Clinging to God: A Model in Prayer

Clinging to God: A Model of Prayer

For me, having an authentic prayer life has definitely been a journey. When I was single I was convinced that it was a God-honoring prayer to ask Him when every new guy came along, “Lord, is he the one?” Really convinced that knowing that answer would help me to conduct myself rightly, I persisted in this prayer until one weekend I was challenged by a very godly man at our church to rethink this. Sinclair Ferguson, a Scottish reformed minister, had been asked to speak at our single’s retreat and having sworn off single’s retreats in my 30’s for all the melodrama inherently imbedded in them, I decided to go one last time, just to hear him talk. He gave a talk at an outdoor amphitheater one afternoon I will never forget. He titled it, “Why doesn’t God give us the red phone?” He started his talk with this question and shared his own angst in the dating process when he met and began to date his wife. Doing what apparently most of us singles do, he had been asking the Lord to show him if she was the one prior to asking her out, when he was challenged by a godly man at his church if she was a woman of character and the right kind of woman to marry. When Sinclair said yes, the man responded that he should not hesitate then to ask her out. That God might not want him to have that answer that the beginning of the process. He said that gave him much material for thought and spurred a shift in his thinking in this matter of knowing God’s will. He went on to point out that perhaps our prayers that are so rabidly focused on the outcome of the events of our lives and whether or not something was God’s will was really not at all about seeking God’s will. That is was rather a means of risk management. That we sometimes ask God if a thing is His will because we want to know at the beginning if we will get hurt, if we need to be guarded in the process. But taking us to the Scriptures, he pointed out that God is actually much more concerned about this process of conforming us to the image of His Son; that He is committed to a process in our lives not just a specific path, course of action or outcome. The importance of being in this process is that by not knowing how God will provide in every instance and having to wait upon Him and see how He works things out is what builds our faith and our trust in Him. He pointed out that God in fact only calls us to be accountable for one day at a time. To seek Him and His will daily, with a surrendered heart to whatever the outcome might be. He challenged us to consider that perhaps rather than praying that we know if this person or that person is the one, we commit rather to praying that we are the right kind of spouse and that God works in us to be the partner He wants us to be for the person He brings to us. That we pray that we are committed to honoring God in the dating process and allowing Him to unfold His plan regarding this person as we walk with the Lord daily, rather than praying that we see the end from the beginning. That can just be our way of managing the risk of a situation. While it looks Godly on the surface, underneath it lurks a dark motive of suspicion and mistrust of God’s mercy in our lives.

That talk really had an impact on me and I decided from that day on not to pray anymore that I would know ahead of time in a flash of revelation who was the one for me. I began to pray instead that God would keep me open to who He would bring into my life, and keep me open to His will in the process of leading us together. I actually prayed that God would lead through the man’s assurance that I was the one. He was pleased to honor that prayer when I met and started dating my husband to be. It was actually a grueling process for me though, and revealed to me in the process that I really did want to maintain control of the situation.

As I have reflected on the nature of prayer as God intends it, I have decided that the reason Sinclair had really landed on the right idea about prayer was because it promoted a posture of clinging to God. In the past few years my eyes have been opened to this being not only a minor theme that runs through the Old and New Testament but also actually an underlying theme in what right relationship with God looks like. Consider the passage in Jeremiah 13:10-11 where God makes a strange request of Jeremiah and asks him to get a waistband and hide it under a rock for many days. When God tells Jeremiah to retrieve it awhile later, naturally having been exposed to the elements, it has been ruined. He tells Jeremiah in this story that the people of Israel have become worthless to Him because they refuse to cling to Him. “For as the waistband clings to the waist of a man, so I made the whole house of Israel and the whole house of Judah to cling to me, declares the Lord, that they might be for Me a people of renown, for praise and for glory; but they did not listen.”

Again in Deuteronomy 13:4 when the people are challenged to keeps the Lord’s commandments, along with that admonition is a call to cling to the Lord. It says, “You shall follow the Lord your God and fear Him; and you shall keep His commandments, listen to His voice, serve Him and cling to Him. When the people of Israel were being led by Joshua into the Promised Land God says to His people, “But you are to cling to the Lord your God as you have done to this day.”

The most godly king who ever ruled Judah is described this way in II Kings 18: 3-6. It says, “And he did right in the sight of the Lord, according to all that his father David had done…He trusted in the Lord the God of Israel: so that after him there was none like him among all the kings of Judah, nor among those who were before him. For he clung to the Lord; he did not depart from following Him, but kept His commandments, which the Lord had commanded Moses.” And then it goes on to describe his response when the king of Assyria’s messenger went to Israel and told them not to let their naïve king Hezekiah mislead them. That they would be not delivered out of his hand by the living God. How did Hezekiah respond? Did he get into some theological banter with that evil king? He went into the temple, laid this letter of scorn before the altar of God and cried out to Him to deliver them. And boy did God answer. It was one of the few battles described in the Old Testament where God directly sends an angel of destruction to wipe out the enemies of God. His prayer life was a reflex of dependence, surrender and vulnerable expectation before God. His response to life’s trials was to run to His heavenly Father and cling to Him.

What keeps us from operating in such vulnerable expectation with the Lord? Again reflecting back on my single years one of the other most impactful talks I heard was regarding this issue of prayer with our single women’s leader Kari Stainbeck. She was talking about this matter of prayer and said that the reason we don’t come before the Lord with our hearts wide open is because we are afraid to let our desires and fears be as big as they really are because we don’t really think God will come through for us. So we tell ourselves it’s really not that big of a deal. It really isn’t that desperately lonely to be single. I really don’t want kids that badly. We hide behind this very Christian-sounding rhetoric that says, “I’m really ok with this” because it’s the Lord’s will when in fact our hearts our breaking. But we can’t admit to ourselves let alone the Lord just how big or devastating this issue is to us because on some level we really believe He just might not come through. He might not answer me. His love might not be enough to cover and heal this. So we minimize our needs and desires when we pray because our God is frankly just too small.

Elizabeth Elliot describes a similar struggle in her prayer life shortly after the death of her second husband in her book A Path through Suffering. Having lost her first husband to a massacre by a tribe of Auca Indians, it was unimaginable to her that God would ever call her to suffer the death of her second husband to cancer. Finding herself a widow however for the second time, shortly after his death, she was sitting at her table trying to have time with the Lord but feeling entirely at a loss with what to bring to Him. She told him in a moment of complete honestly that she knew she needed to worship Him but the only thing she really had to bring before His throne was heartache, disappointment and despair. She recounts that the Spirit softly replied to her, “then child that is what you are to bring to me. For it is not that you bring your best, but that you bring what you have in your heart and offer it on the alter of surrender. For it is in laying it down before me, that it becomes a fragrant offering to me.” It was a totally liberating moment for her to recognize that we do not come before the Lord in prayer with the right attitude or the right heart, but in this model of clinging, rather we just run to Him. We see him as our refuge, our only hope and we run to him because as Peter says in John 6: 68, “Lord to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.” We do not come to Him because we can do it right or well or in a spiritual frame of mine. We come to Him because He is Abba---Daddy. We come to Him because we know that ultimately He is our only hope, our only rock and our only refuge. There is nowhere else to turn.

What better example is given to us of this kind of clinging in prayer that Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane? It is interesting because as many times as it mentions in the New Testament that Jesus went alone by himself to pray, this is our only intimate glimpse of what actually took place in His prayer life with the Father. And it isn’t what we would expect. For Jesus does not come with pious stoic words of lofty notions of suffering. He cries out to His Father in complete vulnerability that this cross is not one He wants to bear. That this cup of suffering is one He would rather not drink. He doesn’t minimize his fear or his emotions. He doesn’t hide from the Father his true human feelings about facing the cross. Instead He pours out his heart before the Father so fervently that He sweats blood. He held nothing back. He threw Himself with unguarded passion at His Father’s feet, and in doing so found that He received mercy in His time of need. As it tells us in Hebrews 5: 7 “ In the days of His flesh, He offered up both prayers and supplications with loud crying and tears to the one who was able to save Him from death, and He was heard because of His piety. Although He was a Son, He learned obedience from the things which He suffered.”

Several things fascinate me about this passage. It says that Jesus appeal to His Father was emotional, heart-felt and completely honest. He did not try to dress up His feelings or diminish His very real fears about going to the cross. He did not hold back revealing His true desires and even making requests of the Father that if possible He would not have to go to the cross. What is interesting about the text though is that the Scriptures clearly tell us that He was heard because of His piety. His Father heard Him; and yet Jesus did end up going to the cross. The Father did not say yes to His Son in this, even His only Son. Do we trust the Father as Jesus did? Enough to come to Him as our only source of comfort and pour out our hearts? Willing to accept whatever the Father has for us in the process?

One of my favorite stories of prayer is about St. Augustine’s mother Monica. She was a godly woman of prayer who had prayed fervently for the conversion of her wayward son Augustine. When he announced to her that he planned to move to Rome, the capital of debauchery at that time, her heart was broken. She was convinced that if he moved to Rome he would never be converted to Christ. And so the night before his planned departure, she lay on the dock from which his ship was to embark and prayed fervently all night long that God would not let him get on that ship. And yet when morning came, he did get on that ship and leave for Rome. She was crushed. Had God not heard her prayer? Did He not have more of a heart for her son’s conversion than she did? And yet it was a few months later in Rome that Augustine met the Lord.

What is interesting about this story is that God was working out Monica’s prayer. It did not look like it. How could she have known that in order for God to say yes to the heart of her prayer—her son’s conversion---He would say no to the particular of her prayer—that he not go to Rome. Such is the wisdom of God in our lives. And so the challenge for us is to entrust our lives into the hand of our faithful creator and practice a life of clinging abandon with Him. If this was not what He intended why would He say in John 15:5 “I am the vine, you are the branches; he who abides in Me, and I in him, he bears much fruit; for apart from me you can do nothing.” The image He gives us for relationship with Him is that of total dependence, total surrender, a clinging to our Vine. Are you willing to enter into this kind of prayer relationship with your Father? Ready to lay before Him all that you have, and wish for, and have not, that you might discover the riches of His grace? Cling to Him and see if He is not worthy of all your trust.