“How are you?”
“Oh, you know, same ol’ same ol’.”
“I know you’ve been struggling lately and I’ve seen how morose you’ve been. You know, it almost seems cyclical, huh? Just know that I’m praying for you.”
“Thanks so much, my friend. This cross I’ve been called to carry gets pretty darn heavy from time to time. I just keep praying for relief. It hasn’t come yet, but I’m assuming that God’s leaving all the pain for a reason. I like to think I’m a witness to the angels, like Job.”
“I understand,” says the concerned friend. They choose to say no more.
God sees two different hearts here. First, He sees a good friend reaching out to another for the sake of encouragement. He also sees this person’s earnest prayers and He favors them because they seek deliverance, through intercession, for the well-being of one of His other children. He doesn’t favor the prayers of the so-called “cross-bearing” individual because their prayers are always the same, seeking relief rather than deliverance.
Some people boast about “carrying a cross”, praying for strength to “press on,” using all the right biblical language, quipping phrases from Holy Scripture, though often grossly out of context. The cross these people speak of is a counterfeit, and their prayers for relief from their suffering are against God’s will. They like to call upon God’s mercy as if it were a relief valve of sorts; but it isn’t. If God were to bend towards man’s will like this, He’d be enslaved to him (I suggest you read the chapter in my book, Covert Arrogance – Hiding Out in Plain Sight, the section titled Mercy Demands).
God possesses and exercises perfect justice. There’s never a time when He doesn’t. This justice is a fundamental aspect of His integrity, which includes His righteousness also. What this means is that if a person sins, God is perfectly right to judge them. He hates sin because it is antagonistic to His plan to deliver His own children (believers) experientially from the power of it. Therefore, if a person continues in sin, what do you think the holy God of the Universe is going to do for that person? How will He answer their incessant prayers for relief from the guaranteed fruit of sin (e.g., pain, suffering, anguish, etc.)? Will He grant them relief without fail, thus enabling their dysfunction to continue, or might He, in integrity, rightly refuse to grant said relief because He loves them? On the flip side, what is the righteous response from the one praying? Should this person presume Job-like responsibilities to the grand stage of angelic host, or might they be better off pondering the root cause of their pain?
“FOR THOSE WHOM THE LORD LOVES HE DISCIPLINES, AND HE SCOURGES EVERY SON WHOM HE RECEIVES.”
It is for discipline that you endure; God deals with you as with sons; for what son is there whom his father does not discipline? But if you are without discipline, of which all have become partakers, then you are illegitimate children and not sons. Furthermore, we had earthly fathers to discipline us, and we respected them; shall we not much rather be subject to the Father of spirits, and live?
For they disciplined us for a short time as seemed best to them, but He disciplines us for our good, so that we may share His holiness. All discipline for the moment seems not to be joyful, but sorrowful; yet to those who have been trained by it, afterwards it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness.
Therefore, strengthen the hands that are weak and the knees that are feeble, and make straight paths for your feet, so that the limb which is lame may not be put out of joint, but rather be healed.
— Hebrews 12:6-13
Mankind seldom enjoys looking “behind the veil,” as I like to phrase it. He’s not all that fond of digging too deeply into himself because of fear of what he might find there. Yet, the Bible exhorts us to examine ourselves consistently. If a person fails in this way, the result is a claim to innocence that fosters the presumption that God has given them a certain cross to bear, and that any suffering endured is a direct result. What this false thinking has done is effectively boxed out the possibility that they may have manufactured their own suffering through sinful behavior (past, present, or planned). Once this thinking becomes foundational, a person rarely, if ever, re-examines it.
Ask yourself, why do our doctors instruct us to examine our body parts for disease more regularly the older we get? It’s because our bodies are decaying, aging, getting worse, and therefore are more susceptible to disorder. Why would we ever think that the same isn’t true in our spiritual lives, at least in part? The human flesh gets worse over time, not better; more toxic, not purer; more dangerous, not more benevolent. All the more reason to examine its influence in our lives! Like many diseases, its power to overcome us is based on its ability to deceive us into thinking nothing is wrong. We might go years popping pain relievers, praying the pills cover the pain, when all along the root cause goes unaddressed.
Case in point, the opening dialogue. The suffering person was praying for relief, while their friend prayed for deliverance. These are entirely different prayers. The prior seeks to avoid the righteous pain of reaping what is sown through sin, while the latter seeks the righteous will of God, that is, to deliver a person from the thing producing the sin in the first place.
My son, do not reject the discipline of the LORD
Or loathe His reproof,
For whom the LORD loves He reproves,
Even as a father corrects the son in whom he delights.
How blessed is the man who finds wisdom
And the man who gains understanding.
For her profit is better than the profit of silver
And her gain better than fine gold.
— Proverbs 3:11-14
Those whom I love, I reprove and discipline; therefore be zealous and repent.
— Revelation 3:19
God desires to sanctify/deliver us, not spare the rod just because we wince when we reap rightly what we have sown in sin (e.g., granting a prayer for mercy while on a counterfeit cross – this is the opposite of true mercy!). “The rod and reproof give wisdom” (Proverbs 29:15a). In God’s perfect timing, He may choose to alleviate some of our self-inflicted pain, but that’s His sovereign right alone.
Our prayers are often the greatest indicator of where our hearts are. Are we praying for relief or deliverance? There’s a difference. Do we seek band-aids or healing? Do we wish to continue in our sin or do we truly desire deliverance from it? Are we just playing games, in the weakness of our human ingenuity, substantiating the need for the Spirit’s intercessory prayer?
In the same way the Spirit also helps our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we should, but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words; and He who searches the hearts knows what the mind of the Spirit is, because He intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.
And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose.
— Romans 8:26-28
There are a few simple questions we all need to ask ourselves. What is our motivation when we pray? Are we willing to accept, in humility, whatever the Spirit reveals to us? Are we willing to re-examine the foundation of our lifestyles, to challenge the bedrock of our longstanding beliefs? Is it possible we’ve been deceived for a very long time and the cross we bear is in the shadow of darkness? Sin veils itself in order to gain control. We have to seek what’s behind the veil, what’s been pushed back into the recesses of our soul, no matter how painful the exercise, for this is where deliverance lies, my friends. To reject such a notion is to frustrate the sanctification that God desires for you.
Seek not relief in the absence of deliverance. Pray likewise.
Here’s a short parable for the tenacious folks reading this blog…
Two high school students party on the weekends. They both get drunk regularly. One never gets a hangover, while the other suffers awfully the next morning, without fail. The first one becomes a raging alcoholic and dies from cirrhosis of the liver at thirty-five years old. The second learns his lesson young and lives a healthy life, dying of natural causes at the ripe old age of eighty. Pain saved the second person’s life, delivered them. The end.
Love in Christ,
Ed Collins