Peter Witkowski Discipleship

Why I Don’t Talk to April But Pray

When my dear April ceased to breathe, a piercing emptiness settled over my home and my soul. Where once there had been laughter, playful banter, and deep theological reflection now there was only thick, sticky, and suffocating silence.

As my heart broke under the weight of April’s death, I longed to be heard, to pour out my heart without reserve and without concern of time, schedule, or setting. But when I asked aloud, “Where are you, my love?” the air brought back no reply.

Why I Generally Don’t Talk to April

Though some have suggested that I trade my past marital dialogues for a therapeutic monologue, I find the option rather uncompelling if not troubling. I have no idea how April would respond to the experiences, concerns, hopes, worries, and fears that I now carry about with me. I can certainly speculate about how she might react to this or that. But as all good historians know, such speculations prove to be anachronistic and wholly inauthentic. They are nothing more than the manifestations of our imaginations on to reality which by logical necessity distort reality. We cannot project out without either adding to or taking away from what would be real. Such imaginary interactions with our dead loved ones are to reality what orcs are to men.

But even if she were to interact with my ramblings from heaven, she would have little to share with me for she is perfect, and I (as my kids will happily attest to) am not. As Paul notes in 1 Corinthians 13:12, “For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known.” The struggles, fears, worries, hopes, and desires that I wish to process aloud with her, the things the make me yearn for her open ear, derive from my incomplete knowledge of the Lord and from my sinful frailty. April no longer shares in those things, nor can she relate to my incompleteness for she knows the eternal joy of completeness. She has crossed the Jordan. Even if she could respond to my mumblings, I could no more understand her knowledge than a three-year-old could understand the terminology used to develop rocket science. As Paul noted of his vision of heaven, “he heard things that cannot be told, which man may not utter.” And what she could share with me has already been shared with me through the Scriptures. As Jesus said in his parable of the rich man and Lazarus, ‘They have Moses and the Prophets; let them hear them (Lk 16:29).”

This is not to say that April has no knowledge of me nor awareness of what happens in my life or in the lives of our dear children while she awaits Christ’s return in heaven. Scripture seems to indicate some heavenly awareness of earthly things. But while her love for us and us for her remains, we have no meaningful way to communicate. Death has separated us until it will one day again unite us. Until then, I must embrace the reality of her absence.

Why I Pray

But I do not have to embrace the silence. Though I have lost the companionship of my April for a time, I am not alone. My cries do not go unheard. The Psalmist offers all who grieve a glorious hope writing, “The eyes of the Lord are toward the righteous and his ears toward their cry.” I still process my life out loud. I cry out to the Lord through the penetrating silence that has enveloped my bedroom, kitchen, car, office, and even the church sanctuary. When I am alone and in need of help, I talk to the God who is there in the silence, bottling my tears as I weep through the night, extending grace to me as I argue with him through the day, and filling my heart with hope as I plead for fresh signs of his goodness and love. In other words, I do not bottle up my emotions but rather audibly process them with the Lord. The Puritan John Flavel who discovered the goodness of this process a few hundred years before me wrote,

To whom should children go but to their father, to make their moan…Did we complain more to God, he would complain less of us, and quickly abate the matters of our complaint.

Oh friends, it is sweet to process one’s life through prayer. Indeed, to talk with God is to commune with him and to experience the truth, love, and grace that transforms our lives.

However, such practices are not unique to widowers or to the grieving. As one theologian noted,

Invoking God, calling on him in prayer, isn’t an emergency measure…something that we turn to in extremity, at the hour of death or disappointment or depression. Calling on God’s name accompanies all of human life and all human activity.

Or to borrow from the apostle Peter, all of us are to cast our cares upon Christ because he cares for us (1 Pt 5:7).

What April Knew

Towards the end of her life as April verbally processed her fears with me, she would at times bring our conversations to a conclusion and kindly say, “I don’t expect an answer from you, Peter.” The comment unnerved me. I was her husband…her best friend…her truest confidant…her pastor. Surely, I should have some answer…some hope to offer…some word to say. But with each passing day, I have come to increasingly appreciate her wisdom in those moments. My shoulders could not carry all her burdens. Nor could her’s carry mine. They were not designed to. But Christ’s could. To Him, she turned.

A few weeks later when I lost my April, my heart shattered into a million pieces like a glass striking a hard kitchen tile. Nothing made sense. Everything hurt and was out of place. But I was not alone. Though he crushed me, my God did not leave me nor forsake me. He heard me. He hears me.

Don’t talk to the dead who cannot help us as they await the resurrection. Talk to the God who hears!  

Peter Witkowski Sermon on the Mount

Why You Should Keep Praying

The ability to love those who insult us, to remain pure when our phones offer us a million pathways to pornography, and to refrain from being hyper-critical of that man’s vegan diet does not naturally reside within the Christian soul. To achieve the lifestyle that Jesus prescribes in his famous Sermon on the Mount, Christians must regularly ask God for help. They need it, and God promises to give it. In Matthew 7:7-8, Jesus begins the conclusion of his sermon with a reflection upon prayer, saying,

Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened.

No soul naturally loves its enemies or places its hope in God as opposed to riches and bank accounts. Were faith our natural condition, Jesus would not have had to recast the vision for the kingdom for us. Even those souls that have entered the narrow gate still cannot achieve the kingdom ethic in their own power. To overcome temptation and to develop a love for God and neighbor, the Christian must regularly and faithfully pray to Jesus who promises to give them what they ask for. 

Why We Don’t Pray

I suspect many Christians succumb to temptation and make peace with sin because they fail to grasp their persistent need to pray. Just as some people nominally concerned about their health diet for a day or two and then quit after seeing no meaningful results, many Christians pray for a day or two and then quit. They pray that God would give them a love for their coworker. But then Monday rolls around, their coworker makes another off-colored remark, and the hate of last week boils back up. They assume prayer failed and that God is at peace with their irritable nature. It is just who they are. They will call again if someone gets cancer or if a hurricane is headed their way. Otherwise, they are good.

Keep Praying

Essentially, they stop asking, they stop knocking, they stop seeking. Understandably the change they desire never comes. Yet, the fault lies not with little tried tool of prayer but with the practitioner of the prayer. Godly prayer requires perseverance. As the German Reformer Martin Luther noted,

“Since your need goes on knocking, therefore, you go right on knocking, too, and do not relent.”

Jesus clarifies the connection between perseverance and prayer in Luke 11: 5-8. In this passage that heavily resembles Matthew 7, Jesus tells the parable of a man who bangs on his friend’s door at midnight because another friend just popped in to spend the night. At first, the friend in bed tells the man to go away.  But the man keeps on knocking. Fearing the man will wake up the entire house (kids and all) the friend gets up and gives the man some food. Jesus says, “Because of his impudence, he will rise and him whatever he needs (8).”

The point of the parable is obvious. The soul that keeps on knocking will never leave empty handed. As Jesus says, “For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened (Mt 7:8). The teenager who longs for sexual purity will get it through fervent prayer. The tired wife that bangs on God’s door asking God to give her a love for her in-laws will receive it. The angry child that looks for freedom from her anger through prayer will find peace. Those who pray without ceasing will receive the gifts that they need.

Trust God’s Character

To drive the point home, Jesus compares his care for us to how our earthly father’s care for us. Just as children can trust earthly parents to give them bread and not rocks for dinner, Christians can ask God for their spiritual needs, trusting that he will neither manipulate them nor harm them. Jesus says, “If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him (Mt 7:11)!” Jesus does not toss out the analogy to validate human goodness. Rather, he uses it to reveal that if we can trust our earthly fathers who are capable of great evil to do some basic good things, then we should trust God even more. God will not play games with us. Even if we ask God for a stone, he will still give us bread.

Why Didn’t God Heal Susie?

That very promise from God to answer our prayer can also cause us to doubt whether or not God truly is good. Many Christians have prayed for years for a new job, for Johnny’s salvation, and for Susie to recover from cancer. Yet no one calls you for interviews, Johnny still refuses to come to church, and you just learned that Susie died. In light of God’s promise that those who seek will find, many souls cannot help but openly question: “What happened?”

But such questions arise from a profound misunderstanding of the context in which Jesus promises to honor our prayers. As John Stott noted many years earlier, the promises made in Matthew 7 relate to God’s character as Father and not as creator. As creator, God bestows the earthly gifts of family, health, and financial success upon billions of people who never pray. In Matthew 5:45, Jesus credits God with sending rain, “on the just and the unjust.” While Christians should ask God for their daily bread as their heavenly Father is the author of all good gifts, the specify delivery of good gifts cannot be guaranteed through prayer. Moreover, our repeated and earnest asking of God for something does not obligate God to give us the earthly thing asked for. For example, I longed for a red convertible as a teenager and college student. I frequently prayer for such a good gift. To date, I have never owned a red convertible. We should ask him for health and a host of other earthly but should do so with the tagline from James, “if the Lord wills (Jm 4:15).”

But as Father, God answers all the spiritual things we ask of him. Salvation comes not by osmosis nor by splashing water on people’s foreheads. It comes through asking. Paul confirms the foundational role of prayer in the saving process, writing, “For everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved (Rom 10:13).” Sanctification occurs in the same manner. Through asking, seeking, and knocking we grow in our ability to love others, to fulfill our marriage vows, and to promote peace. Spiritual gifts always come through prayer. If we will but ask, seek, and knock, God will give us the desires of our heart.

The old hymn correctly states: What a privilege to carry everything to God in prayer!

Are you praying?

Peter Witkowski Sermon on the Mount

How Should I Pray (Part 2)

Though Jesus begins the Lord’s Prayer with an overarching concern for God’s glory, he remains deeply invested in the lives of his children. Through prayer, Jesus provides us with our daily needs, grants us forgiveness, and protects us from temptation and evil. Godly prayer is not devoid of personal concerns. It is filled with them. To pray well, we must take our troubles to God, beginning with our daily needs. 

Daily Bread

Though Christians sail through this world under the presumptuous banner of self-assurance, the world proves to be anything but certain. As James the brother of Jesus notes, “you do not know what tomorrow will bring (Jm 4:14).” The prayer for one’s daily bread captures this reality. Jesus’s original audience depended upon the daily production of bread which could be interrupted by floods, droughts, and bandits. They had ample reason to take their concerns about lunch to heaven’s throne.

Though we have pantries filled with five different kinds of bread and a few boxes of Lucky Charms, the fragileness of life remains. For example, the very technologies that make food so readily available such as gas-engines can be the source of our downfall as car crashes make clear. Moreover, finances can quickly crumble, jobs can disappear, and college plans can disintegrate overnight. Despite our perceptions of self-sufficiency, we cannot determine the destiny of our life. We cannot even guarantee that we will be on earth tomorrow much less five years from now.

Because our lives our fragile, Jesus tells us to take our needs to him. The wise soul will ask God for her daily bread for, “Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change (Jm. 1:17).”. We should pray to God for our daily needs.

When we experience loneliness, we should pray for friends. When our bank account runs low, we should pray for the means to pay our electric bills. And when we need a new home to care for our family, we pray for the extra bedroom. We do not pray for the imaginary needs of next year. But we are to pray for the needs of today regardless of their size or importance. God cares for us and delights in providing us with good gifts.

Forgive us Our Debts

He also tells us to daily ask for our debts to be forgiven because he cares about our spiritual well-being. Though some branches of Christianity teach that Christians can achieve perfection this side of heaven, Jesus prepares us for the opposite reality. He teaches us to regularly pray for forgiveness because perfection comes only once we reach heaven and not before. According to Jesus, our spiritual life is fraught with peril and struggles. Instead of being surprised by our need to repent of the evil with have done today, we should make repentance a regular part of our prayer life.

Though the asking of forgiveness proves important, the Christian must also know that he has received forgiveness to rest easy at night. To experience the assurance of salvation, Christian’s must grant their enemies forgiveness. Jesus notes, “forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven others (Mt 6:11).” Jesus makes our forgiveness contingent upon our ability to forgive others not because Jesus wants us to earn our salvation. Rather, he is teaching us that all who have been forgiven will in-turn extend forgiveness to others. We ask for help to forgive others because this is the gracious work of the Holy Spirit in our lives. Those who can forgive have been forgiven. In other words, Jesus longs for his followers to rest in the knowledge that they have been forgiven.

Deliver us From Evil

Lastly, Jesus tells us to pray for deliverance from temptation and evil. Though we fashion ourselves as the devil’s equal, we are not. Satan is the lion, and we are the gazelles. If we hope to survive in the open, we must appeal to God for help, dwelling in the shadow of the all mighty.

When we ask God to lead us away from temptation, we are not insinuating that God tempts us. The Scriptures flatly deny this idea stating, “Let no one say when he is tempted, “I am being tempted by God,” for God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempts no one (Jm. 1:13).” Though God places us in situations that test the character of our faith, he never desires us to sin or to respond to our circumstances with anger. God may ordain that we get cancer, but he does not tempt us to respond to that diagnosis with a tirade of expletives. The temptation towards those thoughts of hate come from our flesh, the world, and even Satan. However, the ability to resists those urges towards sin come from the Lord. God promises to make a away of escape for those who ask. Those who struggle with alcohol, pornography, coveting clothes, or being lazy should ask God for help. Often we struggle with sins and are consumed by evil because we refuse to pray. We like the apostle Peter trust in our devotion and will power.  We promise that we will never let God down and wisely manage our money. Though everyone else my go into credit card debt at Christmas, I will not. We do everything but pray. Then the shoes we always wanted, the car we needed, or the dream vacation pops up within reach, and we buy it. The next morning, we awake to a world of debt and regrets. Like Peter, we fall because of our pride. To steer clear of sin, we must get on our knees.

Final Thoughts

Though we assume our heavenly Father is like some of those T.V. Dad’s who simply nod along without any awareness of the situation, Jesus presents his heavenly Father in a different light. According to Jesus, God is deeply interested in our well-being. He tells us to take our material and spiritual concerns to him in prayer. Through prayer, we find relief from the troubles of this world and the doubts and sins that plague our lives. Jesus is never too busy for our prayers. We should never be too busy to pray. When we bump into daily needs, questions of forgiveness, and to enticing temptations we heed the old hymn and “take it to the Lord in prayer.”