Prayers we don’t expect answers to.

When I talk about people who don’t expect God to answer, I’m not necessarily speaking of hypocrites. There are those.

Hypocrites would be the people who offer prayers instead of help; those who wish people to be warm and well fed but won’t offer clothes and food. Jm 2.15-16 Or politicians offer “thoughts and prayers” after a mass shooting, instead of writing laws to control guns. I also wonder how often they actually follow up with prayer—and that’s why they never expect God to answer; they never spoke to him in the first place.

Nope, today I mean the people who don’t believe prayer works. They do pray, but they never, ever expect God to answer. Sometimes because they figure God stopped answering once the bible was complete—so from now on, if you have any God-questions, direct ’em towards the bible, not the Almighty.

And sometimes—and probably more often—they claim prayer doesn’t work that way. They say prayer is meant to be unidirectional. The purpose of prayer isn’t to communicate with God; it’s not to ask him anything, or ask him for anything. Those who make requests of God misunderstand its purpose, get their hopes up that God might hear ’em, but only set themselves up for disappointment. Because God’s not gonna answer them. That’s not why we pray.

Okay, so why do we pray? Well, they explain, that’s the religion. We’re told to pray. Christians pray. If you don’t pray, you’re not following the religion. But don’t expect anything out of the prayer itself; expect it out of the obedience. God wants us to pray, so we do; we’re obedient. That’s the point.

So when they pray, they go through all the motions of talking to God. They address God, praise him, lift up people they think God might want to see us lift up, talk about their own personal religious improvement, add a lot of pious-sounding things which God might like to hear, invoke Jesus’s name, and say Amen. For all the world it looks like they talked to God.

But no, not really. It’s entirely ritual. Or, as any reasonable onlooker might conclude, pure hypocrisy.

No, seriously. If we’re going through all the motions of talking to God, but we’re not really talking to God; we’re just going through the motions because we need to fulfill a religious duty, how is it not hypocrisy? And y’might recall the one thing which, in the gospels, pissed off Jesus more than anything, was hypocrisy. Why on earth would hypocrisy, in any form, be a legitimate part of Jesus’s religion?

We’re meant to expect answers.

This God-doesn’t-answer-prayers mindset isn’t a new one. It’s a very, very old one. It originates from paganism, because pagans prayed to their gods all the time, and their gods never answered.

And of course not; they’re not real! But pagan priests didn’t want their followers to ever come to that conclusion. Sometimes because they themselves were true believers in their gods, and had to explain to themselves why petitioning their gods got no results. Sometimes because they didn’t believe… but the king did, and would kill ’em if they didn’t, and again they needed some explanation why their gods were mute. Other times they were con artists, and tricked people into thinking the gods did answer. Like false prophets and oracles, or the stunts they pulled as found in the apocryphal book Bel and the Dragon.

Naturally some of that mindset leaked into Judaism and Christianity. When unbelieving petitioners offer unbelieving prayers, God’s seldom gonna answer their hypocrisy with anything but “No thank you.” So they’ll persist in their unbelief, and come up with the same pagan explanations for why prayer doesn’t work. It has nothing to do with their lack of expectation. They’re not the problem. Must be God.

When you read about the Sadducees of Jesus’s day, you’ll notice they didn’t believe in angels, miracles, or really anything; they believed in God and Moses, and that’s pretty much it. No doubt they shared this same attitude about prayer: You pray because it’s the religion, but you don’t expect God to answer. Sadducee priests had to pray, and probably prayed a lot! But it was just cold dead religion for them, and their attitudes no doubt infected the rest of the Judeans.

Which is why Jesus had to teach his followers otherwise. We serve a living God, not a dead one!

Mark 11.22-25 NLT

22Then Jesus said to the disciples, “Have faith in God. 23I tell you the truth, you can say to this mountain, ‘May you be lifted up and thrown into the sea,’ and it will happen. But you must really believe it will happen and have no doubt in your heart. 24I tell you, you can pray for anything, and if you believe that you’ve received it, it will be yours. 25But when you are praying, first forgive anyone you are holding a grudge against, so that your Father in heaven will forgive your sins, too.”

Jesus’s students were stunned that he cursed a fig tree, and instead of shaking off the curse as fig trees usually do, it died. Mk 11.20-21 But Jesus wasn’t idly cursing; he meant to smite that tree, because he wanted his students to realize they too were granted the power to smite trees. God heard Jesus; God hears us. Don’t think he doesn’t!

Jesus’s Persistent Widow Story is prefaced by Luke’s comment,

Luke 18.1 NLT

One day Jesus told his disciples a story to show that they should always pray and never give up.

Because he doesn’t want us to give up. Did God not give you the answer you wanted? Do a brief self-analysis—what are your motives; why should God tell you yes—then ask again. And again and again, if need be. Maybe his answer isn’t “no”; maybe it’s “not yet, so keep praying.” Maybe he’s trying to teach you persistence—or compassion, if this is a request for another person. Unbelievers aren’t wrong when they claim prayer’s about changing us; they’re only wrong in saying it’s only about changing us.

Pray expecting God to answer one way or another. And you’ll see him answer.