I had one response to last week’s blog that raised the idea that resignation tends to make us functioning deists rather than functioning atheists. A brief internet search reveals that deism is defined in various ways, but one of those ways is a belief that God created the universe but that he does not interact with the universe. The clockmaker God who creates the world, winds it up and lets it alone to function as it does.

Someone can still believe in God and still believe in his love and goodness, but not believe that they will experience that love and goodness in their lives because God is not involved in their lives in that way. When we have adopted resignation in an area of our lives, we would not consider ourselves to be deists. And that is true of our beliefs and how we approach life in general. But in that area of painful unanswered prayer, we can be seen as functioning deists because we have resigned ourselves to the reality that we will not experience the good and loving God, who we still believe in, operating in our lives in response to that prayer. We only have half of the faith in Hebrews 11:6 “And without faith it is impossible to please him, for whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him.” We give up on prayer for that part of our lives because we no longer believe that God will reward our seeking.

We can react to this by feeling guilty, “Shame on us for becoming deistic.” But we also need to admit that there is a part of us that feels justified in this response. What does God expect when He chooses to treat us in this way? How can he expect us to believe that he is the rewarder of those who seek him when he has not rewarded our seeking again and again and again? Our retreat into deism is not just about protecting ourselves from the pain of being denied. It is also our attempt to protect our faith in God being good and loving. Because when we continue to pray to God about this, and continue to believe that he can answer our prayer, we continue to experience the absence of a good and loving God. And the more that this is our experience, the harder it becomes to believe that a good and loving God exists after all. At least our functioning deism allows us to believe that there is a good and loving God that we will experience in heaven, if not here on earth. It is better to be a deist in this area of our lives than to become an atheist because of what we continue to experience in unanswered prayer.

This does make some sense right? Especially if this is confined to only certain areas of our lives. But the problem is that this deism tends to spill over to the rest of our lives. These areas of unanswered prayer are so painful and so threatening to our belief that God is good and loving because they are so important to us. If God is deistic in this area of our lives, how can we trust, or expect, him to be involved in other areas of our lives. When facing a new challenge, do we really believe he is available to help us? When we adopt resignation to deal with unanswered prayer, it is not only that area of our lives that is affected. We don’t just stop praying for that thing. We naturally end up praying less about everything, including our work lives.

We do not want to be this way. We want a relationship with God where we can, and do rely on his help in our lives. We want to have vibrant and meaningful prayer lives where we truly believe that prayer makes a difference. But how do we honestly face the reality of unanswered prayer without ending up as deists (or worse atheists)? I will continue to explore how surrender is an important part of that path next week.

I would love to connect with you about these posts if they have stirred any thoughts or questions. Take a minute, shoot me an email at bo@leavenedlives.org, and let’s see where that takes us.