It’s a little embarrassing, but God often has to remind me how to pray and how prayer works. This time, God used a friend and mentor, Tom Bourke, who tells this story about reading Exodus 32 and 33 (where God seems to change his mind about going with the people of Israel). “In earlier years, I missed the blessing & inspiration of how I could influence God’s heart with my prayers. Instead, I got wrapped up in a game of ‘Theology Twister,’ trying to reconcile passages like Numbers 23:19 with Moses’s impacting God’s Decisions. Instead of these stories inspiring Confidence, I ended up in a Conundrum…. Yeah, I should have chosen the former!”
Another way to say it is like this: “Trust the character of God. Trust what God is doing. Trust the story.”
What happens in Exodus is hard to explain. Twice, God tells Moses he’s going to do something, and twice Moses prays and God “relents.” Instead of trying to “figure it out,” sometimes, we have to trust first. The order here is important. In John 8:30-32, Jesus is talking to people who had already trusted him. He encourages them to keep living what he had taught them, and then, after the faith and the effort, they would know the truth, and the truth would set them free. Trusting and knowing are not opposites, but they do not always follow the more comfortable order of understanding first.
That process—trusting first—seems upside down! And yet, when I do trust and when I do pray, that is when the confidence most often comes. Maybe that is why so many Psalms start with a cry of disbelief and confusion and end with confidence and praise. The important thing is that the psalm writer got started.
The tagline for one prayer letter I receive is Mike Jordahl’s “just pray now.“ I’m pretty sure he doesn’t mean “ignore everything and pretend like you trust God.” Instead, like the story of Moses and the repeated pattern in the Psalms, the encouragement is to bring it all to God, even when it doesn’t make sense, even if you do not have a lot of time.
There is a lot to be worried about and to be grieving over these days, and a lot that I don’t understand. I need the reminder that I can pray without understanding, honestly before God, and that someday, as Psalm 77 concludes (after much grief and many false starts), there will be joy in the morning.
Resources
- Sign up for Tom’s weekly text messages by texting him at (313) 408-3433 or emailing him at tom.bourke@navigators.org.
- Go here to read Mike and Nancy’s newsletter and check the top left corner to sign up.”
- For a little more insight into the prayer “conundrum” of Exodus, Tom suggests looking up the difference between “repent” and “relent.”