Chapter 1 Unknown Recipient

If you use email, you already know what happens when you send an email for which the recipient is either unspecified or non-existent. It comes back to you. And you know what happens when you receive an email which you know is being sent en masse to everyone who happens to have an email address. You recognize it as impersonal "spam" and delete it. It is no less with prayer.

Let me make an analogy to demonstrate this that we will use throughout this book.

Suppose you are walking down a street, and, out of the blue, I stopped you and asked you to go into a grocery store that is across the street and buy me a sandwich, and then come back and give it to me. Would you do it? Probably not. We do not know each other. There is no claim I have on you to do something for me. We have no previous relationship.

Now, believe it or not, this is a very important consideration for the recipient of your prayers. And it is one that should concern even people who call themselves Christians. Let me demonstrate this from scripture.

"Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven. Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works? And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity." Matt 7:21-23 (KJV)

"I am the good shepherd, and know my sheep, and am known of mine." John 10:14 (KJV)

"And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent." John 17:3 (KJV)

"And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever; Even the Spirit of truth; whom the world cannot receive, because it seeth him not, neither knoweth him: but ye know him; for he dwelleth with you, and shall be in you. John 14:16-17 (KJV)

Now there it is, the Trinitarian testament to the absolute importance of knowing God. And lets look more closely at this so we can make sure we understand what kind of knowing this is.

The Greek language of the original manuscripts of the New Testament has two words that are both translated into English as "know." One word is eido, which means an impersonal, non-experiential knowledge of a thing. The other word is ginosko, which means a personal and experiential knowledge of a thing.

Any American citizen who has access to the mass communications of his country can say, without fear of contradiction, that he knows the President of the United States. True, it would be closer to say that he knows about the President of the United States, but in comparison to someone living in complete isolation from the mass media and other human beings, he can still be said to know the President.

The wife of the President of the United States, however, can also be said to know the President. But her knowledge of the President is qualitatively different from the average US citizen’s. And this is just the difference the Greek language made between eido and ginosko. All of the "knows" I’ve put in italics in the verses above have been translated from the Greek word ginosko.

And this is just the point James makes, in the book of James, that is so often misunderstood because the context is hard to perceive:

James 2:14-20
14 What doth it profit, my brethren, though a man say he hath faith, and have not works? can faith save him?
15 If a brother or sister be naked, and destitute of daily food,
16 And one of you say unto them, Depart in peace, be ye warmed and filled;
notwithstanding ye give them not those things which are needful to the body; what doth it profit?
17 Even so faith, if it hath not works, is dead, being alone.
18 Yea, a man may say, Thou hast faith, and I have works: shew me thy faith without thy works, and I will shew thee my faith by my works.
19 Thou believest that there is one God; thou doest well: the devils also believe, and tremble.
20 But wilt thou know, O vain man, that faith without works is dead?
(KJV)

James is saying that the only faith that is worth anything is faith that is based on ginosko and not eido. That fact that God exists is not an issue for devils. They objectively know that God exists. What damns devils is that they objectively know that God exists, but they refuse to have an experiential relationship with Him based on fact that He is in truth, the Lord God Almighty, their creator.

James is saying that if we really know God by experience and not just by impersonal facts we can acquire about Him, we will be inwardly moved to do the kind of things that God is known to do. Like supplying the destitute. If we are in the habit of hanging around with God, what He is like is going to rub off on us. That is the reason, in a nutshell, why God bids us to pray. "And he spake a parable unto them to this end, that men ought always to pray, and not to faint;" (Luke 18:1 KJV)

So now the question. How do we move from knowing about God to knowing God, experientially, as He is? I’ve just given you the clue. But I’ll give you another.

Question: How to you get to know a stranger?
Answer: You go and talk to him.

You talk to him. You hang around with him. And eventually he rubs off on you. Which is to say, you talk and do not give up - or "faint" - from talking. And it is no different with God.

"But wait a minute," you will ask me. "Didn’t you just say that one had to already experientially know God and be known by Him before prayer would do any good?" Well, yes I did. And I will now do a major demolition job on a bad language habit most English speaking people have about the word "prayer."

This bad language habit is an inheritance from the long, venerable place the King James Version of the Bible has had in the development of the English language. The bad habit is this: Whenever we, as English speakers, have the word "prayer" come into our minds, we get a mental picture of a special kind of communication going on between ourselves and God. We somehow think that this communication is different from the communication we have with our fellow human beings. To be sure, there is a big difference between communication with men and communication with God, but it is not to the point where there is no relationship between the communication we have with men and the communication we have with God.

What’s really deadly about thinking of "prayer" as some kind of special language we fall into when we talk to God is that if we have a weak or non-existent relationship with God this mental habit will encourage us in making "airy-fairy" prayers. The word "prayer" becomes as unreal to us as the other words, like "blessing," "hallelujah," and "amen." that we only hear on Sunday. We fall into the habit of thinking, "Well, we’ve done all we can do. Now we can only pray."

So let me slay this odious mental habit right here and now with a quotation from Shakespeare - whose English is pretty much that of the English of the King James Version of the Bible:

"Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to
you, trippingly on the tongue"

Hamlet, Act III, Scene 2. Hamlet to the actors company.

Do the scales suddenly fall from your eyes? Do you see exactly what the word "pray" really means in both Shakespeare and the King James Version? It is the ordinary word for "beg."

"Speak the speech, I beg you, as I pronounced it to
you, trippingly on the tongue"

"And he spake a parable unto them to this end, that men ought always to beg, and not to faint;"

This answers the question of how we are to approach God in communication if we do not already know Him by experience. We start by begging.

Does that sound far-fetched? Well lets consider our initial analogy.

If you are going down the street, and you don’t know me and I don’t know you, what would be the only way I could conceivably persuade you to run into the grocery store and buy me a sandwich? Only if I started begging you.

Maybe that gives you some pause to realize that your relationship with God is based on beggary. And especially so if you are not the kind of person who listens much to beggars (even as I tend not to be myself.) Never fear:

Matt 5:43-48
43 Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy.
44 But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you;
45 That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.
(KJV)

God is not like you or me. A fact which you will discover again and again in concrete prayer.

Is this is Biblical? Is it really Biblical to say that our true, experiential knowledge of God, and God of us, begins with begging? Well, lets read the Bible ...

Luke 23:32-33
32 And there were also two other, malefactors, led with him to be put to death.
33 And when they were come to the place, which is called Calvary, there they crucified him, and the malefactors, one on the right hand, and the other on the left.
(KJV)

Luke 23:39-43
39 And one of the malefactors which were hanged railed on him, saying, If thou be Christ, save thyself and us.
40 But the other answering rebuked him, saying, Dost not thou fear God, seeing thou art in the same condemnation?
41 And we indeed justly; for we receive the due reward of our deeds: but this man hath done nothing amiss.
42 And he said unto Jesus, Lord, remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom.
43 And Jesus said unto him, Verily I say unto thee, To day shalt thou be with me in paradise.
(KJV)

Here we have an example of a re-occurring theme in the Bible about begging things of God: He is "able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think" (Eph 3:20 KJV).
We come to Him as beggars. And of His own grace, He grants answers to our begging. "For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast." (Eph 2:8-9 KJV).

That word "grace" has an interesting connotation in the Greek language of the original manuscripts. The word is charis. It derives from another Greek word, chairo, which means "to be cheerful." In an age of kings, and servants, and beggars (and no modern concepts that the wealthy owed anything to the poor), charis was the quality exercised by a king (or other superior) when he was chairo enough to throw a beggar a gold piece that could be lived off of for days. A king might even feel frisky enough to take a beggar in as a new servant in his household. And that was a big deal for beggars, because servants - though slaves - were at least given food and clothing that gave them a status above that of a beggar.

We come to God on our knees for the gold coin He may throw us, and we instead find ourselves to be cared for and taken into His service. But He does not stop even there.

"This is my commandment, That ye love one another, as I have loved you. Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. Ye are my friends, if ye do whatsoever I command you. Henceforth I call you not servants; for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth: but I have called you friends; for all things that I have heard of my Father I have made known unto you." (John 15:12-15 KJV)

Thus it was with father Abraham. He came to God childless and with one somber thing to beg for. "Lord GOD, what wilt thou give me, seeing I go childless, and the steward [executor of the estate] of my house is this Eliezer of Damascus?" (Gen 15:2 KJV) And by the time God got through with Abraham, he was not only the father of a nation, but of many nations, and of all who have faith in God like he did. (Gal.3:7). "And the LORD said, Shall I hide from Abraham that thing which I do?" (Gen 18:17). Not from a friend, apparently. (Isaiah 41:8).

This is the God we must come to know in experience if our beggings are to find an ear.