A prayer for the brave, but should it be?

For the last month I have been saying the same prayer almost every day. It is a prayer that I heard when I was meeting with our house church via Zoom from a person that I don't really know, but is connected with the rest of our house church. When I heard it, my heart leapt because it was a prayer that really struck at the heart of what I desire in my walk with God. This is the text of the prayer with it's intro and epilogue:

"Here is a prophetic prayer for the brave. I will meditate on this before praying it.

 

If you would like, as a believer in Jesus Christ, to know the Holy Fear of the Lord, I recommend you pray as follows:

'Lord Jesus, I ask you to shine your light into every dark and hidden corner of my soul, deep into every locked door of my unwillingness, every false cover of my un-surrendered motives, and Lord, as you do this the time will come when I ask you to stop, and when that time comes I ask that you honor this prayer, not the prayer of my distress at that time.'

Before you pray like that, please be aware that this is not some religious formula. You will need to be determined to accept what follows. It will be a challenging experience."

There are so many things that I love in this prayer. It is a prayer that asks God to bring His refining light into your life and to not stop until He is finished, no matter what the cost. However, there are a couple of things I have taken issue with in it.

First, after a week of praying it, I made a change to it. I didn't like that it essentially prescribes that I will be resistant to the change God was bringing and I would ask Him to stop. So I altered it from saying "the time will come... and when that time comes..." to "the time may come... and if that time comes..." 

It is a small change, but it is a significant change. I don't want to assume that I am going to resist God's refining light in my life. I may end up doing that, and if I do, then I want God to honour my first prayer rather than the prayer of my distress, but I did not want to go into it assuming that I would resist and not embrace His pruning and shaping. I very much believe in the power of words, and I did not want to speak those words over my life (even though I can understand the original author's intent and heart in them).

The thing is, even though God's refining of us often is a painful experience as we die to self in various ways and degrees over time, and it has been painful at times in my life, I don't believe it has to be that way. I can say with honesty and confidence that I have experienced it to be a joyful thing as well. 

I believe that the pain that comes from His refining fire comes not from the process of Him working in our lives - He brings life, not pain - but that it comes resistance to His refining due to our misunderstanding of who He is, of what sinful practices really do to us, of how good His love and comfort is, and how it is much better than the false comforts that we tend to take respite in. When God wants to prune something from our lives, then pain doesn't really come from His pruning, it comes from us holding on to those things too tightly. 

I am not saying that it is easy to have this kind of disposition towards God's pruning - it definitely does not come naturally - but I have seen in my life that the more He prunes, and the more I allow Him to do so - or even seek for Him to do so - the easier it gets, and the more desirable His pruning becomes. It hasn't come easy for me - I was very stubborn and walked contrary to Him for many years before I allowed Him to really be my God above all - but I want to encourage those who struggle with it that it gets better and that His pruning and His ways are far greater than anything the world has to offer; believe me, I tried a lot of it and it all fell short.

Second, there is still something that doesn't sit right with me with the description of this prayer, the fact that it is called a prayer for the brave. Although it may take bravery to go before God and ask Him to bring His light into all of your darkness in you, by saying that it is a prayer for the brave, it implies that this type of prayer is optional and is only for those who are brave enough. I don't believe that this prayer is only for the brave, but that this prayer is actually the type of prayer should be at the core of what it means to be Christians and followers of God, and that our Christian walk should not, perhaps even cannot, be devoid of a prayer like this. 

When I read the Bible I do not see anything that tells me that a disposition towards God like this is optional for those who truly want to be called by His name (Christians means little Christs, so we truly are called by His name). As I read Paul and his talk of dying with Christ, or his call to live lives worthy of our calling, or his challenge to be imitators of Christ, it does not seem like this is something only for a select few or for the brave. This is what it means to really be a Christian. In the book The Kingdom Life, Keith Meyer speaks about Paul's call to be imitators of Christ:

"When you ask most believers if they can say this along with Paul, they balk and say they would have to be perfect. Somewhere along the way we have lost the view of salvation as a life we could actually imitate and live. Paul's letters challenge us to be living examples of Christ's life. He not only thought it possible, he saw it as the only way for salvation to be passed on." (The Kingdom Life, ed. Alan Andrews, pg. 177)

Biblically, the Christian life isn't about going to heaven when we die, and doesn't consider salvation as the end, but as the beginning. We step from death into life when we give our lives to God and start a process of sanctification that enables us to experience His abundant life and salvation in this life. Too often the gospel that is preached is a self serving gospel of not going to hell rather than a gospel of being a disciple of Christ. Discipleship takes effort and requires a heart that says "not my will, but yours be done." 

To be clear, I am not saying that we are saved by our works - we are saved by grace through faith - but, as James said, real faith includes works. Dallas Willard puts it quite well, "God is not opposed to effort, but to earning" (Dallas Willard's Study Guide to the Divine Conspiracy, pg. 107). Being a Christian is not a passive thing where we say a prayer and hope we say sorry enough and are nice enough that we get to go to heaven. It is about being God's ambassadors in this world, which requires His pruning and His grace to empower us, bringing restoration and life to all of His creation. 

This is not a prayer for the brave, it is a prayer for all believers who truly want to see His kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven, because it is possible, but only as believers wake up to the calling they have been called to and accepted when they gave their lives in service to God. There is no other way.