When I Pray, What Does God Do?

David Wilkinson

• Publisher: Monarch Books
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780857216045
• eBook ISBN: 9780857216052
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Rituals & Practice

The question of how, and whether, God answers prayer has been intellectually shaped by the rise of science, the problem of evil and the nature of the biblical records.

Scientist and theologian David Wilkinson shares his own struggles with the question of how God answers prayer. Science does not rule out God acting in the universe in surprising ways; the Bible shows a God who acts in the world in response to people's prayers. Yet there is always a mystery about the nature and outcome of prayer, not least in the experience of unanswered prayer.

The author shares his struggles with praying in the midst of his wife's long-term illness. What we believe affects how we pray. God is neither a slot machine, nor an indulgent parent, nor a divine dictator, nor a ruler in absentia.

Questions covered include:

How does God work in a world of science?

Why doesn't He answer more often?

Has God acted in history?

How did Jesus pray?

How, in a world governed by law and grace, should we pray?

CHAPTER 1

My Problems with Prayer

The great twentieth-century preacher Martyn Lloyd-Jones once commented, “Everything we do in the Christian life is easier than prayer.” I remember when I first heard this quote and wondering whether I really agreed with it. Is prayer harder than delivering Christian Aid envelopes to a house which has a notice above the letterbox saying “no religious people welcome”, accompanied by the sound of a dog whose bark can only come from a hound from hell? Or is prayer harder than a church council meeting where half an hour has been wasted on an argument on the colour of the new mugs for the church hall? Or is prayer harder than trying to understand – and then preach – a sermon on the Trinitarian nature of God?

Surely prayer is one of the easiest parts of the Christian life. It can be done alone, at my own time, in my own space, and after all it is simply a quiet chat with God. Sharing my faith with other people makes me vulnerable to being mocked as a member of the “God-squad”. Living as part of a Christian community has its struggles as well as its joys, meaning that I need to love the person whose musical tastes are very different to mine and whose politics will never be even close to mine. Surely, compared to these things, prayer is the simple part of the Christian life.

I used to believe that prayer was easy, although it did strike me that if it was that easy, then why did I not pray more? The problem with prayer, I concluded, was that I simply had not found the right form that suited me. And the history of my prayer life has therefore resembled a Google-like super-spiritual search of different ways of praying. I have tried praying kneeling, standing, sitting, walking, lying down, and crouched in that nonconformist way that everyone in a nonconformist church conforms to. I have prayed with my arms in the air, but with some uncertainty – due to what seems to me to be a change between charismatic generations – about whether I should have my palms up or down! Otherwise, I have prayed with my hands clasped together, with prayer beads and crosses in my hands, and with my arms relaxed and open because someone told me that this welcomes the Holy Spirit. I have prayed for other people with my hands hovering over them just as the charismatic leader John Wimber used to do – until I discovered that there was nothing mystical in this, but simply that Wimber used to pray for folk in a building that was stiflingly hot and had no air conditioning. The hovering laying on of hands was simply to stop it becoming a very sweaty form of ministry. I have prayed with a loud voice and prayed in silence. I have used prayers and liturgies from Christian tradition, prayed in tongues, and used hymns and songs as a form of prayer. I have prayed in prayer meetings, cathedrals, in a small hole in the side of a mountain, on high streets and in convents, and prayed aloud at the same time as 10,000 other people. I have used a prayer journal, prayer cards, prayer letters, and web resources. I have tried praying in the morning, lunchtime, dinnertime, and last thing at night.

All of these forms have been useful – apart from, that is, praying early in the morning! I am the type of person who simply doesn’t understand why the Lord created mornings. I am sure that in the Garden of Eden the day started with mid-morning coffee and early mornings are surely the result of the fall!

Nevertheless, for all the diverse exploration of the forms of prayer, I am left with the reality that Lloyd-Jones was right and I actually do find prayer the hardest thing in the Christian life. Why should that be? Perhaps it is to do not with how I pray but why I pray and, further, the way that I think about how God answers prayers.

Lightning bolts and bishops

Over thirty years ago, in 1984, I was a student at Durham University. I had become a Christian three years previously and, having just completed a physics degree, was about to embark on research in theoretical astrophysics. It was also the time of press interest in the then Bishop of Durham David Jenkins. Controversy had surrounded his questioning of the traditional interpretations of the virgin birth and the resurrection, with the often misquoted remark linking Bishop David to saying that the resurrection is “a conjuring trick with bones”. In fact, the actual quote is a little more difficult to track down, and it is clear that he was trying to say that the resurrection was not just a conjuring trick with bones.

The media were further interested in that three days after the bishop’s consecration at York Minster, the building was hit by lightning. The subsequent fire in the thirteenth-century south transept left its roof destroyed. Papers picked this up and likened it to the bolt of fire in the story of Elijah and the prophets of Baal. It raised the question of whether this was an act of God’s judgment on a bishop with unorthodox views, and indeed whether in a world of modern science we could believe in a God who could work in this kind of way. Bishop David followed all of this up by speaking of how he could not believe in a “laser beam” God who responded to particular prayers by specific acts in the world, picking out one situation to change but leaving so many others.

While having very different views on the virgin birth and resurrection of Jesus, I nevertheless had a great deal of sympathy for the bishop. First of all, I do not think that the fire in York was a sign of God’s judgment. I can think of more telling ways if judgment did have to be exercised! Second, Bishop David was attempting to communicate Christian faith in a world often dominated by science. He was an evangelist and a pastor as well as a theologian, and he felt by talking about how traditional belief could be reinterpreted, it would be more accessible to the vast majority of the British public who had rejected faith. He was courageous in publicly stating some of the issues that we all encounter if we want to believe in the existence and power of a God who invites us to pray and then is prepared to answer that prayer.

However, as a young research student it seemed to me that there was a problem in Bishop David’s view of science and his view of the Bible. It seemed to me that they were both outdated and somewhat simplistic, and yet I understood completely where they came from.

The predictable world of science

While Bishop David was attempting to find a way to hold together science and Christian belief as a bishop in the public sphere, I was doing exactly the same but privately and as a young research student in astrophysics. This had its own struggles and joys. Science is a messy activity, a long way from school physics where if you do not know the shape of the graph that comes from your experimental data, you simply borrow the book of a person in the year above you who did the same experiment twelve months ago. The struggle for me was trying to make sense of a seemingly mysterious universe, with a limited amount of experimental data, while collaborating with students and staff and also competing against other groups that wanted to get there first. Yet, the joy of science was that it disclosed a universe with beautiful, elegant, and universal laws which applied equally to me dropping a glass and to matter falling into a black hole.

The question was whether in such a universe God had any room at all to answer prayer? It was a question that people often posed to me when they knew I was a scientist. Did I believe that God could intervene in a universe that was governed by the laws of science?

This is not a new question. It goes right back to the scientific revolution, which was in some significant way based on Christian theology and proved both fruitful and challenging for Christian belief. A faithful God, who created the universe freely and yet with a constant commitment to sustaining it, provided the seedbed for the growth of what we know as science. Of course, science stemmed from the Greeks, with notable contributions from Chinese and Muslim thinkers, but the belief in universal and reliable laws which could be discovered by observation was provided by the Christian doctrine of creation. Christians believed that if God was free to create as he wanted, not constrained by human logic, then the only way to see what he had done was to look at the universe. And if God was faithful, our observations would have regularities or patterns to them – that is, the laws of physics. This scientific revolution led to such triumphs as Newton’s law of gravitation, which, when coupled with Kepler’s elliptical orbits, explains beautifully the movement of the planets around the sun. Such regular and predictable laws of nature could be visualized not only through simple mathematical equations but also in models which represented these motions as a clockwork mechanism. Thus, from the eighteenth century onwards, you could obtain an orrery, a clockwork mechanical model of the solar system that shows the relative positions and motions of the planets (and moons), in their orbits around the sun.

Thus, with a knowledge of the laws of physics and the present position of things, you could tell what had gone on in the past and what was to happen in the future. Edmond Halley’s prediction of the arrival of the comet which now bears his name was evidence of how powerful this method was.

The beauty, regularity, and simplicity of the scientific laws were seen as reflections of the order and faithfulness of the creator God. Christian thinkers built on this to try to use the laws to demonstrate the existence of a divine creator. But this in itself led to problems. If everything could be explained by scientific laws, where was there space for God to do anything unusual? If God was a perfect creator then surely he would have built a universe where there is no need for constant intervention in response to prayer. If, after all, I buy an expensive Rolex (in my dreams!) I do not want to be going back to the shop every day asking for it to be fixed. Prayer in this kind of picture either becomes God as the repairman constantly coming to look after faulty equipment, or God as a patronizing adult listening to a child’s endless prattling, knowing that everything has been decided already.

The predictable world of charismatic renewal

Yet while I saw the difficulty that science was presenting, I was at the same time growing as a Christian within a culture that accepted that God really did answer prayer. I had become a Christian just before going to university. While brought up in the church, faith only became real to me in the early 1980s.

I had missed the early days of charismatic renewal in the 1960s and 1970s which had sometimes split churches on questions of healing, prophecy, or speaking in tongues. In fact, I remember my interview as a prospective student at Durham, where the college senior tutor, seeing that I was a Christian, warned me against joining the Christian Union. He recounted the story of a group from the Christian Union just a few years before who had felt God had told them not to revise for final exams but to go into the exams and simply pray for the answers. The result was in no way miraculous but very predictable. While their answers were somewhat entertaining in a toe-curling embarrassing way, God apparently refused to be the ultimate exam cheat.

Nevertheless, I did join the Christian Union, feeling that I was far more mature than this previous generation of students. Indeed, most Christians of this evangelical generation found the thought that God might work in miraculous ways quite natural and normal. I did meet a few fellow students who believed that the way God worked in unusual ways in the Old Testament and New Testament was a special dispensation – that is, an unusual time for the beginnings of preaching the gospel – but was not normative for today. Yet I could never see that in the teaching of the Bible, or my experience of student groups, or the churches I attended both during and out of university term.

If a fellow Christian was ill I was very happy to pray for healing and saw some modest apparent answers to such prayer. For example, one friend with diagnosed conjunctivitis seemed to be healed during a five-minute prayer time. I remained sceptical of what I saw as excessive claims of healing but nevertheless felt that the God I read about in the pages of the Bible was ready to respond to prayer in miraculous ways today. At times, in student groups we would be encouraged to write down what requests had been made of God, and to tick them off when such prayers were answered. It is a practice that I do informally in my own prayer life right up to the present, although a friend who did this for his church prayer meeting found an increasing reluctance of people to pray aloud in the meeting!

This was also the belief far from the Christian “hothouse” of my student days. The Methodist church that I grew up in had a weekly prayer meeting, and during the vacations I was one of the six or seven people who were the regular attenders. This prayer meeting had been going a long time and was somewhat predictable in the order of who prayed and how we prayed. Most prayers were prefaced with “Lord, if it be your will”. In fact, a story was often told of a prayer meeting during the Second World War at this church where someone had prayed, “Lord, we pray for complete victory for Britain over Hitler and his armies, but Lord, if it is not your will, then please let it be a draw!” The range of subjects for prayer included those in the church who were ill, but it also regularly included prayer for peace in Northern Ireland and the ending of apartheid in South Africa. Here was always the expectation that God would answer prayer in the big issues of life and death, in our community and on the world stage.

This was the normal Christian life as far as I was concerned. I noted some of the scientific problems with this expectation that God would answer such prayers, but did not really engage with questions of how God did it. I suppose at times it was enough to hold to a view that I would later learn was called “NOMA” by Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) – that is, the non-overlapping magisteriums of science and religion. Gould, attempting to head off the battles of science and religion in US education, argued that science had its own territory and so did religion, but the two would never meet. The scientist was a scientist Monday to Saturday in the laboratory and a person of faith on a Sunday.

This was an easy option to fall into, but deep down I was not satisfied with it. It seemed to me that if I proclaimed Jesus as Lord he needed to be Lord not only of my heart but also my mind, of my Bible reading and my work as a scientist, of Sunday and of Monday morning. To live in two worlds, as a charismatic Christian believing God would answer prayer and a practising scientist believing that God was the source of the wonderful scientific laws, was not sufficient for Jesus as Lord. I needed to at least keep asking the question of how God answered prayer, even if I might never get a full and satisfying answer.

Yet there was another problem for prayer that was and is more serious than the scientific one.

The seemingly unpredictable and trivial will of God

I have heard many Christian friends speak of how God has answered prayers on issues that seem to me to be a trivial waste of God’s time: “I prayed for a parking space in the supermarket and immediately a car pulled out and I could pull straight in.” I had a friend once who crashed his car while he was praying. Fortunately no one was injured, but he still has to endure the jokes about whether he had his hands in the air or whether he had his eyes closed!

Far more serious is the question of why God chooses to answer such trivial questions rather than answer some of the more important questions. Why produce a parking space for a Christian who could probably benefit from a little walk by parking further away rather than heal the person who is going through excruciating pain?

I have prayed for the healing of others throughout my Christian life, sometimes in my own prayer life, sometimes sitting beside them, and sometimes from the front of churches. I have seen some remarkable things. Elsie was a member of a church where I was a pastor, and a colleague and I were called to her hospital bedside after a stroke and told she would not make it through the night. We prayed for God to be with her and to heal her, although fully expecting that her time in this life was now at an end. After sitting with her for some considerable time during the night we eventually left to get some rest, again expecting that we would receive a phone call the next day from the hospital and the undertakers. Next morning, when there had been no phone call, we returned to the hospital to find her sitting up in bed having lunch. Within a few weeks she was back up on her feet serving other elderly people at our weekly luncheon club. To say that the doctors and nurses were surprised was an understatement, but not as surprised as we were! Now of course it is difficult to say that this was solely an answer to prayer. The mind/brain connection as we will see in a later chapter is mysterious, and the ability for the brain to find new pathways around damaged areas is remarkable. It may have been that well-meaning hospital staff had erred on the side of caution in warning of her imminent death. Maybe she would have recovered anyway without our prayer.

If such instances of healing are puzzling, far more difficult are the occasions when I have prayed earnestly and felt full of faith, but the person has not been healed. This is especially the case when the person concerned seems so deserving or is very close to you.

When unanswered prayer is personal

My wife Alison is a brilliant Methodist minister. For twelve years she served a church just outside Durham and transformed it from an elderly and rather traditional church into a church of all ages with lots of new initiat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1 My Problems with Prayer
• Chapter 2 Everyday Myths of Prayer
• Chapter 3 What Does God Actually Do in the Bible?
• Chapter 4 Out of Date Science and the Problems with Miracles
• Chapter 5 New Science and New Possibilities
• Chapter 6 Lord, Teach Us to Pray
• Chapter 7 Praying in the Light of What God Does