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"DON'T PRAY THAT PRAYER ANYMORE"

In the book A Passion For Prayer, Pastor Tim Crosby tells the old fable of a Rabbi Jachanan who took a trip with his friend, the prophet Elijah. And around sunset, they stopped to spend the night with a very poor family who hardly had two pennies to rub together. They did have a cow, but that was just about it. Well, the poor man, along with his wife, came running out into the road and gave them the grandest welcome you can imagine. Milk from the cow, bread, homemade butter, the few goodies they had in the larder. After supper, the man and his wife gave the two visitors the comfortable bed, while they slept by the fire on the bare floor.

The next morning — would you believe it, after all this generosity — the poor man's cow was dead.

But the two men kept on walking. The next evening they happened to come to the mansion of a very wealthy man. And this rabbi, thinking how majestically they'd been treated the night before, assumed that finally they would get the five-star treatment with caviar, a big-screen TV, and some engraved, foil-wrapped mints on their pillows. But no. The millionaire shunted them off into a cowshed, and only tossed them a stale roll for supper. The rabbi was kind of disgusted, but in the morning the prophet Elijah was all smiles and bowing and scraping and thanking his host; in fact, he arranged for a mason to come out and repair one of the walls, which was falling down — at his own expense. That was his way of saying thank you.

Well, as the trip continued, Rabbi Jachanan, as soon as they were out of earshot, just exploded in disgust. Was this Elijah some kind of a nut? What was going on? Why did he treat that millionaire snob so nicely? Why did God let the poor man's only cow die? What kind of an upside-down universe was this, anyway?

Very patiently the prophet told his companion a couple of pieces of inside information. "In regard to the poor man who received us so hospitably," Elijah explained, "it was decreed that his wife was to die that night, but in reward for his goodness, God took the cow instead of the wife." Oh. Well, that helped a bit. But what about the rich man? Elijah told him something about that too. "I repaired the wall of the rich miser because a chest of gold was concealed near the place, and if the miser had repaired the wall himself he would have discovered the treasure." Then the old prophet added this: "Say not therefore to the Lord ‘What doest Thou?' But say in thy heart: ‘Must not the Lord of all do right?'"
Well, it's kind of an interesting fable, but what does it have to do with our rather blunt two-word radio topic for this week: "SHUT UP!"? Simply this. Friend, there are some occasions in life when the God of the universe tells us very plainly that His answer to some request is a "no." We're always encouraged to pray; you probably remember the famous injunction given in First Thessalonians 5:17:
"Pray without ceasing."

The NIV Bible says very simply: "Pray continually." "Always keep on praying," is the Living Bible. However, do you know something? We have to balance that with the biblical truth that sometimes God very clearly communicates to a man or a woman that the answer to this or that request is a no . . . and that there's no point in continuing to ask. And the challenge, then, is to accept that there may be more to the story than we understand.

Some of you probably think immediately of the Bible's most famous case of this. The apostle Paul had a challenge of some kind — and we're not told what it is. But in his second letter to his Christian friends in Corinth, Paul admits that he had a hurt in his life, what he calls a "thorn in the flesh." Here's what he writes in chapter 12:

"There was given me a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me." And then he kind of pours out his heart with this: "Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me."

This thorn, or skolops, in the Greek language, describes anything pointed, like a stake or a splinter or the business end of a fishhook. Now, Christians have debated for 2000 years what kind of thorny briar this might have been. Colin Kruse, in his Tyndale New Testament Commentary for Second Corinthians, points out that it might well have been just a recurring temptation to sin; notice that Paul says this thorn was "a messenger from Satan, to harass me." Or it might have been religious persecution from unbelievers; there was certainly plenty of that for every Christian to endure in the days of the early church. Other scholars conjecture that perhaps Paul suffered from some physical malady: eye trouble, recurring fevers, epilepsy, a speech impediment. Something like that. Whatever it was, it was a grievous problem to him, and on three occasions he got down on his knees and really begged God, maybe with tears and fasting, to remove this thorn.

But as we read on, we discover that God finally gives Paul a very clear no. Now, He doesn't actually say "shut up" to Paul, but this apostle does receive, through inspiration, the message that God is not going to grant this request. There's no point in bringing it up again. After the "three times I pleaded" part, Paul then says this in verse nine:

"But He [God] said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for My power is made perfect in weakness."

So God says, very gently but in a bottom-line kind of way, "The answer's no. My grace is enough to see you through this." And then God adds that His own divine power would be perfected through this human weakness.

Now let's do two things. We're going to back up and get some of Paul's perspective on both sides of this little story, both front and back, because I deliberately left out how he begins the confession. Let me share this from the very colorful paraphrase version called The Message by Dr. Eugene Peterson. Paul has just been talking about some of the visions and dreams he's had. And now this section:

"Because of the extravagance of those revelations, and so I wouldn't get a big head," he writes, "I was GIVEN the gift of a handicap to keep me in constant touch with my limitations." "There was given me a thorn," other versions say. "Satan's angel did his best to get me down; what he in fact did was push me to my knees. No danger then of walking around high and mighty!" Then Paul confesses: "At first I didn't think of it as a gift, and begged God to remove it. Three times I did that, and then He told me, ‘My grace is enough; it's all you need. My strength comes into its own in your weakness."

So here's a divinely sent "Shut up!" God tells Paul the answer's no and that it's always going to be no. Just like Jesus asked three times in Gethsemane for the cup of suffering to be lifted, and got a "no" from heaven, Paul does as well. But here he learns to thank God for this gift, this thorn, because it keeps him humble. It keeps him in touch with the miracle of grace.
In fact, in his Tyndale commentary, Colin Kruse goes on to dissect the Greek word eir ken, which translates into "But He said to me." That word, Kruse tells us, is in the perfect tense, which makes this a kind of eternal answer. God says something to Paul which will always be true. The Lord's answer, he says, assumes "continual applicability for him."
And then the word arkei, meaning "is sufficient," as in "My grace is sufficient for you," has that same perfect tense. The thorn will never be removed, but neither will the grace. It will always be there. It will always be enough. It, too, will be "continually available."
No wonder Paul finishes up — and let me stay here in the Message Bible — by exclaiming this:

"Once I heard that [about God's grace] I was glad to let it happen. I quit focusing on the handicap and began appreciating the gift. It was a case of Christ's strength moving in on my weakness. Now I take limitations in stride, and with good cheer, these limitations that cut me down to size — abuse, accidents, opposition, bad breaks. I just let Christ take over! And so the weaker I get, the stronger I become."

More than one Bible commentary, by the way, points out that this persecution, this fish-hook thorn, whatever it was, did keep Paul on the move — maybe in trying to escape that "messenger of Satan." Which meant that the gospel went to more and more people; the story of the cross entered new territories. And by Paul's own confession, God's "no" to him kept him humble, kept him depending on the stream of grace that God Himself promised would be ever flowing. The thorn would always be there . . . and so would the grace.
So does it sometimes hurt when God says "no"? And then adds: "And don't ask Me that one again"? Maybe so. And for a while we don't understand why there has to be a thorn. Or why a poor man's only cow dies. But friend, just keep on trusting. Sooner or later, as you've probably heard on this radio before, "Now you know the rest of the story."