Praying About Our National Crisis

Yet one action can make our house of cards come crashing to the ground. That’s what happened to us Tuesday morning, as the safety and security we believed we had was exposed to be no more real than the wizard in the Wizard of Oz. We realized how vulnerable and needy we really are.

Prayer continually reminds us of that. When we bring our needs to God in prayer we’re admitting that we can’t handle things all by ourselves. Prayer becomes a way of breaking through our denial and giving us a reality check, as we admit before an infinite God that we can’t take care of ourselves. We bring our needs to our Father because we can’t meet them in our own strength. This is the first reason to bring our needs before God.

Now through the years, generations of Christians have learned how to pray by reading the Bible’s book of Psalms. Whereas the rest of the Bible gives us God inspired communication to us from God, in the Psalms we find God inspired prayers and songs addressed from people to God. We experience the depths of real prayer in the Psalms.

Let me quote to you Psalm 55:1-2: "Listen to my prayer, O God, do not ignore my plea; hear me and answer me. My thoughts trouble me and I am distraught" (NIV).

The psalmist cries out to God in distress, pleading with God to respond to his request. He asks God not to ignore his plea, not because there’s any possibility that God might ignore it, but because he feels desperation. The psalmist’s heart is deeply restless in light of the terrible needs he’s experiencing. I can well imagine our president praying these very words as he tries to figure out how to best respond.

From this inspired prayer we find another reason to bring our needs to God. When we bring our needs to God in prayer, WE OPEN OUR HEARTS TO GOD.

Our tendency is to build walls between what we’re feeling and God. We figure God would be horrified to know what we’re thinking, the thoughts of vengeance and anger. When we feel desperate we fear our impure thoughts would shock God, driving God further away from us in our time of need. So we build walls, pretending to do the right thing, when inside we’re seething with resentment, bitterness, even hatred.

Prayer opens all of that up to God, the anger and the rage, the doubts and the fears.

When we truly pray about our needs, it’s like a dam crumbling, with our torrid emotions and thoughts flooding into the presence of God. We can’t censor the flood, because it just gushes, beyond our control or ability to control. Suddenly we’re exposed, the real me and the real you, with all of our anger and hatred, with our thoughts of vengeance and doubts.

That’s exactly where God wants us, to be who we really are before him. Not that God will leave us in the same condition as when we came to him, but we can only come to God as we truly are.

Professor Thielicke says, “We really do not need to pretend to be anything but what we are [when we pray]. We do not need to put on a show of being above the little and the big things in our life. God wouldn’t believe us anyhow” ("Our Heavenly Father" p. 84).