(Theology of powerlessness Part 3)
"Lord I pray for my friend to be healed from his cancer. But it is OK if you dont want to heal cos it is not your will. I can understand if you want my friend and his entire family to go through a period of testing so that their character can be built through their perseverance and brokenness. "
"Lord I pray that you will send revival to our church. But it is OK if you dont want to. I understand if you want to test and purify the church to build believers who will trust in you even though you are silent and don't answer prayers and even though we labour for years without fruit."
Sounds familiar? Some of us have even convinced ourselves that these are mature prayers of faith. Can we really kid ourselves that God is pleased with such prayers? We are so afraid to prayer for anything, giving God so many ways out for him not to answer so that we won't be disappointed if he doesn't. We weigh our prayers with so many qualifiers that our prayers hardly get off the ground on our tattered wings of faith before it crashes into the ditch of unbelief. Imagine the leper in Matthew chapter 8 saying to Jesus, "Lord if you are willing, You can make me clean...But it's OK if you dont want to. It's OK if you think I am scum and decide not to give me the time of day so that I can be forced to glorify you despite my pathetic existence." Do you think Jesus would have honoured such prayers? There is a reason why James wrote "But let him ask in faith, with no doubting for he who doubts is like a wave of the sea driven and tossed by the wind. For let not that man suppose that he will receive anything from the Lord (1:6,7). There is a reason why Jesus said "assuredly I say to you if you have faith as a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain 'Move from here to there,' and it will move (Mat 17:20). When we pray prayers giving God a way out not to answer, these prayers do not glorify God. Here is where the lie is finally exposed... Many of us use theology as a cover up for our lack of faith. We have convinced ourselves that it is the will of God for us to suffer, to experience hardship and poverty and sickness and persecution and even bondage...simply because we are afraid that if we lack the faith to prayer for deliverance and fear that if we are disappointed, our faith will crumble. The irony is, there is nothing to crumble cos there is no faith to begin with! When faced with the option of healing and sickness, we are automatically trained to think God will chose sickness for us. When faced with the options of prosperity or poverty, we automatically think God will choose poverty for us. We lambast churches for having a 'prosperity' gospel but do not realise that we preach a 'poverty gospel'.
God loves us and wants to bless us and wants to give us freedom from the curse of sin, disease and poverty. Christ died to become a curse for us so that the blessings of Abraham may come upon the Gentiles in Christ Jesus (Gal 3:13,14) We make a mockery of his death by presuming that he still wants us to live under curses. It is true sometimes he does allow us to suffer for a time to build character but this is the exception rather than the norm. To assume we have to suffer all the time belies lack of faith and lack of understanding of grace. Enough is enough. It is time for the people of God to rise up and claim our inheritance in Christ. It is time for us to stop allowing the devil to rob us of our blessings by false theologies. For I am in Christ. Everything that is His he has given to me. And I am not going to let anyone take it away from me...