  His wife tried to get him to talk.  One day the train ran over one of his pigs.  She thought, “I’ll be able to get him to talk about this.” And she said to him, “Tell me about it, I heard from somebody else.” He scarcely looked up when he said, “It tooted and tuk him.”

          I sometimes think that’s not enough.  But there are other extremes where we do all the talking and God can’t speak to us.  But, it seems to me that what’s happening in us, God causes to happen and most of the time we try to create what we are trying to achieve and what we want to do.

          St. Francis’ prayer was offered with a life that sought nothing so much as to imitate Jesus Christ.  It was totally outgoing, totally other oriented.  Maybe that is the secret. Maybe it says something for us because we must confess that we’d like it the way we like it.

          We had a great saint down in Greenwood.  We had a chapel out from the church and found out that if we would move the chapel, just have it moved to the edge of the city, we’d get more people.  This was back in the old days and we carried them out to the chapel.  This was a person who believed in prayer and wanted the Lord’s will done.  One night they wanted to vote on it, and I said, “Let’s pray about it.”  I wasn’t prepared to move the chapel unless this lady agreed because she was closer to the Lord than I was.  She said, “Oh, yes, let’s pray but let’s don’t move it.”  And I think this is how we pray.

          Stanley Jones died at the age of 92.  Many thought he was one of the most devout men of his time.  He had an equally devout mother who prayed that her college age son might make a definite decision for Christ.  Stanley Jones was a fine young man, but like many college students, he’d never taken the time to make a decision about the ultimates of life.  One Sunday night he came home from a worship service in a Methodist Church in Baltimore.  He said to his mother, “Tonight I gave my life to Christ, and I’m happy about it.”

          “Oh, Stanley,” said his mother, “I’ve been praying for this moment for years.” But said Stanley, “Mother you didn’t let me finish. I offered myself for service overseas in India.”

          “Oh, how terrible his mother said, why do you have to throw your life away in a foreign country.”

          I think if she could have lived to see what Stanley Jones became and see what he meant to thousands upon thousands of people, she might have said, “The Lord knew best.”

          How we need to pray in our time for the church, for our country, for the things that are happening, as we think of “Oh freedom, the things done in your name, Oh honesty, the things that are covered up in your name.” We need to pray, for God promises us more and better than we ask.

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