The Prayer You Will Not Pray

You have prayed a great many things in nineteen years.

You have prayed about your work and your parents and a friend's marriage and, for about four years running, one thing you never got and have made a kind of peace about.

There is one prayer you have never prayed.

You know exactly what it is. It is about six words long and it is the most ordinary prayer in the Christian faith, and small children pray it in church halls without giving it a thought, and you have never once said it.

Make me holy. Have all of me. Whatever it costs.

Something like that. The wording moves about but the shape does not.

And you have got right up to the edge of it perhaps four times in nineteen years, twice at conferences and once in a hospital corridor and once, unexpectedly, doing the washing up.

And every time there is a small sharp movement that arrives before any thinking happens, and the movement says: He would take the one thing.

You have never named the one thing, even to yourself, but you know which one it is. It arrived in your mind at the same instant as the fear, both times, all four times.

Nineteen years of a six word prayer left unsaid.

John explains what your fear is actually made of

There is a verse in the same letter as God is love, and it does something diagnostic, and it is unusually direct about the mechanism.

There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment. He that feareth is not made perfect in love.1 John 4:18

Fear hath torment.

That is the diagnosis. He does not say fear is a sin, and he does not tell anybody to stop being afraid, which is an instruction nobody has ever been able to obey. He says fear contains torment, and that love is what removes it, and the removing is done by the love and not by the frightened person.

Now put that against a movement that arrives before thinking.

What you have been calling caution is fear, and what fear does, according to that verse, is torment, and you have been tormented at the edge of that prayer four times in nineteen years.

So take this now, at the edge of it again. You are not being asked to be less afraid. The written word puts the casting out in the hands of love and never in the hands of the one who is afraid, and the Holy Spirit is the one who pours that love in.

The picture behind the fear is not a picture of God

Now let me look at the fear itself, because it has a shape and the shape is worth naming out loud.

You believe that if you pray that prayer, He will take the one thing.

Sit with what that says about the God in the picture. It says He is a God who is waiting for permission. That He wants the thing you love most. That the whole point of the transaction is subtraction, and that holiness is essentially a process of removal in which a person ends up with less.

That is not a picture of the Father. That is closer to a picture of somebody in your history, and I am not going to guess who, and it may not be a person at all, it may be a season.

But notice how far it is from the record. The written word does not have a God who takes what people love in exchange for holiness. It has a God who gives the thing nobody could manufacture, to people who came in with nothing, as a gift.

You are loved by the one you would be praying to. His word says perfect love casts fear out, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is at work in that, and the God in your fear is not the God the prayer would be addressed to.

The plain hall and the promise as it was actually made

In 1895 a man named Phineas Bresee opened a hall near the middle of Los Angeles and made a rule that not one seat could be rented, and the doctrine that room existed to preach is the doctrine underneath your unsaid prayer.

And the whole promise, as it was announced in that hall, was a giving and not a taking.

It was announced to people who had almost nothing to begin with, which is worth pausing on, because a message about God taking your dearest possession is not good news in a room full of people who have already lost most of theirs.

What was preached there was that God does the thing you cannot do, in you, at His own cost, as a present.

Whatever the word has come to mean in some quarters since, and something did happen to it, that is what it meant in the founding room.

The written word puts perfect love in the position of the thing that casts fear out, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries it into a person.