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True prayer, according to pastor and acclaimed Bible expositor John MacArthur, often involves struggling and grappling with God, proving to Him the deepest concern of one’s heart. Prayer is to be a persistent, courageous struggle from which the believer may come away limping.
Virginia
Stem Owens wrote the following about wrestling with God in earnest prayer. Her
sentiments stand in marked contrast to the glib, self-centered prayers of our
day:
Christians have always interpreted the splitting of the temple veil during the crucifixion as symbolic and the liberation from the mediated presence of God. Henceforth they were “free” to approach him directly which is almost like telling someone he is free to stick his head in the lion’s jaws for once you start praying there is no guarantee that you won’t find yourself before Pharaoh, shipwrecked on a desert island, or in a lion’s den.
This is no cosmic teddy bear we are cuddling up to. As one of the one children describes him in C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia, “he is not a tame lion.” Jacques Ellul is convinced that prayer for persons living in the technological age must be combat, and not just combat with the evil one, with one’s society, or even one’s divided self, though it is also all of these; it is combat with God. We too must struggle with him just as Jacob at Peniel where he earned his name Israel – “he who strives with God.” We too must prepare to say, “I will not let you go til you bless me.”
Consider Moses, again and again intervening between the Israelites and God’s wrath; Abraham praying for Sodom; the widow demanding justice of the unjust judge. But in this combat with God, Ellul cautions, we must be ready to bear the consequences … “Jacob’s thigh was pulled out of joint, and he went away lame. However, the most unusual experience will be God’s decision to put to work the person who cried to him …whoever wrestles with God in prayer puts his whole life at stake.”
Awful things happen to people who pray. Their plans are frequently disrupted. They end up in strange places. Abraham “went out, not knowing where he was to go” ... After Mary’s magnificent prayer at the annunciation, she finds herself the pariah of Nazareth society.
How tempting to up the stakes, making prayer merely another consumer product. How embarrassing to have to admit not only that prayer may get you into a prison, as it did Jeremiah, but also that while you’re moldering away in a miry pit there, you may have a long list of lamentations and unanswered questions to present to your Lord. How are we going to tell them they may end up lame and vagrant if they grasp hold of this God?
(“Prayer – Into the Lion’s Jaws,” Christianity Today, November 19, 1976. pp. 222-223, italics in the original)
