During my many years as a high school classroom teacher, I was always amazed at the kinds of questions students would ask me about the subject matter at hand on any given day. I always encouraged students to ask questions, because it provided great benefits both to the students and myself. I learned early on that the questions students asked provided me valuable insights into what’s going on in their hearts and minds. Of course, getting something of value out of their questions is not the same as liking their questions. On many occasions, while in the midst of delivering an impassionate and insightful lesson on the amazing properties of a particular mathematical theorem, I would desperately search for an intellectually captivated student to ask a question, any question, about the wonderful realities I was setting before them. Aha! A solitary hand goes up in the back of the room!! An inquiring mind seeks deeper knowledge and understanding!!! All that time, money, and effort that I sacrificed for my teaching preparation has been validated!!!! “Yes, Jordan, what is your question?” I couldn’t wait to provide him some amazing insight that would help him along his intellectual journey. And then the answer would come like a hammer blow, which invariably crushed my tender teacher’s heart: “Mr. Fleming, can I go to the bathroom?” Whatever small amount of pedagogical momentum I might have happened to gather up to that point would come screeching to a halt.
Happily, students would indeed grow intellectually as we journeyed through the wonderful world of math, and that growth could often be detected in the type of questions they asked. Sometimes they were very insightful; “Is there more than one way of proving these angles to be congruent?” Some questions spoke to the bigger picture of their personal world; “Can studying geometry help me in my future career as a forest ranger?” By the end of the year, many students would be asking the kinds of questions that would lead to greater mathematical understanding: “I’m using the Pythagorean Theorem to find the length of one of the sides of this triangle, why am I having trouble with it?” (Answer: “You are confusing the side in question with the hypotenuse.”) At the same time, it wasn’t uncommon for students to make a request that had nothing to do with the beauty and structure of math, but rather for their own personal gain, the most common of which was, “Is this going to be on the test?”
It has occurred to me recently that I can see a similar pattern at work throughout the course of my own spiritual life, and in the lives of many or most believers in general. We ask many things of God, and the things we ask for sometimes reflect important things about our spiritual health and maturity. I think most of us would agree that the vast majority of the things we ask God for pertain to some type of physical provision in times of need or relief from some type of problem or calamity. These are not bad prayers, by any means. The Lord knows better that any of us that we are very needy people, with limited intellectual insight and physical strength to affect our own lives in any meaningful way, let alone the lives of others, by virtue of the fact that we are both finite and fallen, among other reasons. Indeed, the Lord sanctions prayers of personal need throughout Scripture, most notably visible in the Lord’s model prayer; “Give us today our daily bread . . ., forgive us our debts . . ., and lead us not into temptation” (Matt. 6:11-13).
Be that as it may, it seems to me to be a mark of spiritual growth and maturity when the focus of our prayers begins to fall more on the needs and problems of others than that of our own selves. In Paul’s many letters to the churches, his unsolicited prayers for his readers (e.g. “I pray that the eyes of your heart might be enlightened . . .,” Eph. 1:18) far outnumber the prayer requests he made on behalf of himself (“And pray on my behalf, that utterance may be given to me . . . to make known . . . the gospel,” Eph. 6:19). In similar fashion, it’s both striking and significant to observe that Paul almost always asked God to bestow spiritual resources on his readers as opposed to physical ones (e.g. “a spirit of wisdom,” and spiritual insight into “the hope” of our calling, the “riches” of our future inheritance, and “the surpassing greatness of His power toward us who believe,” Eph. 1:15-19). It is instructive to observe that when Paul mentions his imprisonment in his letter to the Ephesian saints, it is not deliverance from said imprisonment that he requests prayers for, but rather boldness to proclaim the gospel in the midst of it.
I believe we can observe these dynamics at work in the life of Moses. At the outset of his divine mission to stand before “almighty” Pharoah and demand that he free his Hebrew slaves, who provided the muscle and might to bring his ambitious building projects to life, Moses, shall we say, was less than eager to enlist for such a frightful mission. After offering a number of excuses as to why this might not work out so well, Moses finally requested what was really on his mind, which can be summed us as, “Please find someone else” (Ex. 4:13). More than likely he was concerned with the very real possibility that this might end up being a suicide mission (speaking from a human point of view). Approximately a year later, after having a front row seat to seeing first-hand the Living God’s incredible power as manifested in the vanquishing of the pagan Egyptian gods via the ten plagues, and God’s magnificent presence in the pillar of cloud be day and fire by night, he audaciously asked of God, Show me your glory” (Ex. 33:18). The dramatic shift from his prior concern with his own physical well-being to the deep desire for spiritual intimacy with the Creator we see here cannot be missed. At around the same time, we can see a transition in his requests of God from his own personal needs in chapter 4, to the needs of the rebellious and disobedient Hebrew nation (“Please don’t destroy them”), and that for the sake of God’s own reputation, that it might not be tarnished in the eyes of the surrounding nations (Ex. 32:1-14). Even at the end of his life 39 years later, after being barred by the Lord from entering the long-awaited Promised land, we see him praying for the Jewish people, asking God to provide them a leader that would shepherd them into the Promised Land (Num. 27:15-17; Deut. 32:44-52; 34:1-12), rather than making further request that God might show him mercy by letting him cross over the Jordan River after all (Deut. 3:23-25).
While I have been familiar with the content of Paul’s prayers for the churches he writes to and what it suggests for that of our own prayers, the observations regarding the progression of Moses’ prayer life is a new insight for me. It has grown out of the realization that my prayers are changing, for the better, I think. I still pray for the daily needs of myself and others, as I always have, but am starting to add new requests of a whole different category, more akin to Moses, “Show me Your glory.” Insightful Scriptures pregnant with heavenly possibilities are being transformed in my heart and mind from mere “memory verses” I’ve known for most of my Christian life to powerful portals into the things that are close to the heart of God. A simple way to put it might be to say that the central focus of my prayers are starting to shift from self-centered and other-centered to God-centered. I’m asking God to “create in me a clean heart . . . and to renew a right spirit in me” (Ps. 51:10), because I’m learning more about God’s incredible holiness and by comparison the depths of my own depravity. I’m asking God to break my heart over the things that break His heart (Gen. 6:5-8; Jer. 23:9-14), because the things that typically break my heart seem of little importance by comparison. I’m asking God to help me see things from His point of view, because His thoughts and ways are infinitely high than mine (Isa. 55:8-9). I’m asking God to put a deep, unquenching desire for Him into my heart, like the exhausted, thirsting deer that pants for water (Ps. 42:1-2; Ps. 63:1), because, frankly, I rarely seem to do so. I want to behold God’s power and glory in the sanctuary when we worship together, because I know it’s possible, but rarely apprehended (Ps. 63:2).
These are just some of the things I am asking God for. I want to be like Solomon, who asked for wisdom to guide God’s people when the Lord invited him to ask of Him anything he wanted, a request that greatly pleased the Lord (1 Kings 3:5-15). I believe I’m somewhere in between, “Father, save me from this hour” and “Father, glorify Thy name” (John 12:27-28). I don’t know which one I’m closer to, but I think I’m moving in the right direction.
