Prayer requests, karma, and faith.

Years ago a pastor gave me a book of daily devotions, consisting of E.M. Bounds’s writings. If you’ve not heard of the guy, he’s a 19th-century Methodist who wrote eight of his 11 books about prayer. Because his works are in the public domain, publishers keep adapting and using them to make cheap devotionals. It’s all variations on the same theme: If we wanna grow as Christians, or want our churches to grow, we gotta pray. Gotta. Bounds believed in hours-long daily prayers; I’m more into God-mindfulness. But however you do it, Bounds was right: We gotta pray.

That said, Bounds wasn’t infallible; nobody but Jesus is. Sometimes he’d get it wrong. And some of the excerpts from his writings, which this devotional edits down to one-page daily readings, consist of some of this wrongness. I’ll give you an example from a page from last month.

A life of obedience helps prayer. It speeds prayer to the throne. God cannot help hearing the prayer of an obedient child. Unquestioning obedience counts much in the sight of God at the throne of heavenly grace.

It acts like the flowing tides of many rivers. An obedient life is not simply a reformed life. It is not the old life primed and repainted. It is not a superficial churchgoing life or a flurry of activities.

Neither is it only an external conformation to what society expects. It takes much more than this to be a truly obedient Christian.

It comes from one paragraph from chapter 9 of Bounds’s posthumous 1929 book The Necessity of Prayer. It’s not even the full paragraph.

It sounds correct to many Christians, because when Christians write about prayer, far too few of ’em talk about God’s grace. Instead we talk about karma. Humanity presumes the universe runs on reciprocity. So if you do good deeds, you get good things in return. If you do evil deeds, the universe somehow punishes you.

Or so wealthy westerners believe. Poor easterners know better. Every authoritarian government in the world is proof the universe absolutely does not run this way. There are plenty of good people in North Korea, but they’ve nonetheless been crapped upon by the Kim family for generations. The Kims aren’t good people, but Il-Sung and Jong-Il managed to live comfortably and die peacefully, and someday the same may be true of Jong-Un and Ju-Ae. But I digress: Because easterners regularly witness firsthand how the universe doesn’t come through for good people, their beliefs about karma usually claim reciprocity will happen in the next life. Once they’re reincarnated, good people will have better lives; wicked people will have worse lives. Because in this life, if you’re looking for hope in the universe, you get nothing. You lose. Good day, sir.

But I digress. Instead of a meaningless universe, people figure God is behind all the reciprocity out there—he makes sure the wicked never prosper, and the righteous get mansions and yachts and enough billions to buy elections. So how do we make sure we’re on the receiving end of God’s full-blast firehose of blessings? Duh; we gotta be good. Obey God’s commands, and God will answer your every prayer. Don’t, and God will pass you by.

Does this concept come from bible? Not even close. God’s kingdom runs on grace, not karma. And God’s answers to prayer likewise run on his grace. He doesn’t answer our prayers because we’re good; he answers our prayers because he’s good. Like Jesus says, your Father is happy to give good things to his children. Mt 7.11

Cart before the horse.

You know why God most often appears to answer obedient believers? Because of the reason they’re obedient believers. It’s not the obedience itself. That’s the cart. There’s a horse pulling it. The horse is faith.

What is it we do, which justifies God establishing any kind of relationship with us? Faith. We trust God. Same as Abraham trusting the LORD, and God thereby crediting Abraham with righteousness. Ro 4.3 That’s the only thing which makes us justified in God’s eyes—faith alone.

Obedience is the fruit of this faith. When Christians trust God, we read our bibles, read what Jesus teaches, and determine to actually do it. Oh, we’ll suck at it at first, but Jesus forgives our mistakes. We’ll keep plugging away at it, and get better at it. We’ll become obedient believers.

And when people notice God answers the prayers of obedient believers more often than not, they’ll come to the entirely reasonable—but entirely wrong—conclusion that God’s rewarding our obedience. He is not. He’s recognizing our trust in him. He’s responding to that, not our goodness. Every sinner’s prayer gets answered—and are they good people? Some of them, kinda! But not enough of ’em. Yet God answers the sinners too—because they have enough faith to cry out to him for salvation.

Having faith is the very core of prayer: If you don’t believe God answers prayer, why would you even bother to pray? In fact this is precisely why a lot of people never bother to pray: They think they’re either talking to a God who never intervenes, or who already has a plan and is never gonna deviate from it no matter what we pray… or to no one at all. People who don’t pray, don’t have faith. People who do pray… well, they got something. It’s tiny faith. Small as a mustard seed. But Jesus does say that’s all we need.

So, those people who claim we gotta be obedient before God can answer our prayers? Yep, they put the cart before the horse. Plus it jibes so well with their karmic beliefs. So they’re gonna teach that, and ignore everything Jesus teaches about how our prayers oughta be based on, and filled with, faith.

Mark 11.22-24 NRSVue

22Jesus answered them, “Have faith in God. 23Truly I tell you, if you say to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and thrown into the sea,’ and if you do not doubt in your heart but believe that what you say will come to pass, it will be done for you. 24So I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.”

Luke 11.9-13 NRSVue

9“So I say to you, Ask, and it will be given to you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. 10For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened. 11Is there anyone among you who, if your child asked for a fish, would give a snake instead of a fish? 12Or if the child asked for an egg, would give a scorpion? 13If you, then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!”

John 16.26-27 NRSVue

26“On that day you will ask in my name. I do not say to you that I will ask the Father on your behalf, 27for the Father himself loves you because you have loved me and have believed that I came from God.”

Jesus doesn’t have to teach us that God answers the prayers of the obedient, ’cause if we truly believe, we’re gonna want to be obedient. That’ll happen regardless. So you notice he instead teaches us we have to pray in faith. We gotta trust God to answer us; that he loves and justifies us because we trust him, and trust Jesus. We gotta stop trusting in our good deeds and obedience; while those things are good, and we still oughta do them, they don’t save, and they’re no guarantee God’ll answer us. No matter what your favorite E.M. Bounds devotional suggests.