Jesus on Prayer – Application

I am applying what I have been blogging to an area of unanswered prayer in my life. For over 25 years, I have had lower back pain. It is not a debilitating pain, and while it waxes and wanes, it has always been there to some degree. Some activities like lifting things or forms of exercise will exacerbate the pain, but by far the worst thing is sitting. So I try to avoid sitting whenever I can. (Car rides are a real problem). I have had lots of prayer and a lot of people praying for this over those years. I have also sought out various forms of medical treatment (doctors, physical therapy, chiropractors, epidural injections, etc). The general pattern has been to try a form of treatment for awhile and then give it up due to the lack of results and the time and money being spent. Then it would get worse and I would try some form of treatment with the same outcome.

So how do I obey Jesus command, “always to pray and not lose heart”, in this area of my life? What is going to motivate me? The main motivation is the idea that God wants me to pray about this. He wants this area of my life to be a part of my relationship with Him. So, rather than dealing with this on my own, or doing the best I can to ignore it, I talk to Him about it. And I do this with the belief that regardless of my experience, God wants me to keep asking.

But engaging in prayer is not easy because it involves talking with Him about how great it would be if He would heal my back… the difficulty of not being able to sit and relax during the day or enjoy a sit down meal with others…. the constant low level pain wearing me out… the frustration that travel for a vacation creates days of increased pain…my fear that this is just going to get worse as I get older. The more I pray about it, the more I desire to have life without it. And the harder it is to imagine what positive purpose God is accomplishing that outweighs all of these negative aspects.

So it is helpful to see that Jesus does not expect me to be able to reconcile God’s good purposes in my life with areas of unanswered prayer. If I was trying to do that, I would have to avoid talking with God about how I was feeling. If I imagine a scale with God’s good purpose on one side and unanswered prayer on the other, and the idea that I need to somehow SEE God’s good purpose as the weightier side, then talking with God about how I am feeling just puts weight on the wrong side.

There is something healthy about talking with God about the experience of suffering if I can avoid bitterness that He is not taking it away. There is an element of surrender, allowing God to be good and loving without needing to relieve the suffering. There is something about being able to share the suffering with Him that changes the experience. Does it help to get in touch with the Jesus who shares our suffering or do we just want the Jesus who takes it away?

At the tomb of Lazarus, Jesus wept. Jesus knew that he was about to perform the miracle of raising Lazarus from the dead and everyone’s grief would instantly be changed to joy. Yet he pauses to share their grief and suffering. That is remarkable, and something I would never think to do, share someone’s suffering when I had the power to simply remove it. There is a level of love and intimacy in shared suffering. With unanswered prayer and suffering, we have the fellowship of the Jesus who shares our suffering, if we are willing to receive it.

And there is hope that God acting in deliverance and healing can happen at any time for no discernible reason. I resonate with what someone has said, “God acts in response to prayer, but with baffling unpredictability.” So, God might act in response to my prayer for relief from my back pain even though it has been 25 years. It is not an exercise in obedient prayer with no hope of a favorable outcome. The 25 years are not determinative of the future. My immediate future could be one of healing. And even if it is not, my ultimate future is one of complete healing.

To lose heart in an area of unanswered prayer is to lose God …. in that area of our lives, we are practicing atheists. Persevering in prayer guards against this and allows us to connect with God. If work has been an area of losing heart in prayer, what do you need to do about that?