Then God answers my prayer. I receive an opportunity to practice humility. And I get frustrated. I definitely don't think back to that prayer. I just think of my discomfort right now. In my wayward, complicated heart, I get upset at God for answering my own prayer.
There's something deeply telling about this. It shows a misunderstanding about three things: prayer, how God works, and my own sanctification.
It first shows that I misunderstand prayer. Prayer is not a chance for me to spout off pseudo-spiritual phrases, or "heap up empty phrases" like the Pharisees that Jesus called out. It's not an opportunity to be rushed through without thinking through exactly what I'm saying. It's a gift that God has given me, His child, to come to Him in humble adoration and lay honest requests at His throne.
It also shows that I don't grasp how God works. God works through prayer, something that I'm guilty of forgetting. Prayer changes things. Of course, God is still in total control but He has graciously allowed prayer to be a medium by which He ordains things to come to be. Be very careful before you pray. God works to bring His children closer to Him, sometimes through painful ways.
Yet it also demonstrates that I don't understand sanctification. Sanctification is the process by which God makes His children more holy. He does this through tests, trials, opportunities, and answered prayer. God works to make us more like Him. And there is, of course, no one more humble than God incarnate, the Word who came to dwell with us in the humble form of a man.
Maybe I'm not alone in this. Do you ever get upset at answered prayer? Perhaps it's when you pray for patience, or opportunities for evangelism. All I can say is that we must repent, seek to know God more through His Word, and pray all the more that we can be more like Jesus. For it was Jesus who always perfectly understood prayer, always knew how God works, and was perfectly holy.
So we pray to the Father: "Forgive us, and make us more like Your Son."
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