***Christ's Power, Our Weakness, and Prayer.

by Paul Grant

What possible good does it do for us to pray for God to change the world, when it seems he won't even answer that prayer in our own lives? I'm not asking for an apologetic here - this is a question to which I know the theological answer. The question is deeper than doctrine. It is a question of the character of God. I used to take offense at Nietzsche's comment regarding the inhumanity of Christianity; no longer. Because the more I understand Jesus and the Holy spirit, the more counterintuitive I find the story at the very center of the Gospel.

Perhaps the greatest mystery of the Gospel is the Upside-Downness of it all. In Jesus’ good news, the weak become strong. Or, as Jesus’ mother put it, God has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty. God’s reign is all about inversion of power. Jesus was at his greatest when he was dying as a contemptible criminal. At that same instant, Satan’s greatest triumph turned out to be his greatest failure.

Yet it is wrong for us to read the gospel as a revolutionary message, just as it was wrong for the disciples to expect Jesus to knock down the Roman Empire. Don’t you understand, Peter, Jesus asked, the reason I am not destroying Rome is because I am destroying something immeasurably bigger: Satan’s rule over the world; and Satan’s claim on your souls. The Holy Spirit, not a defeated Caesar, is the witness of my power.

Unfortunately for impatient people like me, who’d rather have joined Peter in smashing imperialism, the Holy Spirit is exceedingly patient. In fact, the Holy Spirit’s response to social injustice is prayer. But this posture – turning to prayer before turning to arms – is not namby-pamby impotence. No “in the by-and-by all things will be made right, so for the time being, slaves obey your masters” is contained in prayer for God’s kingdom to come. Rather, the prayer posture is firmly grounded in reality. And a realistic vision of the world acknowledges weak human beings’ finiteness, relative to an infinite, activist God.

Our God is also a God who promises amazing things about the power of prayer. The saints of the civil rights movement were entirely dedicated to prayer, even as they marched. Indeed, they couldn’t have marched except by the power of prayer. Prayer is no surrender to the world, but an act of absolute sedition. And while God does not always answer our prayers, he invariably changes our perspective on the world. He shows us a little bit of his upside-down power when we pray.In prayer our vision becomes clear, so that at the moment of greatest injustice our sanity remains solid, while the oppressor, mentally shackled to fleeting power, loses his mind and confuses the here-and-now with the limitless. When we pray, God changes the world, and he usually starts with our hearts and minds. When we pray, even amid stultifying injustice, God demonstrates greater power yet by giving us our right minds.

Schism and Repentance

The reason prayer is confusing to us is twofold. First, prayer is counterintuitive to humans. We value power we can see with our eyes and feel with our hands. We don’t like being told to change our perspective, especially when people are dying.

The second reason for our confusion over prayer is historical, and particular to Evangelical Christianity. Approximately one hundred years ago, a devastating argument rent the American church in two. To oversimplify the events, on the one side stood those who emphasized ministry in society as the work of the church, the "social gospel" as it was called. In reaction, evangelicals put exclusive emphasis on "saving souls".

Ultimately, there came into being two camps, who defined themselves relative to each other, instead of learning from each other. This is because the good news of Jesus Christ is both an eternal, spiritual message, as well as a message of hope and transformation for the here and now.

The evangelical camp was wrong in reducing the power of the gospel to a disembodied numinous wind, with no more call to change the world than to sacrifice to idols. How much evil was tolerated because we evangelicals failed to intercede against it? We need to repent. Repentance means more than saying sorry; it means changing course. As evangelicals we need to repent of our otherworldliness and get on our knees and intercede for God’s mercy in the immediate evils of our day.

On the other hand, the social-gospel camp was fatally flawed by its neglect of God’s power in prayer for changing the world. With a focus on good works in a suffering world, absent God’s leadership, the social-gospel people became tumbleweeds blown this way and that across the social landscape. Subject to pop psychology and fashionable causes, they grew decreasingly relevant by trying to become more relevant. And today this camp, having left God out of the equation, is in a deeper hole than the evangelicals, and will need a lot of help getting unstuck.

Many American Christians have a lot of catching up to do in our understanding of scripture. We learned a broken gospel from earliest childhood: a gospel that talks of being "washed in the blood of Christ” without obligation to Christ’s call to justice. Our disobedience has bitter consequences when we allow injustice to continue unchecked in our society and in our world and in our local churches.

God commands us to tear down injustice, but to do it on our knees. A mature understanding of injustice sees the big picture, and seeing the big picture invariably makes us turn to the heavens in prayer.

Somewhere in here the miraculous happens: he sends us to do the very same work we were just despairing of ever being done. If we were previously ready to turn over the money-changers’ tables, only to be prompted to patient prayer by the Holy Spirit, sometimes that same Holy Spirit will move us to clear out the temple, just as we were going to beforehand.

But something is now different. This time our minds have been sharpened with the eternal perspective of the Holy Spirit. Our actions have more power in the banal here-and-now, because of our spiritual surrender. Even if the Holy Spirit leads us into the exact same fray he called us away from mere moments or days earlier, we won’t go insane with the crush of human passion. Our sanity will be grounded in greater passion – God’s – and less human passion. We will feel more deeply about the injustice, and find ourselves much less helpless than before.

And if, in prayer, God tells us not to get up and march, we can rest assured that God remains as in control of the circumstances as he does over the very fabric of space and time: God is God. If in prayer he tells us to remain in prayer, asking for his kindgom to come, we can understand that he is honoring us, not humiliating us.

As this election season ebbs, turn to the creator of the world and cry out for his justice to come down, and then watch as he disburdens you of delusion and emboldens you to proclaim God’s kingdom into a world of petty kings and foolish lords and would-be lords.