Red Letters/Black Letters: Day 114: To pray as if you were Christ

"And whatever you ask in My name, that I will do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. 
If you ask anything in My name, I will do it." John 14:13-14

Derek Webb has this song titled The Spirit Vs. The Kick Drum which contains the lyric "I don't want the Father, I want a vending machine." That, all too often, is where we find ourselves, wanting God to be a vending machine, or perhaps more seasonally appropriate, Santa Claus. It is my belief that we often get there because we misinterpret passages like this one, reading it for face value and thinking "If I just add 'In Jesus's name' I will get what I pray for." Unfortunately this mindset is at times exasperated by the local Christian ghetto, I mean bookstore, take the wildly popular book The Prayer of Jabez from a while back. Here was a book that posited that the reason this one verse was in the Bible was due to the fact that if you prayed a prayer from the Book of Chronicles, of all places, you would get what you want in life.

Our rational brain tells us this isn't true, I am sure that you, like me, have prayed more prayers that weren't answered the way you wanted them to be than you have prayed that were answered the way you wanted, but inevitably we often just go back hoping that this time God will do exactly what we want. As I said, the problem is interpretation, isn't it always? The question we need to ask in conjunction with this particular verse is, what does it mean to 'ask anything in My name'? [Spoiler alert: it is not adding 'In Jesus's name' to the end of prayers] I believe that it means that we need to pray like we are attempting to live, 

The apostle Paul says that it is no longer he who lives but it is rather Christ who lives in him, the same is true for those of us who attempt to follow Jesus. If Christ is living in us then our lives need to reflect his life, our actions reflect his actions, our words reflect his words, and...our prayers reflect his prayers. If Jesus is our example then our prayers should be aimed at wanting God's will to breakthrough to this place. If Jesus is our example then our prayers should be about the needs of others as opposed to our wants. If Jesus is our example then even when we ask for things that we would like to see happen we should always surround them with, 'not my will but thine.'

+ Do you pray like Jesus?

+ What gets you in the vending machine, Santa Claus mindset?