Annoying Heaven out of God

CROSS PURPOSES 92

1 August 2007

Our Men’s breaky guys have been reading a Philip Yancey book on prayer. In a chapter entitled “ASK, SEEK, KNOCK” he gets into two stories Jesus told about a persistent friend who needs help and a persistent widow who needs justice. Jesus’ point is that our Lord is telling us he’s surely listening.
Here’s some of the text:

“Older versions of the Bible apply the little-used word ‘importunate’ to the widow and the borrower in Jesus’ stories. Sometimes our requests will seem annoying, as that word implies. I think of William Wilberforce submitting the same bill, year after year, before Parliament as he argued, importunately, for the abolition of slavery. Or of Senator William Proxmire giving a speech every day on the floor of the Senate – 3211 speeches delivered over nineteen years – until his colleagues finally passed a bill outlawing genocide. I think of Sister Helen Prejean, portrayed in the movie Dead Man Walking, who tirelessly crosses the United States pleading against the death penalty. And of Martin Luther King Jr as he addressed the bloodied Selma marchers from the steps of Alabama’s state capital, voicing again and again their question about justice: ‘How long?...How long?...How long will it take?’
Activists who take up a cause – third-world debt, AIDS in Africa, homelessness, abortion, sexual trafficking, racism, hate crimes, drink driving, health care, unjust wars, the environment, pornography, prison reform, terrorism, human rights and a hundred others – will doubtless grow weary and may be tempted to give up the fight. To them, God must resemble the callous judge or the crotchety neighbour in Jesus’ stories. Jesus insists otherwise. Unlike the judge and the neighbour, God has infinite tolerance for our requests and demands, especially those supporting the cause of God’s own kingdom. Why else would the Bible include so many importuning psalms, so many prophetic laments?
In his sermon ‘The Parable of the Importunate Widow’, Helmut Thielicke notes that ‘God is doing nothing less than offering to his praying church a part in his government of the world’. The giants of history, Thielicke says (thinking of his contemporaries Hitler and Stalin), stride across the stage under the delusion that they are directing the drama of the world, whereas in reality they are only bit players permitted on-stage for a moment. Real power rests in those who perceive history as God’s own drama, who tap into a power accessible only to those who ask and seek and knock. Prayer sets God loose. As we revolt against the world’s disorder in our actions and in our prayers, refusing to resign ourselves to evil, we demonstrate that there remains, in Jesus’ phrase, ‘faith on the earth’.
Generations may pass before persistent prayer receives its answer. How many soldiers died before Thielicke’s own prayers for peace and justice in his homeland Germany were answered? How many Jews died praying for a future at a time when it seemed the entire race was being incinerated? Filipinos prayed, importunately, for relief before People Power brought down a corrupt regime. Millions languished in prison camps before the Iron Curtain fell to the ranks of peaceful protestors. How many Chinese Christians still suffer imprisonment and torture while outside the prison walls an unprecedented spiritual revival continues to gather steam?
On a more personal level, how many abuse victims plead for healing and still wake up every day feeling wounded and ashamed? Addicts pray for deliverance and then rise each day to fight the same relentless battles. Parents grieve in prayer over children who seem determined to live self-destructively”.


Go on! Annoy God. Be very annoying! Be importunate. Get on his case. Tell him he’s promised to do things, to listen, to respond. Remind him he cares! Let there be faith on earth! “You promised… Your kingdom come”.

Be Blessed friends

Fred