The people of Israel are facing the sea, and the Egyptians are coming in fury to take them hostage again. They are filled with fear and trembling, and what more appropriate time could their be to cry out to God for his power to rescue them? Nevertheless, God does not want them to be crying to him. He tells Moses to knock it off, and to tell the people to move on. This is no time for prayer God is saying. This is a time to stop praying and move. Take action, and move forward. There are times when prayer is not a priority. The priority has to be action, for it is a matter of life or death. If the people delay their movement to get across the sea by setting time aside for prayer meetings, they will be slaughtered or captured. Their prayers can only be answered by their physical movement in getting their bodies across that sea. It is a paradox for sure, for prayer at this time will lead to their killing their chance to escape from the Egyptians. Prayer will be deadly if it keeps them from moving forward. The paradox is that if they stop to pray they will perish. Their only hope to get their prayer answered is to stop praying and get moving. God is telling them that this is no time for prayer. Prayer at this time is the most dangerous thing you can do.
Of course, we can see how people can keep praying as they move across the sea, but what we are looking at is people bowing to the ground on their knees in fervent prayer for God's help. They are stopping their forward movement to plead for God's deliverance, and God is saying that this is not the time to stop and pray. If you are going to pray, do it on the run, for right now it is movement that counts most. Cease to pray, and don't delay, if you want to live another day. God is saying to Moses something like this: “There is something you need to do right now that is more important than prayer, and that is to get these people moving through that parted water. I have already heard your prayer for my help, but if you keep on asking for it instead of moving forward you will be hindering your own prayers. If you keep on knocking after I have opened the door, you are just irritating me. So stop knocking and get moving.”
Rabbi Shawn Fields-Meyer comments on this verse, “But even in their passionate, genuine moment of need, God doesn't want their prayers. Instead, God says: Don't pray now. This is no time for praise or thanks or petition. This is no time even for self-reflection. There is something much more appropriate and effective at this hour of need. Says God: "Tell the Israelites to go forward" (14:15).
Rashi, the classical Torah commentator, explains: "God said to Moses: 'Now is not the time to prolong prayer -- Israel is in distress!'" Prayer has great value. Spontaneous or set, brief or extensive, prayer is an outlet for the spirit. But sometimes it's just not the right thing, even from a divine perspective. Sometimes, action takes precedence. In the words of the Torah, sometimes the right thing to do is not to contemplate at all, but rather, "to go forward." And that is just what the Israelites do. Following the divine command, they redirect their energies from thought to movement. From head and heart to feet. Ultimately, this is what enables them to cross the sea, and make the full transition from slavery to freedom.”
We need to apply this message to our own lives. We do not have an Egyptian army on our tail, but we do have the temptation to stop where we are in our journey to God's best for us, and plead with Him for protection from all of the things that keep us fearful and filled with anxiety. It is okay to have a rest stop in our spiritual journey, but when it becomes far more than a vacation to the point where we are basically retiring from the journey, it is a scandal. Many Christians become inactive for years and just stop growing and seeking to know God's will for them. They don't stop praying, but they do not do what is necessary to get their prayers answered. God is saying to them, “Don't keep bugging me in your prayers, but get your rear in gear and move forward. Stop being content to stay where you are, and take action that will stimulate growth.” The fact is, we are often the key to answered prayer. God could not take the people of Israel across that sea until they put one foot ahead of the other and got their bodies moving forward, and it is true for all of our lives. We need to take action that will move us from our present dead zone to a new place where we begin again to show progress in our walk with the Lord.
A. W. Tozer, the spiritual giant of his day, wrote, “Have you noticed how much praying for revival has been going on of late & how little revival has resulted? We have been trying to substitute praying for obeying, & it simply will not work. To pray for revival while ignoring the plain precept laid down in Scripture is to waste a lot of words & get nothing for our trouble. Prayer will become effective when we stop using it as a substitute for obedience.” Tozer is saying that prayer can be a cop out that makes us deceive ourselves into thinking that we are engaged in the spiritual battle for God's kingdom. In reality we are sitting the battle out by our praying that does not lead us to action that makes a difference. If we do not move forward to be agents in bringing our prayer to fruition, we are actually hindering the answer. Be are blocking our answer to prayer by our very prayers. Jesus said when you come before God with an offering, but you are out of fellowship with a brother, go first to that brother and be reconciled. In other words, stop praying and move forward in forgiving and being forgiven. Then you can pray with assurance that God will be pleased.
BUTT PRINTS IN THE SAND
Author Unknown
One night I had a wondrous dream,
One set of footprints there were seen,
The footprints of my precious Lord,
But mine were not along the shore.
But then some stranger prints appeared,
And I asked the Lord, "What have we here?"
Those prints are large and round and neat,
"But Lord, they are too big for feet."
"My child," He said in somber tones,
"For miles I carried you alone.
I challenged you to walk in faith,
But you refused and made me wait."
"You disobeyed, you would not grow,
The walk of faith, you would not know,
So I got tired, I got fed up,
And there I dropped you on your butt."
"Because in life, there comes a time,
When one must fight, and one must climb,
When one must rise and take a stand,
Or leave their butt prints in the sand."
It would be like praying to God to help you understand the book of Ezekiel. You pray and pray every day for the ability to grasp what Ezekiel is all about, but you never pick up your Bible and study the book. You never go to the library and get a study of the book to read. You never take notes, and seek for insights from the many commentaries that are available on the internet. You just pray and pray to get it, and God is saying to you, “Stop this pathetic prayer and get your bottom out of that chair. If you really care, there are many who have wisdom to share. It is time to stop this endless stare, and sitting in your self despair, which constantly does your progress impair. Wake up from this nightmare that is taking you nowhere. It is time to repair, and escape from this snare. From this bondage you must tare for your spiritual welfare. I declare and I swear, that I will always be there, if you take the dare to stand and prepare to start marching forward as an active soldier in spiritual warfare.
You won't get much Bible knowledge by praying if you don't read and study the Bible. You won't feed and clothe starving and cold children by praying for them to be warmed and filled if you don't give them food and clothing. You have to make your faith practical is the message of the book of James. Don't just say words and let that be the end. You have got to act in bringing to people what they need. Prayer has limitations because God will not do what he has made you capable of doing. You can pray all day for your shoes to be tied, but God will not tie them for you because he has made you capable of doing it, and so you have got to stop praying for him to do it, and just do it. We are to pray without ceasing, but this does not mean any kind of prayer however meaningless. The Israelites could be praying all the while they were crossing that sea on dry ground. They should certainly be thanking and praising God in prayer for this awesome miracle, but they must keep on moving, for God will not move them across without their own effort to keep those feet going forward.
Prayer is not good when it is asking God to take over our responsibilities. God has his role in areas where we cannot act, but we have a role to act in areas where we have the duty and responsibility to do so. Do you drink a gallon of caffeine in the evening and then pray for God to give you a good nights sleep? That is throwing on God what is your responsibility. If you know caffeine keeps you awake, and you still drink it, you cannot escape your folly by means of prayer. Stop praying and do what it is your responsibility to do to get a good nights rest. Millions of prayers never get answered because they are asking God to do for us what God has made it clear is not his responsibility but yours. Stop praying that God will do your duty, for this is an abuse of prayer.
One little guy thought he had found a time when he did not need to pray. The Sunday School teacher asked one of the boys in his class, “Do you say a prayer before you eat at your house?” “No,” the boy responded. “We don’t need to. My mother is a good cook!” He forgot that prayer for food is not for God's protection, but thanksgiving for God's provision.
There are other times, however, when it is valid to stop praying. Ed Wood in his sermon on this text said, ““Every Christian should practice prayer as a daily discipline in life. But if your prayer room has become an ivory tower which isolates you from the responsibilities of daily living, then God’s voice is saying to you as he did to Moses, quit praying, and get moving. Ed goes on to point out other times when God tells his people to stop praying. In Deut. 3:23-26 we read, “At that time I pleaded with the LORD : 24 "O Sovereign LORD, you have begun to show to your servant your greatness and your strong hand. For what god is there in heaven or on earth who can do the deeds and mighty works you do? 25 Let me go over and see the good land beyond the Jordan—that fine hill country and Lebanon." 26 But because of you the LORD was angry with me and would not listen to me. "That is enough," the LORD said. "Do not speak to me anymore about this matter.”
When God has made his will clear it is time to accept it and not try to change it by begging him in prayer to change. There are exceptions to this as in the prayer of Hezekiah that changed God's bad news of his death to giving him 15 more years to live. This does not change the fact that it is inappropriate to keep asking God for what he has made clear is not his will. Married people get infatuated with someone else and they actually pray that God will approve of their affair, divorce and remarriage. It happens all the time, and people think, how can anything this good be bad? They try to get God on their side to lessen the guilt of their clearly violating his revealed will. Anytime you are praying for God to approve of what he has made clear in his Word is not his will, is a matter of self deception. This is a time to stop praying and start repenting. It is a good time to pray for forgiveness, but not to pray for approval.
In Matthew 20:20-25 we see an example where Jesus said to stop praying, and that is when it is not fitting to ask for what is in God's established plan for the future. “Then the mother of Zebedee's sons came to Jesus with her sons and, kneeling down, asked a favor of him. 21"What is it you want?" he asked. She said, "Grant that one of these two sons of mine may sit at your right and the other at your left in your kingdom." 22"You don't know what you are asking," Jesus said to them. "Can you drink the cup I am going to drink?" "We can," they answered. 23Jesus said to them, "You will indeed drink from my cup, but to sit at my right or left is not for me to grant. These places belong to those for whom they have been prepared by my Father." We cannot ask God to change his plan and fit us in to some role that is already fixed. Some things are not negotiable with God. He has fixed them and they are locked in. We cannot pray that the post-millennial view be the one that comes true, or that the pre-millennial, or amillennial view be the one God selects to carry out. We cannot pray that Jesus will come before the 1012 prophecy of some natives. We cannot alter the eternal established program of God for history by means of prayer. If you are wasting your time trying to persuade God to make your theology the one he carries out for the end times, stop it. Stop praying for things that are not your business to be praying about.
Ed Wood gives another example: “Much spiritual energy is wasted on prayers that cannot be answered logically. A little boy who was in an accident prayed, “Dear Lord, may this accident not have happened.” God cannot answer a prayer like that.
Mark Quam has written a book called Stop Praying. It is a self-help book. I have not read the book, but his point is very much like the point God is making to Moses and his people. He writes, “If you want a better life it's time to be honest with yourself. Your "prayers", which can range from sweet requests to all out begging and bartering, have done nothing for you in the past and will not do anything for you in the future. Do you really think God wants to answer your prayers and fix your problems? Would you say yes to every request you got from your kids? You need to STOP PRAYING for a better life and START LIVING one.” His point is valid, for depending on God to take care of everything is like being on a spiritual welfare program. Instead of the government meeting all your needs, you expect God to do so, and you stop doing what you need to do to move forward in achieving the goals that God wants you to achieve. By prayer you want God to hand over a good and meaningful life on a platter. You are in deep earnest when you say you want to be a growing and thriving Christian, but you want God to make it happen for you rather than putting forth all of the labor and learning that it takes to make this valid dream come true. It is time to stop praying and take the responsibility on yourself to get moving forward.
The whole idea of this study on a time to stop praying means to stop praying as an escape from doing. We are never to stop praying in valid ways for God's guidance and support, but just stop praying in ways that hinder you from taking the necessary action that you have to take to get where God wants you to be. The Israelites could have stopped moving forward and had all night prayer meetings, but in doing so they would have ended up dead or captured and enslaved again. God said it was time to stop praying and get moving. Think of how this may apply to your life and your prayers. Can you see where you may be praying when you should be moving?
It is kind of shocking that God can even be angry at the prayers of his people. We read in Psalm 80:4, "How long wilt thou be angry against the prayer of thy people?" God is not angry because they did not pray. He is angry because they did pray. I think it is obvious that a time to stop praying is when your prayers are making God angry. We do not know exactly what they were praying for, but we read in James 4:3 a very similar situation among Christians. James wrote,
“When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures.” Here is prayer by believers that God rejects and refuses to answer. This is the kind of prayer that is a waste of time, and so it is time to stop praying this worthless prayer that only makes God angry. You can hide your motives from people, but God is never deceived by your sweet and clever words. If your motive is to use God to get your way over someone else just so you can have the pleasure of victory in getting what you want, God will not jump on your bandwagon and assure you of victory. It is pure self centered abuse of prayer. You are trying to manipulate God to achieve your self centered goals with no regard to his will or purpose. You need to look for another partner, for God will not sign up for this prideful pleasure centered gig.
We need to examine our motives when we pray. We need to examine our hearts and ask why it is we want what we want. What is the driving motive? If we look deeply we may recognize that we are using God to help us be successful in our sins of lust. We may just want to get ahead of somebody else in our fellowship, or possibly get revenge on someone who has offended us. Our motives determine the validity of our prayer. If behind our innocent words is a spirit of worldliness, we are asking God to help us be what he commands us not to be. That is not going to go over good in the mind of the Lord when he sees the wrong motive behind the right sounding words he is hearing. The point here is that God does not respond to self centered requests. If what you want does not have as a motive that others will benefit by what is given, you will pray in vain. We need from God that which makes us better followers of our Lord in loving and ministering to others. God loves it when we ask for that which makes us more effective teachers and leaders in the body of Christ. What will aid you to be a better servant in the body, and a better witness to the world? That is the question you need to ask yourself before you pray for God to give you something.
We could go through Scripture and show many other texts that are negative on prayer, and where God actually hates prayer that is superficial and hypocritical. I think what we have in the texts I have shared are enough to make the point clear. There is a time to quit praying, and get doing. There is a time to stop praying until you examine your motives, and get in the right spirit, for to continue in that type of prayer is futile, and less than worthless, for it will get no answer, and on top of that it makes God angry. You very prayers are leading you away from God rather than drawing you nearer. This is a heavy truth to deal with, but if we do, and take it seriously, we can soon be moving forward with a wiser and better prayer life.
