All right, here's one for you. If there is a God who is powerful enough to call existence out of non-existence, who is unlimited enough to know everything, never grew, never changed, never evolved, already had everything down, never got surprised by anything, knew every decision that was coming, every little wrinkle in the universe, the cosmos that he made. If there was such a God, and there was such a God that was also interested in how the world unfolds, also engaged in how the world was unfolding, and also interested in you, how you're doing, what's going on, how things shake out for you. And all of those things are what the Bible holds out the God of the Bible as being. If such a God exists, why do we ask him for stuff? Why would you go to a God like that and be like, hey, I need this thing, or I could really use traveling mercies, or my friend is sick and be with my friend. I mean, those are all very reasonable things to have concerns about and to want to go to the deity, the God of the universe about. I mean, we get told later on in the New Testament that you can approach the throne of grace, of mercy with confidence that this relationship has been opened up. I mean, that's what Jesus is driving at here in the Sermon on the Mount, is that there's there's some sort of accessibility with him where you you really can go and do this. But if God already knows what's going to happen with all of the things, and God isn't your performing idiot, that if you just say the right insurance code word, he then begrudgingly has to do whatever you said. If God is so powerful that we can't interpret the verse that says, wherever two or more are gathered together in my name in Matthew 18, as meaning that if you just get two people to agree together, then God just has to do whatever you say. Like if we acknowledge that empirically and rationally and biblically, God doesn't have to do anything anyone prays for, then why ask it all? He's immutable, he's not changing. I guess we could look at the passage where it looks like maybe God is negotiating about the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah. That maybe that would be a case that somebody could make to be like, no, no, no, you can change his mind. But was God's mind really being changed there? I mean, if that really was a negotiation and he really was changing his mind as it went along, then that changes a lot of the assumptions that the rest of the Bible has about God. Well, it looks more like that was somehow for the benefit of the human conversation partner uh in that particular discussion. I I don't know. My youth pastor did this. He would ask hard things and then just solve it real quick. It might feel like I'm doing that trick with you right now, but I think I'm almost more kind of just asking, like, really, how does this work? And if the point of prayer, as you and I have both been told repeatedly, is to get God to do things, then shouldn't he just do them? I mean, wouldn't he already know before you ask what you need or what needs to happen? Well, it really comes down to two things, I think. And these are the two, what do you want to call them, simulations that I have to run in my brain. And one I ran for the first big chunk of my life, and one I'm still working through now. Maybe you can help me with this. I'm interested in your thoughts. The one simulation that I ran early on was the one I did learn in youth group as a kid, and that was Jesus loves you very much. Like, oh yeah, okay, adult me still totally agrees with that. And God is interested in the lives of people. Okay, yeah, I still believe that. And God wants us to pray to him. Uh, yep, that seems legit. I mean, right here in Matthew 6, it says, and when you pray, so I mean, he assumes that prayer is going to happen. And if a person loves God, like if they loved anybody, right? You want to talk to that person or that being. And so uh, you know, there's going to be some kind of conversation going on here. So, okay, I assent to all of that. But the tricky part then is, why didn't I get all the things that I prayed for? And unfortunately, the youth group answer that I got was, well, you didn't get it because there's some kind of sin in your life. And then I'd be like, oh, well, I better stop that, because if I just get this sin out of my life, then that's like saying the proper insurance code word. And then Jesus has to do it. So I will stop doing that thing. I will stop thinking that thing. I will stop saying those things. And then when I have done that, now I should get my stuff, right? And so, okay, God, like I really need this and I want it to be like that. But it just never happened. It it didn't work most of the stuff I prayed for. It just didn't work. And you know what? I'm gonna shoot straight with you. I don't think it was because of sin in my life, because I was a pretty good kid. Partly because I was selfishly trying to get things out of God and I was told that that would work, and it just didn't work. And yes, I prayed to be six feet tall, and no, that did not pan out. So you got that mindset, but I think one of the weaknesses of that mindset, and again, tell me if I'm wrong, is that the main character of that prayer relationship, then, would be me. I need stuff, my happiness, my comfort, my desires, even my my noble intentions are the point of my interaction with God here. And if he's not doing it, uh, maybe there's something that I'm doing wrong or screwy and I need to get that addressed, which then really centers the whole thing about a relationship with this eternal God on my behavior or my mindset or my list of beliefs that I assent to. Maybe I thought the wrong thing. And if I think the right thing now, maybe I'll get it. And really, that doesn't sound that different from the stuff that I got told when I was in like third grade by the crazy occult neighbor, sixth grade girl who took an odd interest in me, and she was like, Here are things you can say into a mirror at exactly midnight on Halloween night, and then this crazy, like dangerous devil occult thing happens. I did not try that. I don't think the devil occult thing probably would have happened. I don't think my mirror would have bled, but it's sort of the same formula, just in a dark way. It's about you. Here's how to harness power. And I think part of the reason my faith sort of broke as an adult, not sort of, it broke. I didn't think there was a God anymore for a good chunk of time, was because of that equation and really the question of prayer. Why doesn't God do the stuff I want God to do? Well, and then there's this other version that says, okay, what does prayer look like if you aren't the point? Why would you pray if God is the point? Why would you pray if you believe that God already knows how everything's gonna play out, whether that's determined or whether we pick, I don't know, one way or another. God knows how that stuff is gonna play out, or he's he's not a deity. So why would you pray if that's the situation? Well, and that creates some confusion as well. So should I just not ask for anything? Should I not bring stuff that's kind of eaten at me or that I'm really concerned about for a friend to God? What do I do? And that, frankly, created another adult faith crisis. So that like the two competing versions of why to pray, the one that I got as a kid, and then the one that I got as I got toward like seminary and grown-upness, both of them really do come with some difficult questions. Well, the second one, which I really do think has a whole lot more validity and fits better with the passage we've been looking at, points toward the idea that God is sovereign, God is in charge, God will do the things that God wants to do. That's definitional, it's built into who he is. And therefore, unlike version one of prayer, which is really about adjusting God's expectations or his decisions to the things that I would like, this other version would seem to be around the idea of, I guess, adjusting my mental state of mind, my set of priorities, my wants to the things of God. And yet the text still clearly advocates for praying for people, for bringing concerns to God, all of this kind of stuff. But even though a lot of those occasions for prayer might have to do with me and stuff I care about and people that I care about, there's still this brilliant line that Jesus just drops in at the end of this little passage on prayer that changes up the whole thing. Don't be like them, the people who pray all weird and with compromised motives and styles. For your father knows what you need before you ask him. Whoa. It feels like what Jesus just did here is with one simple phrase, he detonates all the expectations about prayer as uh a way to get stuff out of God and flips it around to the idea of God as provider. Now, this is an old testament concept. There's even a name of God attached to the idea of God as provider or God will provide. And you know, and you can see this connected all the way back to the story of Abraham and Isaac, and like, oh, there's got to be a sacrifice here. What are we gonna do? God will provide. So this aspect of God, this character of God, is a really easy one to forget because I mean we live in a world with money and stuff and needs and timelines and urgency, and it feels like I do things and I provide. Jesus here seems to be saying that ultimately it is a sovereign God who's surprised by nothing, sovereign over everything who provides, even if you don't see it or you don't connect the dots on how that's happening. That is a very difficult Bible faith concept for me. And I know a lot of you are just nodding and you're like, yeah, obviously that's how it all works. Why is this hard for you? I don't know, because you're better at this part of faith than me. That would clearly be why. But on the flip side of that, there is something really encouraging about this idea that there is this ultimate mind that is fully aware, totally dialed on all the stuff, completely aware of all of the situations. And if that ultimate mind doesn't act in response to an urgent thing that I bring to him, it might be really troubling to me, it might be really frustrating or confusing to me. But at its core, that would mean that the ultimate mind, who knows how all the things play out, was like, no, that's how all the things needed to play out. Yeah, I'm going Doctor Strange next. You probably saw it coming. Get ready. Remember how the deal worked with Doctor Strange and the last two movies of the Avengers? If you haven't watched them yet, you might want to tune out right now and come back in one minute. Remember? He's like, Tony, I just ran all the simulations of all the simulations that could ever be run about the entire way that anything could ever play out. And there was one bizarre way that this unfolds and it works. And because he did that, as I walked out of the theater after that very tragic ending of Infinity War, I was like, Yeah, but Doctor Strange saw all the things, and then he went and behaved the way he behaved. Which means that what seemed like a really big deal and things that just can't happen, you just can't do that, to me, did not seem that way to the one who had run all the simulations and seen everything. And then as everything turns out, you're like, oh yeah, he saw that one permutation of reality that made sense where stuff works out and he was able to negotiate things that way. I'm not saying that Doctor Strange is God, that means it's a comic book, what did the analogy breaks down? Fine, whatever. What I am saying is that all the much more so, if there's a God whose mind is the perfect ultimate supercomputer and it can run all the simulations at the same moment in time and sees all possible outcomes and has picked a set of possible outcomes, it means that even if I feel very frantic about stuff and like this is not the way it should go, it should go this other way, no matter how dark that moment is, there's some reassurance in saying, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, your father knows what you need before you ask him. Your father can hold up the one finger and say, no, no, no, there's one way this works out, and I've got it. And if you believe there is a sovereign over existence and history, then I got it. And I might not like that because it's not really about me and it might mean inconvenience or pain for me or things I don't like, but I think that view of prayer holds up. If we start our thought about prayer, not from the perspective of what do I need and what can I get out of God, but from the perspective of the infinite nature of God and the consequences of that infinite mind and that infinite power, I think it can't help but change the equation, even if I don't totally get the equation. There's meant to be this calm, cool assurance that comes from that style of relationship that is intoned in verse eight. And I think the wrong way to read this passage, and yep, I'm just gonna fire this shot across the bow, is to be like, okay, he eliminated three dumb things that you shouldn't do to get stuff out of God, which means here's three better things to do to get stuff out of God. No, I think he's saying wrong question. Here is the proper orientation. God is king, God is provider, God is in charge, you are a subject in the kingdom, and what does a subject in a kingdom do? He submits to the will of the king and participates in the agenda and the mission of the king. And that is what we're going to see next when we get into perhaps the most famous words of Jesus in the entire Bible, all of history, in the Lord's Prayer. Yep, prayer is confusing and weird. Yep, anytime there's an interaction between finite beings like us and an infinite being, there should be friction. If there were no friction, this would smack to me of a man-made religion like L. Ron Hubbard's work. But instead, all the places where this should feel weird and clunky and difficult for us to figure out are all the places that it feels weird and clunky and difficult to figure out if you mash the finite and the infinite together in a relationship in the same room and see what happens. I'm cool with this friction, but I'm also not done wrestling this friction through. Matt, this is a 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do it again soon.