Jonah: Prayer is Relational

Many years ago, the New York Times magazine ran an article entitled The Right Way to Pray.

Well that that would be really nice to know, wouldn't it?

Like right or what you're like, I need to read that.

Because I I think a lot of us either you pray and you're not quite sure if you're praying in the right way or praying in the wrong way.

I think there's others of us that keep praying in a certain way and we're sort of disillusioned with it.

And then some others of us sort of like you just stopped.

Like you wouldn't raise your hand if I asked you, but like really, if I just asked, like, do you pray?

You're like, yeah, not really, because you did it for a while and like nothing happened.

And so this idea of the right way to pray, I mean, there's a title for an article.

And what's interesting is this guy, a secular guy, is not a Christian, not a believer in God and in Jesus.

And what he does is he goes around and he interviews and he studies different traditional ways to pray, different religious ways to pray, different uh different types of churches, different theological bents.

And what he decides at the end of it is he decides he likes how children pray.

And here's a great little quote from the article.

Here's what he says.

They didn't pray to decenter their egos or find transcendence or to set off on a lifelong therapeutic spiritual journey.

They prayed to a God with whom they were on a first name basis.

And they believed their prayers gave them power.

Straight up gimme on behalf of people who really need the help.

Now, we all like the idea of a gimme, right?

I mean, who doesn't like a free t-shirt, right?

I mean, you've been at the basketball game or the football, they bring out the guns and all of a sudden, all of it.

We love a gimme.

But what I think what he's saying is that he liked the children's prayers, and it's why a child's prayer is always refreshing, no matter how absurd it is, right?

It's so refreshing because it's it's honest and relational in terms.

It is not transactional.

It's honest and relational in nature, it's not transactional.

So we've been going through this Old Testament story of Jonah.

This guy was an Old Testament prophet.

He was religious, he was very pious, he was sort of a well-known prophet.

He gets a call to go to Nineveh.

This would be a town, a different country.

This would be the enemy, these would be people that have hurt his people, hurt people he knew.

He so he ran the other way.

Right away, he discovers what all of us discover, you can't outrun God.

He ends up on a ship, and then he ends up in the sea, and then he ends up under the sea, and then under the surface, that's where he is rescued by a fish.

And he keeps calling this the belly of Sheol or the belly of death.

And this is where a couple weeks ago we talked about that we all need a death before death.

And it's under the surface that we actually get rescued.

I'll reread some of these verses and make some points as we go.

Jonah 2, Jonah chapter 2, verses 1 and 2.

Jonah 2:1

Then Jonah prayed to the Lord as God.

It's interesting, it said then he prayed.

So, like after he was under the surface, after he was rescued.

Then he prayed to the Lord as God from the belly of the fish, saying, I called out to the Lord out of my distress, and he answered me out of the belly of Sheol, I cried, and you listened, or you heard my voice.

And that is good news.

If you are exhausted, or you are broken, or you're the end of yourself, you don't know how to figure out, you don't know the next step, you don't know which way to go, or you're just ashamed.

And you heard my voice.

I can think back over my life.

Many of you are older than me, you have many more stories than I do, but I can think back over it, and I can think of like, oh, that hurt or that thing I was praying for.

I didn't get what I was praying for, but later on I look back, and the thing that was probably the most powerful in those moments is just that I had some measure of confidence of he heard my voice.

Here's point number one.

Point number one is this is prayer is not the bending of God to our plans, but the death of our wills to a loving God.

Prayer is not the bending of God to our plans, but the death of our wills to our loving God.

You ever been going on a long trip, you pack your suitcases, say it's a long trip, and so you have your carry-on, you got your backpack, and then say you got two suitcases, right?

You have two suits, you have all your shoes in one and then all your clothes in the other, or whatever it is that fills these up.

But you need two suitcases.

Maybe you're with family, maybe you have kids with you, you get to the airport, you park at the back of one of those lots because it's the cheapest.

You have a mile walk, put the backpack on, you got your suitcases, you're going through the parking lot.

Every kid, you're real clear, everybody's got to carry their own suitcases, you're not gonna pick up any other baggage, and you're going and you're good for the first hundred yards, you're like row X, and then you get to M and you're feeling pretty good.

You get to like D, you're okay.

You get to the covered walkway.

We know that walkway leads to under the parking deck, and that's where all the nice cars are, and you see those, oh that would have been nice.

And then about there, like you have to resituate, and you know, it's the suitcase, you resituate, and then your kid decides they're not, they're tired of their suitcase, so you stack it on top of yours, you keep going, and it's about then you see what you needed to see the whole time.

The terminal's up ahead, and the savior's there.

Do we know who the savior is?

It's the baggage handler.

It's the most wonderful thing in the world.

You get up there and you lift that suitcase that better weigh 49 pounds, right?

Know that feeling.

You ever been at 52?

Has anybody been at 52, 50, 51?

I mean, that is that's a moment.

That's a moment.

You're unzipping everybody's judgment over you, and they're seeing how you packed, and it's always the shampoo bottle and the you know, curling iron.

I mean, it's it's stuff that weighs a lot, and you gotta move it.

It's it's embarrassing.

Zip it back.

All they can zip back, most wonderful moment, right?

Is when you hand those bags over.

And he tags them.

You tip him some amount, you have no idea if it's the right amount, nobody knows.

And you walk away, and you're you're free.

Still your bags, still your responsibility, but there's been a handing over of control.

Right?

Like take this job, this opportunity, the sickness, the future that I don't know, the future I'm hoping for, or the future that I'm really afraid of.

The marriage that's not good, the finances that are not, well.

Prayer is the death.

Prayer is the death of control, of trying to control everything.

So that you can possibly walk through any one thing in your life with grace and wisdom.

Prayer's this that's the gift of prayer.

The gift of prayer is not you bending God, it's that you get to surrender over all this you're trying to control.

Point number two, prayer becomes freedom when prayer is no longer an assertion of the sinful controlling self.

And I know about praying, controlling prayers, right?

You're praying a lot, but you never really have handed anything over.

Jonah's had such limited sight the entire time through this story.

He's called a Nineveh, thinks he can outrun God, doesn't work out.

Boards a ship, thinks that's gonna work, doesn't work out.

Thinks he can hide below deck, doesn't work out.

And the best thing that happens to him is he goes under the water.

And then finally he's miraculously rescued.

It's then he prays.

So there's this wonderful ancient parable.

I don't know where it came from.

I heard it on some podcast at some point, but I loved it so much.

It has stayed with me.

And here's the story it's about a man in the village who owns a horse.

His neighbor comes over, he says, Oh, unbelievable! What a what a blessing.

You are so blessed.

You have a horse, and the man says, What do I know?

That night the horse runs away.

Neighbor comes back over the next morning.

He says, How awful.

This must be so hard for you to lose your prize possession.

This must be so awful.

The man says, What do I know?

The next day the horse comes back.

The horse had gone and corralled nine wild horses, brought all the horses back, and now this man has ten horses.

Neighbor comes back over.

Unbelievable.

What a blessing.

You're the wealthiest man in the region.

Can you believe it?

And the man says, What do I know?

That afternoon, the man's son gets on one of the wild horses, gets bucked off, breaks his leg.

Neighbor comes over.

How awful.

I mean, you you lost your only help around your land.

I mean, what are you gonna do?

This is horrible.

I mean, this is the end.

I mean, you can't believe it.

What do I know?

The next day, army recruiter comes by to draft boys for the war.

The boy can't go because he has a broken leg.

Neighbor comes over.

My son got drafted.

You're so man, you're so blessed that your boy's leg was broken.

What do I know?

All right, so that's the end of the story.

It could keep going, it can go forever, right?

And you're like, oh, that's kind of my life as well.

That's how my life feels.

Now, at first you could react to that and you should just go like, well, why should I pray?

Like, that just sort of sounds like reason to not pray anymore.

But see, I actually think it works the other way around.

I actually think it motivates us to pray.

I think this is how Jesus prays.

He's in the Garden of Gethsemane.

He's about to be arrested and beaten and crucified, not for anything he did, but for our sin.

And what does he pray?

How does he pray?

He says, God, take this cup from me.

I don't want to deal with this.

This is horrible.

This is suffering.

I do not want to go through this.

He prays true emotion, true prayer, exactly what he wants.

He lets it rip.

And then at the end he goes, but your will be done.

What do I know?

Jonah 2, verse 3 says, For you cast me into the deep into the heart of the seas, and the flood surrounded me.

Jonah 2:3

All your waves and your billows passed over me.

Have you ever been praying for someone?

Maybe you've just really been praying for that couple, that couple you've seen in your life.

You know, you're praying for that, you're praying for their parenting and their spending habits because you've seen it.

You're concerned for them.

Because you would never be like that.

You would never be like that.

You are praying for them and praying for them and praying for them.

And then finally, it hits you that you are so self-righteous.

And there we have a gift, don't we?

Even there we have a gift.

Even when we've been praying self-righteously, we have a gift.

We have the same gift, the thing that's happening to Jonah.

He and his self-righteousness has been put in this position, and then he is buried.

And when he is buried, he gets freedom.

It's another way to say that the law has buried you.

God's holy law buries you.

God will bury you with his law.

We are all buried before the standards of holiness and holy living.

No matter how much we want to live up to it, we are buried by it because we are imperfect, because we're sinners.

And we need God's law to bury us, and then we need God's grace to raise us.

This is the life of the Christian, death and resurrection, repentance and life.

And God's grace always meets us in our death, taking our sin on the cross, giving to us his righteousness so we are secure.

So I think Jonah gives us two examples of types of prayer.

And I hate to get too prescriptive when it comes to different prayers in the Bible because we could end up with some model that's just like, this was just Jonah's prayer.

He was just letting it rip.

And so it's not to build it out and get like a prescription for like, oh, and this is how you now pray forever.

But I think there's some description here for us to learn.

And how I've been thinking about it this week is I think first what we see here is we can see prayer.

It doesn't feel like this is what's going on in this, but this is sort of like the opposite of what's going on here with Jonah.

But it's just prayer that's sort of like, I can handle it, prayer.

Usually this is where we give God announcements.

You know, I pray for whatever at 6 p.m.

on Tuesday evening.

You just sort of like film in on the details, like as much details as possible.

Maybe you even praise him, maybe you even ask him for things.

But all of it's in the context of our plan.

Our plan for ourselves, our plan for our lives, our plan for our friends, our plan for our children, and we're asking it all in God's name.

That'll be the cloak we put over it, so we don't have to face perhaps that we're just being controlling.

But there's no surrender.

There's no like, maybe I don't know everything in this world.

Ultimately, it's a little bit like using God as a vending machine.

I'll insert my behaviors, I'll insert key words, and if I insert enough key words and key behaviors, and perhaps a little bit of like my really good actions and behaviors of purity and moralism, I'll insert them and then I'll have God in a fix, and if I have God in a fix, then He'll owe me.

And there's a problem with this, because the problem is what if your prayers aren't answered?

Well, then it's your fault.

You're not a good person or you don't have enough faith.

Ultimately, it just doesn't work.

And then three things remain at that point.

I mentioned them earlier.

Once prayer starts to not work, three things happen.

Either we live in denial and we just keep doing the same thing forever.

It's a very religious thing to do.

Number two is we come disillusioned and we stop praying.

We walk away.

Maybe we walk away from faith totally.

Or number three is we come to the end of our religiosity and transactional prayers, and we move into prayer of surrender and prayer of relationship.

And then this is what I call not I can handle it prayer, but I can't handle it prayer.

And the praying is not to bend God to your plan.

The praying is that you need to voice it.

You need to speak it out, you need to say it.

And you're gonna be like Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, just letting it rip, like all your emotions, all your thoughts, all your desires, all your wants, all your dreams, all your concerns, all your breakdowns, all you can let it, that's in the grace of God.

You get to let it all go, and the Abba Father of yours hears it all.

But you're not like controlling him.

You get to do that as his beloved children.

It's this like, here are my bags, like let me just keep handing over these bags, that thing, and this thing, and him and her, and all that.

Have your way.

Open the door or close the door.

Give me wisdom, teach me, show me.

It's the mind's attention and the heart's affection of surrendering aspects, all aspects of your life, so you might be able to walk through any one aspect of your life.

Years ago, Christy and I we were newly married.

This has probably been 13 or 14 years ago.

I graduated seminary.

I was working in the business world, I was not happy in my job, I didn't know what I was gonna do with my future.

I had an interview with an organization called Walk Through the Bible.

Walk Through the Bible published all different materials and materials for churches and individuals and Bibles and all different stuff, and I had an interview with them to be an editor of a youth magazine.

Now I had no business being an editor of a youth magazine.

Let's be very clear on that.

But somehow I ended up with the interview, and I wanted it because it was the answer to my unhappiness.

In my limited sight, this was it.

Nothing more, no other option.

No more struggle, no more difficulty.

I was done with that.

And on one lunch break, I went over to their building, I parked in their lot, I walked around the parking lot, and I'm praying, God, open the door, God, open the door, God, you know, in Jesus' name and the kingdom, the Holy Spirit.

But all the prayer, all the prayer was open the door, open the door, open the door, open the door.

None of it was with any measure, and I can see it now, any measure of humility, of maybe this would be horrible.

Maybe this would be the worst thing for me.

God, you know, would you would you break my heart so that I will relinquish control?

All my prayers were of control.

Most of them today are still controlled.

And the prayers themselves is a process of transformation to get me to relinquish control.

So that we can not just pray, I trust you in the openings and in the raises, but that we could also say, like, I trust you in the like closures and in the difficulty.

The psalms are filled with people praying.

Ridiculous prayers.

Have you read the Psalms?

You're like, what?

He prayed what?

Like, he's praying what to come down on who?

And that you're like, they're just letting it rip, they're just letting it rip.

They needed to pray that out.

Not because they're trying to bid, well, they probably were trying to bid God, but not because that was gonna actually happen every time, but because they needed to let that out and pray that for transformation inside of them to happen, for God to be working in them.

So we get to pray for the stuff.

This is what's so great.

In God's grace, we get to pray for the stuff, we get to pray for the opening, we get to pray for the thing that we think should happen.

Hopefully, we're doing that in a measure of humility, praying for wisdom and praying for closures and openings.

Hopefully, we have some measure of humility in that.

But most of just no, you aren't in control, and I'm not in control.

See, it's better than that.

It is better than the stuff.

If it's just transactional, eventually you are condemned.

But if it's relational, you won't be condemned.

You don't need God to answer every prayer exactly like you have preconceived that it should happen.

And you either live in denial or disillusionment.

We get to pray, I can't handle this prayers.

Jonah 2, verses 4 through 6, last few verses.

Jonah 2:4–6

Then I said, I am driven away from your sight, yet I shall again look upon your holy temple.

The waters closed in over me to take my life.

The deep surrounded me, weeds were wrapped around my head at the roots of the mountains.

I went down to the land whose bars closed upon me forever, yet you brought up my life from the pit, O Lord my God.

Last point.

God lovingly uses difficulty to drive us under the surface, that we might move from transactional pious prayers to relational surrendering prayers.

All the language here is language of death.

Going under the water, this is language of death throughout the scriptures.

This is beautiful poetic language that Jonah's giving us.

This is poetry for us.

That's why we baptize.

We pour water over people, or we dunk people, and it's the symbol that we are going under in death that we might be raised in the grace of God.

It's why we say, buried with Christ in baptism, raised to walk in newness of life.

So, my brothers and sisters, you are buried with Christ, but you are raised to walk in newness of life.

Let's pray together.

God, thank you that we get to pray and that you hear us and you encourage us to pray, and you encourage us to pray what is on our hearts and pray our concerns.

And the grace of God and your good grace, you just hear our voice.

God, would this morning not be about us re-evaluating every prayer we have ever prayed, but would it be about us knowing we are loved in every prayer we have ever prayed?

And you have always heard us.

God, would you release us into a freedom of surrender that prays more because we know we are loved more?

That relinquishes control to you more, that prays in a freedom that doesn't move into denial or disillusionment, but is empowered by the gospel that your good news for us is we're right with you and beloved because of your work for us.

In Jesus' name we pray in all things and we live and we pray.

Amen.