On praying for guidance

The following was in response to a comment over at All Things Beautiful.

Jess,

The thing is, it's a huge subject, and it's all tied in with the virtues of wisdom and prudence. It also goes to NxN's point about God helping those who help themselves

Just some very brief bullet points, off the top of my head and in no coherent order:

1. God created us for intimacy with Him and prayer is the conversation that we have with our Lover.

2. No matter how smart you are, there are situations where if you're missing some critical piece of information, you'll make the wrong decision. In fact, the smarter you are, the more certain it becomes that you'll make the wrong decision, because the information you have available is fundamentally misleading. ...continue reading...

3. God has all the information, including the parts we don't have. This is particularly true when it comes to the future.

4. From time to time God does the same thing every parent does (and I speak as a father of eight): He tells us, "Look, I know you don't understand why I'm telling you to do this, but just trust me on this one. You'll understand later."

5. Wisdom and prudence are absolutely moral virtues that Christians are expected to practice. We are supposed to love the Lord our God with all our mind as well as with all our heart. So you do your very best to make good decisions...but you always need to be praying for guidance so that God can have the option of saying, "Listen, I know something you don't know, and this is what you need to do even though it looks crazy." But without specific and clear instructions from God to the contrary, you have the responsibility to act wisely and prudently based on the information available to you. This is hard work, but then Christianity is not for lazy people. I might add that this is the ordinary mode in which God asks Christians to live (situations in which He says, "I want you do something that seems senseless," are relatively infrequent), and so while this is the only situation in which "God helps those who help themselves," applies, it is the situation in which most of us usually find ourselves. Hence that proverb is generally valid, even though God is always free to step in and say, "Step back and watch Me work on this one."

6. When you think God is telling you to do something apparently insane, you need to make sure it's not somebody else pretending to be God, and that means you have to go to other godly people and ask them to pray for confirmation that you're hearing God properly. That's a necessary control on the prayer for guidance.

7. If somebody tells you that they believe God is telling them to do something, and you proceed to lay out all the logical reasons that God can't really be telling them to do that because it's stupid, then you need to go back and think about point #2 until it sinks in properly. If the right decision could always be figured out logically based on the available evidence, there would be no need for the gift of discernment. The help they need from you is, they need you to pray and ask God, "Are they hearing you properly?" In which case you will either hear, "Yes, they are," or, "No, they're not," or no answer. And you tell the other person what you got in your prayers.

8. The gift of discernment is, among other things, the ability to hear God clearly. If you think God is telling you to do something that doesn't make sense, then you don't want to go get help from a smart person (like me) -- you want to go get help from a person with the gift of discernment (like my wife). That means you need to know which of your friends is so gifted and which aren't. Start paying attention now, so that when the time comes and you need this sort of help, you'll know whom to go to.

9. The most important decisions, and the most rewarding decisions, that I have ever made in my life, were decisions that made no logical sense at the time and that my wife and I took because we were clearly told to do so in prayer. Faith never really gets stretched and nurtured until God calls you to take a step out into the unpredictable and the unimaginable, and you obey, and worlds you could never have imagined open up to your astonished eyes. But there have been very few such decisions that God has called us to make; the overwhelming majority of day-to-day decisions are opportunities for the exercise of wisdom and prudence rather than of dramatic faith. And you can't force God to do a miracle in your life just because you want to get on with it or you feel like your life is boring and could use some more drama or whatever: you do your job and you act wisely and prudently until He decides that it's time to leave the comfort zone. (Trying to force God to take dramatic action in order to liven things up is one of the besetting sins of Pentecostalism, just as insisting that God would never take any action that couldn't be rationalized beforehand in a vestry meeting composed entirely of hard-headed calculator-equipped businessmen, is one of the many besetting sins of traditional Episcopalianism.)

10. The prayer for guidance needs to be part of a complete and healthy prayer life that includes praise and worship and intercession and oblation.

11. Evangelicals especially need to understand this last part: lots of times, if you ask God, "Which of these three options do You want me to take?" His answer will be, "I'd be happy with any of them -- pick whichever one you want."

One other point. There's a trick question you can ask any group of randomly selected Christians, that runs like this: "Jesus said the harvest is plentiful but the laborers are few. So what did He say we should do about it?"

The answer you will generally get is, "Get out there and go to work." But that is not the right answer. The correct answer is, "Pray that the Lord of the harvest will send laborers."

What this means, I firmly believe, is that every Christian has to grasp that just because something needs to be done, that doesn't mean you're the one who needs to do it. "Unless the Lord builds the house, they labor in vain who build it." The single most important key to successful ministry is to make sure you know what your assignment is, and do that. And you can't really know what is your assignment, your vocation, without much prayer for guidance. Of course when you're praying that the Lord will send laborers, you have to be prepared to hear Him say, "Fine, I think I will -- get your butt out there and get to work." And if that's what He says, then you'd better hustle on out there and get to work. But...and this is a very difficult thing for many Christians to accept...God doesn't just need people who are willing to work. He also needs people who are willing to be told not to work. Every church needs people who are willing to step up and take on important roles...but they also need to be willing to let somebody else do those roles. That's because the important thing isn't to get the best person for the job; it's to get the person God has assigned to the job. And it's hard to get that right if you aren't listening to God in the first place.

So I think I'll close this disorganized and rambling comment with Milton's sonnet "On His Blindness":

When I consider how my light is spent,
Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,
And that one talent which is death to hide,
Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent

To serve therewith my maker, and present
My true account, lest he returning chide,
"Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?"
I fondly ask; but Patience to prevent

That murmur, soon replies, "God doth not need
Either man's work or His own gifts; who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed
And post o'er land and ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and wait."