Is Angry Prayer Okay?
00:00:00.000 | [Music]
00:00:04.000 | "Is angry prayer okay?"
00:00:07.000 | It's the question from Jake, a listener in Western Australia.
00:00:11.000 | Pastor John, hello, and thank you for taking my question.
00:00:14.000 | "Is angry prayer okay?"
00:00:16.000 | That's my question.
00:00:17.000 | "To clear my head, I often ride my bike around a local lake.
00:00:21.000 | Each lap is about 6 kilometers or 4 miles, and I have circled the lake for many years.
00:00:27.000 | As I ride, I begin to speak to God. My mouth becomes a spillway.
00:00:31.000 | I lose a sense of myself and zone out and speak to Him with virtually no self-awareness.
00:00:36.000 | In those experiences, there have been two distinct times I have spoken to God in a very firm way.
00:00:42.000 | But here's the thing. Both of those times, He answered my prayer within hours.
00:00:48.000 | So it makes me wonder, does God actually desire that we be engaged with a blunt,
00:00:53.000 | no-nonsense, self-unaware, truthful attitude when it comes to praying to Him?"
00:01:00.000 | Pastor John, what would you say to Jake?
00:01:02.000 | I remember reading the biography of Mary Slessor years ago,
00:01:08.000 | a Scottish missionary to Africa in the 19th century,
00:01:13.000 | and one of the sentences that I never forgot—and I just went and took it off the shelf here a little while ago—
00:01:21.000 | to make sure that I got it right in my memory was this.
00:01:25.000 | She said to her supporters in a letter, "Pray for us. Pray in a businesslike fashion.
00:01:32.000 | Earnestly, definitely, statedly."
00:01:35.000 | And it struck me at the time as strange because I generally don't think of prayer as businesslike.
00:01:41.000 | I tend to put a high priority on engagement of the affections in prayer,
00:01:47.000 | and maybe she included that when she said "earnestly." Don't want to misunderstand.
00:01:52.000 | But I was unprepared for the word "pray for us in a businesslike way."
00:01:57.000 | Remember? I've never forgotten it. "Pray for us in a businesslike manner."
00:02:03.000 | As if we have business with the Father, and in a kind of no-nonsense, more or less ordinary way,
00:02:10.000 | we knock on His door, state our business for our missionary, Ms. Slessor, in Calabar,
00:02:15.000 | and then be on our way. And I came to believe that there is really something to that.
00:02:22.000 | Not that we should be indifferent to whether we feel any affections in prayer toward our Father,
00:02:29.000 | but neither should we turn prayer into something that only has validity
00:02:35.000 | if it consists in passionate appeals or a certain temperature of our emotions.
00:02:42.000 | I mention this because it seems to me that Mary Slessor's view is at least similar
00:02:48.000 | to what Jake is saying in the question, "Does God actually desire that we be engaged
00:02:54.000 | with a blunt, no-nonsense, self-unaware, truthful attitude when it comes to praying?"
00:03:01.000 | And I think Mary Slessor would like that suggestion.
00:03:06.000 | Let's take those four definers, those four words he uses to define prayer,
00:03:12.000 | and test them, or at least try to understand them so we can say "yay" or "nay" to what he's asking.
00:03:19.000 | Truthful, self-unaware, no-nonsense, blunt, truthful.
00:03:25.000 | Surely no one can fault being truthful with God.
00:03:30.000 | But that's not sufficient reason for the prayer to be pleasing to God,
00:03:34.000 | since there are lots of true things about me that displease God.
00:03:38.000 | But we don't make those things—I don't make those things better by being untruthful about them.
00:03:45.000 | So it's always better to be truthful than to be untruthful.
00:03:49.000 | God knows my heart anyway, and all untruthfulness towards God is futile.
00:03:56.000 | You can't conceal anything from God.
00:04:00.000 | So yes, by all means, prayers, truthful.
00:04:04.000 | Next, Jake says that he wants the prayers to be self-unaware.
00:04:09.000 | And I take that to mean that we have become so fully engaged in speaking to God
00:04:15.000 | that we're no longer standing outside ourselves watching ourselves pray
00:04:21.000 | and passing judgment positively or negatively on the way we're praying and how we're saying it.
00:04:27.000 | I've always wanted to be like that in my preaching.
00:04:31.000 | I never wanted to be preaching and watching myself preach and saying,
00:04:35.000 | "Not a good job. You're not doing a good job."
00:04:38.000 | Or just as bad to say, "Hey, good job. Good job. You're doing a good job."
00:04:43.000 | No, we want to be so fully into the transaction with the people and the truth
00:04:51.000 | that we're not even thinking about ourselves.
00:04:54.000 | Same thing with prayer.
00:04:55.000 | So yes, I think if that's what he's saying, that's exactly what I want.
00:05:02.000 | You can preach or pray in complete freedom and authenticity.
00:05:09.000 | So I agree with Jake.
00:05:11.000 | We want to be undivided in our prayer as well as our preaching,
00:05:17.000 | which means our focus would be entirely on God and not on ourselves and how we're praying.
00:05:25.000 | I think that's a very, very good goal.
00:05:28.000 | So amen to self-unaware.
00:05:31.000 | But before I leave it, let me say that just like truthfulness,
00:05:36.000 | being self-unaware doesn't guarantee that our prayer is pleasing to God.
00:05:42.000 | Spontaneity that speaks without self-awareness might come from places in our heart
00:05:49.000 | which are quite unsanctified and may reveal aspects of our sinfulness.
00:05:53.000 | So being self-unaware is a good thing in itself,
00:05:58.000 | but needs other influences in order to be pleasing to God.
00:06:03.000 | Then Jake says he wants prayer to be no-nonsense.
00:06:08.000 | And I'm sure he means more than let's avoid nonsense in the presence of God.
00:06:14.000 | That's too obvious to consider.
00:06:16.000 | No, I think he means something like Mary Schleser meant when she said,
00:06:21.000 | "I want you to pray for me in a business-like way."
00:06:25.000 | In other words, when you walk into God's office, you don't need to make small talk.
00:06:31.000 | You don't need to beat around the bush.
00:06:33.000 | You don't need to work up any particular tone of voice.
00:06:37.000 | You don't need to be subtle or indirect or calculating.
00:06:42.000 | You just need to get down to business and deal with the facts.
00:06:46.000 | God is God. God invites prayer. God is merciful.
00:06:51.000 | God has made glorious promises to those who trust him.
00:06:55.000 | I have a need. It accords with God's revealed will.
00:06:59.000 | I will state my case, make my request, and be on to the next thing in faith
00:07:06.000 | because God can't be coerced by dawdling.
00:07:09.000 | Something like that, maybe, is what he means by no-nonsense.
00:07:13.000 | And I would say as long as we don't absolutize that way of praying, it's perfectly fine.
00:07:20.000 | It fits into a much larger repertoire or varied ways of approaching God.
00:07:29.000 | There are many different circumstances and emotional situations
00:07:34.000 | and senses of urgency and moods of the moment
00:07:38.000 | that no one simple demeanor like a no-nonsense or a businesslike demeanor
00:07:46.000 | should be made normative for all praying.
00:07:49.000 | There are times when I would say businesslike or no-nonsense praying is perfectly appropriate,
00:07:56.000 | and there are times when it would seem quite odd to approach God in that way,
00:08:03.000 | the hour after your husband was killed or your wife was killed.
00:08:09.000 | Now, the last feature of the prayer Jake is suggesting is blunt.
00:08:15.000 | Now, here I'm less sure about what Jake means.
00:08:19.000 | If I just had the word blunt, it would be one thing.
00:08:23.000 | But his very first question was, "Is angry prayer okay?"
00:08:27.000 | And then he says, "There have been two distinct times when I have spoken to God in a very firm way."
00:08:34.000 | So we have angry, firm, and blunt.
00:08:38.000 | So I'm not sure what Jake is asking, because not only do those three words refer to very different states of mind,
00:08:48.000 | but the word angry could refer to anger at God himself or anger at some evil expressed to God, but not at God.
00:08:59.000 | Now, whether one ought to be blunt or firm with God depends on whether the demeanor carries a sense of disrespect or impatience with God.
00:09:10.000 | And I can imagine a blunt and firm way of speaking that's not disrespectful and is not impatient.
00:09:16.000 | With regard to anger, I don't think it's ever right to be angry at God, with God, ever.
00:09:24.000 | Anger at a person means, "I am very upset because you have done badly or wrong."
00:09:32.000 | We should never say or feel that about God.
00:09:36.000 | When Jesus strongly wanted to say something or experience something different, say, in Gethsemane, than what God was about to do,
00:09:46.000 | he did not get angry with God's resolve contrary to what Jesus was asking.
00:09:52.000 | He humbled himself and submitted to God's will.
00:09:56.000 | Even the cry of the damned, "Why have you forsaken me?" was not a cry of anger at God.
00:10:04.000 | God is infinitely wise, infinitely good, and infinitely able to carry out his wise and good plans,
00:10:12.000 | and therefore we never have a right to be angry at God.
00:10:18.000 | But if we are angry about something we ought to be angry about, then I don't think we have to wait for that to subside before we go to God.
00:10:30.000 | And if our anger is about to turn into sinful anger, which most of the time it does, at least for John Piper, I would say,
00:10:38.000 | and that's what James seems to think when he says, "The anger of man doesn't work the righteousness of God."
00:10:43.000 | If we're about to become sinful in our anger, it would be quite fitting to rush to God in that anger and ask for his help that the anger be sanctified.
00:10:54.000 | All that to say, "Pray on, Jake. Pray on. I'm glad you're praying.
00:10:59.000 | I'm glad you're losing yourself in prayer.
00:11:02.000 | And may all of us have the truthfulness, the freedom from self-consciousness, the business-like regularity.
00:11:11.000 | And may all of us come to God and be as firm and submissive as we ought to be as we come as a loving and confident friend of God."
00:11:26.000 | Yes, and amen. Very helpful.
00:11:28.000 | Thank you, Pastor John.
00:11:29.000 | And thank you for joining us today on the podcast for our feed, our archive, or to send us your own question, go to our online home at DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn.
00:11:40.000 | We are going to break for the weekend.
00:11:42.000 | I'm Tony Reinke.
00:11:43.000 | We'll see you back here on Monday.
00:11:45.000 | Thanks for listening.
00:11:46.000 | [Music]
00:11:47.000 | [Music]
00:11:49.000 | [Music]
00:11:50.000 | [Music]
00:11:51.000 | [Music]
00:11:52.000 | [Music]
00:11:53.000 | [Music]
00:11:54.000 | [Music]
00:11:55.000 | [Music]