When I Pray, What Does God Do? (eBook)

CHAPTER 1

My Problems with Prayer

The great twentieth-century preacher Martyn Lloyd-Jones once commented, “Everything we do in the Christian life is easier than prayer.” I remember when I first heard this quote and wondering whether I really agreed with it. Is prayer harder than delivering Christian Aid envelopes to a house which has a notice above the letterbox saying “no religious people welcome”, accompanied by the sound of a dog whose bark can only come from a hound from hell? Or is prayer harder than a church council meeting where half an hour has been wasted on an argument on the colour of the new mugs for the church hall? Or is prayer harder than trying to understand – and then preach – a sermon on the Trinitarian nature of God?

Surely prayer is one of the easiest parts of the Christian life. It can be done alone, at my own time, in my own space, and after all it is simply a quiet chat with God. Sharing my faith with other people makes me vulnerable to being mocked as a member of the “God-squad”. Living as part of a Christian community has its struggles as well as its joys, meaning that I need to love the person whose musical tastes are very different to mine and whose politics will never be even close to mine. Surely, compared to these things, prayer is the simple part of the Christian life.

I used to believe that prayer was easy, although it did strike me that if it was that easy, then why did I not pray more? The problem with prayer, I concluded, was that I simply had not found the right form that suited me. And the history of my prayer life has therefore resembled a Google-like super-spiritual search of different ways of praying. I have tried praying kneeling, standing, sitting, walking, lying down, and crouched in that nonconformist way that everyone in a nonconformist church conforms to. I have prayed with my arms in the air, but with some uncertainty – due to what seems to me to be a change between charismatic generations – about whether I should have my palms up or down! Otherwise, I have prayed with my hands clasped together, with prayer beads and crosses in my hands, and with my arms relaxed and open because someone told me that this welcomes the Holy Spirit. I have prayed for other people with my hands hovering over them just as the charismatic leader John Wimber used to do – until I discovered that there was nothing mystical in this, but simply that Wimber used to pray for folk in a building that was stiflingly hot and had no air conditioning. The hovering laying on of hands was simply to stop it becoming a very sweaty form of ministry. I have prayed with a loud voice and prayed in silence. I have used prayers and liturgies from Christian tradition, prayed in tongues, and used hymns and songs as a form of prayer. I have prayed in prayer meetings, cathedrals, in a small hole in the side of a mountain, on high streets and in convents, and prayed aloud at the same time as 10,000 other people. I have used a prayer journal, prayer cards, prayer letters, and web resources. I have tried praying in the morning, lunchtime, dinnertime, and last thing at night.

All of these forms have been useful – apart from, that is, praying early in the morning! I am the type of person who simply doesn’t understand why the Lord created mornings. I am sure that in the Garden of Eden the day started with mid-morning coffee and early mornings are surely the result of the fall!

Nevertheless, for all the diverse exploration of the forms of prayer, I am left with the reality that Lloyd-Jones was right and I actually do find prayer the hardest thing in the Christian life. Why should that be? Perhaps it is to do not with how I pray but why I pray and, further, the way that I think about how God answers prayers.

Lightning bolts and bishops

Over thirty years ago, in 1984, I was a student at Durham University. I had become a Christian three years previously and, having just completed a physics degree, was about to embark on research in theoretical astrophysics. It was also the time of press interest in the then Bishop of Durham David Jenkins. Controversy had surrounded his questioning of the traditional interpretations of the virgin birth and the resurrection, with the often misquoted remark linking Bishop David to saying that the resurrection is “a conjuring trick with bones”. In fact, the actual quote is a little more difficult to track down, and it is clear that he was trying to say that the resurrection was not just a conjuring trick with bones.

The media were further interested in that three days after the bishop’s consecration at York Minster, the building was hit by lightning. The subsequent fire in the thirteenth-century south transept left its roof destroyed. Papers picked this up and likened it to the bolt of fire in the story of Elijah and the prophets of Baal. It raised the question of whether this was an act of God’s judgment on a bishop with unorthodox views, and indeed whether in a world of modern science we could believe in a God who could work in this kind of way. Bishop David followed all of this up by speaking of how he could not believe in a “laser beam” God who responded to particular prayers by specific acts in the world, picking out one situation to change but leaving so many others.

While having very different views on the virgin birth and resurrection of Jesus, I nevertheless had a great deal of sympathy for the bishop. First of all, I do not think that the fire in York was a sign of God’s judgment. I can think of more telling ways if judgment did have to be exercised! Second, Bishop David was attempting to communicate Christian faith in a world often dominated by science. He was an evangelist and a pastor as well as a theologian, and he felt by talking about how traditional belief could be reinterpreted, it would be more accessible to the vast majority of the British public who had rejected faith. He was courageous in publicly stating some of the issues that we all encounter if we want to believe in the existence and power of a God who invites us to pray and then is prepared to answer that prayer.

However, as a young research student it seemed to me that there was a problem in Bishop David’s view of science and his view of the Bible. It seemed to me that they were both outdated and somewhat simplistic, and yet I understood completely where they came from.

The predictable world of science

While Bishop David was attempting to find a way to hold together science and Christian belief as a bishop in the public sphere, I was doing exactly the same but privately and as a young research student in astrophysics. This had its own struggles and joys. Science is a messy activity, a long way from school physics where if you do not know the shape of the graph that comes from your experimental data, you simply borrow the book of a person in the year above you who did the same experiment twelve months ago. The struggle for me was trying to make sense of a seemingly mysterious universe, with a limited amount of experimental data, while collaborating with students and staff and also competing against other groups that wanted to get there first. Yet, the joy of science was that it disclosed a universe with beautiful, elegant, and universal laws which applied equally to me dropping a glass and to matter falling into a black hole.

The question was whether in such a universe God had any room at all to answer prayer? It was a question that people often posed to me when they knew I was a scientist. Did I believe that God could intervene in a universe that was governed by the laws of science?

This is not a new question. It goes right back to the scientific revolution, which was in some significant way based on Christian theology and proved both fruitful and challenging for Christian belief. A faithful God, who created the universe freely and yet with a constant commitment to sustaining it, provided the seedbed for the growth of what we know as science. Of course, science stemmed from the Greeks, with notable contributions from Chinese and Muslim thinkers, but the belief in universal and reliable laws which could be discovered by observation was provided by the Christian doctrine of creation. Christians believed that if God was free to create as he wanted, not constrained by human logic, then the only way to see what he had done was to look at the universe. And if God was faithful, our observations would have regularities or patterns to them – that is, the laws of physics. This scientific revolution led to such triumphs as Newton’s law of gravitation, which, when coupled with Kepler’s elliptical orbits, explains beautifully the movement of the planets around the sun. Such regular and predictable laws of nature could be visualized not only through simple mathematical equations but also in models which represented these motions as a clockwork mechanism. Thus, from the eighteenth century onwards, you could obtain an orrery, a clockwork mechanical model of the solar system that shows the relative positions and motions of the planets (and moons), in their orbits around the sun.

Thus, with a knowledge of the laws of physics and the present position of things, you could tell what had gone on in the past and what was to happen in the future. Edmond Halley’s prediction of the arrival of the comet which now bears his name was evidence of how powerful this method was.

The beauty, regularity, and simplicity of the scientific laws were seen as reflections of the order and faithfulness of the creator God. Christian thinkers built on this to try to use the laws to demonstrate the existence of a divine...