[0:00] I want to read you a letter. A viewer sent it to me, and she gave me permission to read it to you as long as I keep who she is hidden. Here's what she wrote. I'm just going to pose my question that is bothering me daily right now. Prayer. Why do we do it? And does God actually intervene? If he doesn't intervene, then why do we ask him for things? If he does intervene, why does he intervene for some, but not for all? And then a little further down. And is there a right and a wrong way to pray? Later, she told me what was behind this question. A baby she loves survived in a NICU. In the same unit with the same doctors and the same nurses, another family's baby died. She said she was terrified and close to walking away from her faith. Some of you have never written those words down and mailed them to someone, but I bet you've been carrying them around for a long time. And it's again possible maybe you've never told anyone. I want to give my friend and you a straight answer as best as

[0:51] I possibly can to every one of those questions. You've probably noticed a theme in some of my more recent videos, but a lot of us have misconceptions about God that sort of ruin the way that we relate to him in very specific ways. Many of us were taught that prayer works like a deal. You pray right and you believe hard enough, and then God comes through for you. We talked about that in some level of depth just a couple of videos ago. I think that idea is the real wound because it means that when a baby lives, somebody earned it, and then when a baby dies, that means somebody fell short. Candidly, I believe the Bible refuses that math. And I also believe that there's one thing it won't tell us, and over time I've come to see that missing answer as something of a mercy. So she asked if God actually intervenes. Yes, he does, and mostly he does it through hands. So the answer is yes, and I don't want to bury that under a

[1:42] pile of qualifications. God acts, he hears people and he responds to them. The Bible is full of moments where somebody asks, and the thing that was about to happen doesn't happen. One of my favorites, I brought it up in my debate with James White, is about a king named Hezekiah. He's sick, badly sick. And then the prophet Isaiah walks into the palace with the worst news a person could possibly get. Set your house in order, for you shall die and not live. That's the word from God. Isaiah delivers the word and then turns around to go and walk out. So Hezekiah prays. He turns his face to the wall and weeps and asks God for a miracle to rescue his life. There's a detail most of you would read right past. I read right past it for years. The text says that before Isaiah had even gone out of the middle court, the word of Yahweh came to him again. The prophet hasn't even made it out of the building yet.

[2:30] God stops him in the courtyard and sends him back in with a completely different message. I have heard your prayer, I have seen your tears. Behold, I will heal you. And God adds 15 years to the man's life. So let's just think about the order of the events there, right? The verdict was spoken out loud, and then it was changed, and the thing that changed it was a man in tears asking God for mercy. Moses has a moment like this too. It's one of the strangest conversations in your entire Bible. Israel has just made the golden calf, and then God says to Moses, Now then leave me alone or let me alone, that my anger may burn against them and that I may destroy them. I love this because God is basically telling Moses, step aside, but Moses won't do it. He pleads, turn from your burning anger and change your mind. And then the text says it about as plainly as a sentence can say anything.

[3:15] So the Lord changed his mind about the harm which he said he would do to his people. Centuries later, a psalm looks back on that day, and that says Moses stood in the breach. A breach is like a broken open piece in a wall or an absence of the wall. Moses planted himself in that broken place between his people and what was coming at them, and he stayed there until it didn't come. I want to kind of go rapid fire through some of these examples so that we can see what's happening, and then we'll go a little bit deeper on a few that I think are really going to turn this on the head for you. But I think of Nineveh, even, right? The city that Jonah wanted nothing to do with. When the warning reaches the king, he says, Who knows? God may turn and relent. And then God does. The text says that God relented concerning the calamity he'd declared, and he did not do it. Those stories I think are enough to show the pattern. God says what's coming, someone asks him for something else, and then what was

[4:05] coming doesn't come. My friend's letter went right at this. She wrote, If everything is set in stone from the beginning, why do we even ask for anything to change? And I think she put her finger on exactly the right nerve. If every moment of history was locked in before the world began, then Hezekiah's tears were theater, and Moses was just reading lines from a script where his win was already written. I just can't read those stories that way. And I know that puts me outside what a lot of churches teach. I believe they mean what they say. The future is genuinely open. God has chosen to run his world in a way where asking him actually changes things. When you pray, you're talking to someone who is listening and answering in real time. There's another detail in Hezekiah's story that matters more than I used to realize. So right after the promise of healing, Isaiah gives an order, take a cake

[4:54] of figs. So they take a lump of figs, they lay it on the boil, and then Hezekiah recovers. In 2 Kings 20, I think it's verse 7, it literally just says, So they laid the lump of figs on him, and then the boil recovered. The story apparently never stops to ask which one healed him, the prayer or the figs. God hears the prayer, God promises somebody healing, somebody presses a fig poultice onto a sore, and then the king gets well, all in the space of a few verses. And the writer doesn't see any conflict between those things at all, because in his mind they belong to the same event. Just hold on to this idea for a second, because we're gonna nuance it a little bit more as we go. Paul's letters do the same thing.. At the end of Colossians, he passes along his greetings from the people with him One of them is Epaphras, who Paul says is quote always laboring earnestly for you in his prayers. Now it just wouldn't be one of my videos if we didn't do a

[5:41] nice deep dive on some Greek here. So let's look at that word we were just talking about. Here we go. Epaphras, who is of you a servant of Christ Jesus, always struggling. Agōnizomenos. Struggling. It's the it's the word where we get the English agonize. This man agonizes in prayer for these people. And uh again, we're just kind of in the same neighborhood. A couple verses later, we have greets you, Luke, the physician, the beloved physician. So there's a there's a man straining in prayer and a doctor side by side in the same paragraph, both on Paul's team. Paul doesn't rank them, Paul's grateful for both of them, and he lists both of their functions uh as though this is just who they are. This is what they produce, and this is what they contribute to the body of Christ. Someone in my friend's family and her care team, we might say, has a very clear answer for why that baby lived.

[6:32] The doctors, the nurses, the skin to skin, the baby's mom doing everything right, and I really like that answer. It's true. All of those things happened, and every one of them mattered. They contributed to everything that led to that baby surviving. Where I would want to gently push back is the split underneath it. The idea that either God did it or the doctors did. Amazingly, the Bible just never divides things that way. Picture your grandma mailing you a birthday card with 20 bucks tucked inside. You open it, and your friend asks who it's from, and you say, Oh, the mail carrier. I I watched him put it in the box. Well, yes, he did. That's how it got to you, but it's still from grandma. That's how the Bible talks about God and ordinary means. Psalm 104 says that God causes the grass to grow for the cattle and vegetation for the labor of man, so that he may bring forth food from the

[7:22] earth. God grows it, people work it. All of that happens inside one sentence to produce the fruit or the vegetable that's being grown and cultivated. This goes a lot deeper than just a couple of verses where we're kind of, you know, the ambiguity is that we don't really know how to parse it. Tim Mackie from Bible Project said something about this that stopped me in my tracks. He called Genesis 1, quote, the only narrative in the Bible where God is at work in the world without working through humans. I flat out did not believe him. And then I had to go and really look at it. On the first pages, God speaks light and land and living things into being all by himself. After that, the Bible's story is mostly the story of God working in his world through people. So let's go see if we can find out where Genesis first shows God's spirit at work in a person. It's in Joseph.

[8:09] A famine is coming that could have destroyed the whole region, and Joseph lays out a plan to store up grain in the good years so that there's food in the bad ones. Pharaoh hears the plan and then says this to his servants. Can we find a man like this in whom is a sp a divine spirit or the spirit of God? Elohim here is a much more generic term. It's not um it's not Yahweh Elohim necessarily, but he's saying is in whom is a divine spirit. So the first time the spirit is identified as showing up in a person, he shows up as wisdom and good planning in a man running a food storage program, and that plan keeps Egypt and the lands around it alive through a famine. Then in the in the very next book, there's a craftsman named Bezalel. I've brought this passage up a number of times. It's incredible. Exodus says God filled him with the spirit of God in wisdom, in understanding, in knowledge, and in all kinds of craftsmanship.

[8:59] His j.ob was to make the tabernacle and to craft the beautiful things that went into decorating it The Spirit of God shows up in a skilled pair of artisan craftsmen's hands. Again, Mackie put it this way The primary way that God is at work in the world through his spirit is through people. Now, again, God can act on his own, and those stories about Hezekiah and Moses and Nineveh show him doing it in answer to prayer. But when he works in the world, his favorite way of doing it, the way he picks again and again is through us. In researching this, I was just floored. The idea of where skin to skin care came from. phenomenal. So in 1978, at a hospital in Bogotá, Colombia, a doctor named Edgar Rey Sanabria had more premature babies than he could handle, and not nearly enough incubators. That was what they used at the time.

[9:47] So he had mothers carry their twin babies against their own chests, skin to skin, all day long. Of course, this was natural. It's not as though this was the first time this was ever tried. But the idea spread around the world. Years later, when researchers pulled together the careful trials on small early babies, even preemie babies, carrying them that way once they were stable, cut deaths by about 40%. A doctor ran out of machines to do the job, and mothers' bodies did the work the machines couldn't. So I can't run a lab test on that and point to God in the results. But I know what a biblical writer would say if he heard that story. He'd say that the same spirit who gave Joseph a plan for the famine gave that doctor an idea for his babies. So in that NICU, the nurse checking lines at three in the morning with steady hands, the doctor who spent ten years learning how to keep a tiny body alive, the exhausted mom holding her baby against her skin.

[10:39] Those are God's hands. She asked whether God stepped in for that baby, and I believe that he he did did, and it through them. And he was every bit as present for having used and worked through them Now, that answer makes her next question hurt even more. The same hands were on the other baby, the same unit, the same nurses, the same skill, the same care. One family carried their baby out to the car and the other family went home without theirs. So if God works through hands and the hands were the same, then why did he step in for one of those babies and not the other? The truth is that there's something sitting underneath her question that makes it heavier than it has to be. It's yet another lie or a deal that we assume God is operating by that a lot of us were taught, right? We've we've been talking about this. If you pray right, you believe hard enough, you live clean enough, God comes through.

[11:26] So that would mean, by extension, if prayer is what saved the baby who went home, then the family down the hall lost their baby because their prayers came up short. Maybe they didn't pray enough or didn't believe enough or weren't close enough to God. So let me say this as plainly as I can. Parents whose baby died did nothing at all to earn that. They didn't pray wrong. They weren't too far from God. And Jesus settled this himself, actually, because people brought this exact question to him, and he answered it every time. You probably know the passage, so let's just jump right into it. In John 9, Jesus and his disciples walk past a man who's born blind. Now the the disciples' first thought is to find the sin behind it. They say, Rabbi, who sinned, this man or the parents of him, that he should be born blind? Was it his sin or his parents? It says I it's a dichotomy in their mind.

[12:14] Think about that for a second. A child is born with something wrong, and the first thing the religious people in the room reach for is whose fault it was. Jesus shuts it down. Jesus says, Neither this man sinned nor the parents of him. Now, some of you have it in your mind how that verse keeps going, but it was. that should be displayed the works of God in him Some people read that to mean God made this man to blind so that Jesus could heal him and show God's power. But let's look really, really closely here. It was is an interpretive choice. It's not actually there. The translators supplied them to try to make this work in a specific way that they understand it. It's not in the Greek. The verse numbers came along about 1500 years later, and so did most of the punctuation. It is grammatically possible to read it like this, and then it suits the context well. Neither this man sinned, nor the parents of him, but so that the works of God might be displayed in him, right?

[13:04] No period here, we must work the works of him who sent me. Let me say that again. Neither this man sinned, nor his parents, but so that the works of God might be displayed in him, we must work the works of him who sent me. Most Bibles don't punctuate it that way, and I, you know, I want to be honest about that. But the Greek allows it, and read like that, Jesus turns straight from whose fault it was to what he and his friends are about to do about it. Then he spits on the ground, makes mud, and heals the man. Man, the Bible is so funny, dude. Later on, it's in Luke 13. Some people bring Jesus the news that a group of Galileans had been killed, and you can tell they want a verdict on the dead. They're saying, What happened here? Basically, Jesus says, Do you suppose that these Galileans were greater sinners than all the other Galileans because they suffered this fate? I tell you, no. Then he brings up another disaster everybody knew about already. A tower in a place called Siloam had fallen and killed eighteen people. He says they weren't worse culprits either.

[13:54] And then he turns the whole thing back on the crowd and tells them to look at their own lives. The crowd wanted a reason inside of the the thing that happened to these victims. Jesus refuses to give them one. He does the same thing on the Sermon on the Mount. When Jesus tells people to love their enemies, the reason he gives is what his father is like. He causes his son to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous alike. We don't always gather this, but I think in a farming world, rain decided whether your family got to eat that year. And just God just hands it out generously without checking anybody's record first. His kindness has never been a paycheck for the deserving. If you could earn it, it would stop being grace and it would start turning into, you know, wages, payment for your good behavior or something like that. That's just not how it works. Then there's Job, which when you really think about it is is a whole it's a whole book about this question.

[14:43] Job loses his children, his wealth, his health, and three of his friends come to sit with him. For chapter after chapter, they explain his suffering to him, and their explanation always comes back to the same place. Look, Job, you must have sinned. They have a tidy formula and they defend it to the tooth. But at the end, God shows up. He has some hard words for Job, too. Totally fine. Job takes them. He accepts the rebuke and the correction that he gets from God. But when God turns to the friends, he says, My wrath is kindled against you and against your two friends, because you've not spoken of me what is right as my servant Job has. We just talked about this the other day. In the very next verse, he says it again, twice back to back, God is angrier at the friends with their neat and tidy formula than at the man who spent the whole book shaking his fist at the sky. But we didn't cover it in our last video what comes next. God tells the friends that Job will pray for them, and they need to

[15:32] go offer sacrifices. The men who were so sure about why Job was suffering needed the prayers of the man that they had blamed and assumed was in the fault. So picture again Moses standing in the breach. I don't want anybody to hear these stories and conclude that the other baby had nobody standing there in the breach for him. That's the deal. That's the lie sneaking back in through a side door. Nobody earned a death, not that baby and not his parents. So once we set this this bad deal down, her. question, again, my friend's question gets sharper If nobody deserved it, then why did it happen? Well, let's get back to camping out in Luke 13, because six verses after the tower and the whole bit about the fig tree in between, we get to a woman being healed. Jesus is teaching in a synagogue, and there's a woman there who hasn't been able to stand up straight for 18 years. And she was bent over and not able to lift herself up to the

[16:21] hole. So Jesus called to her and said to her woman, You have been freed from the sickness of you, and he laid upon her the hands, and immediately she was made straight and glorified God, answering moreover, the ruler of the synagogue, who was indignant, because on the Sabbath Jesus healed someone on the Sabbath. He said to the crowd, Six days there are in which it behooves one to work. In these, therefore, coming, be healed, and not on the day of the Sabbath. But Jesus says, keeps going. It's this ah, so good. He says, moreover, a daughter of Abraham, being whom has been bound by Satan eighteen years. Ought she not to be loosed from the bond this on the day of the Sabbath? He calls her a woman whom Satan has bound for eighteen long years. The number 18, interestingly, shows up in this same exact chapter two times, two stories. Eighteen people died under a tower, and Jesus says it didn't deserve it. A woman spent 18 years bent over, and Jesus says an enemy had her tied up.

[17:08] This is the way that Jesus seemed to see these things, including sickness. He saw sickness as the work of an enemy, and he treated healing as setting prisoners free. When Peter later sums up Jesus's whole ministry in Acts 10, he says that Jesus went around healing all who were being oppressed by the devil. We could say, as Greg Boyd did, that Jesus is treating them as casualties of war. That is the world the Bible says we're living in. God is good, uncomplicatedly good, and God is powerful, and he is at war. There are other powers in his world with real wills of their own, and they fight against what he wants. We run into this all the time. I walk past people who will say things like, you know, oh, everything happens for a reason. Well, yeah, sometimes the reason is that God has enemies and and they will do anything that they can, you know, to try to destroy you or anything that God created that he calls good.

[17:57] Or even like, you know, people will say, you know, whatever doesn't kill you only makes you stronger. Well, whatever doesn't kill you might also sell sever your spinal cord and leave you, you know, struggling in a puddle of your own waste fluid. That's also something that doesn't necessarily kill you. But there are real wills that fight against God's will. The clearest picture of this I know is in Daniel 10. Daniel has been praying and mourning for three whole weeks, not eating any good food, and he hears nothing. It might be safe to assume that he thinks God is not going to answer him. Then a messenger from God finally shows up, and what he tells Daniel is something I wish every person who has prayed into silence could hear. From the first day that you set your heart on understanding this and on humbling yourself before your God, your words were heard. And I have come in response to your words. But the prince of the kingdom of Persia was withstanding me for 21 days.

[18:47] Then, behold, Michael, one of the chief princes, came to help me. This is this is mind-blowing if you've never really studied it in any level of depth. That Prince of Persia is a spiritual power over that nation, and he stood in the way. Look at the numbers. Daniel prayed for three weeks. The messenger was held up for 21 days. It's the same exact stretch of time. The answer left heaven and God's dispatch chamber from on day one. And every single day that Daniel heard nothing, it was on its way, fighting to get to him. The text puts the delay on the opposition and never says a word against Daniel. But there is a delay. God delays in getting an answer to Daniel himself. Is it always like that? No, but sometimes it is. And your own Bible is the thing that shows you that that's how it works. Acts 12 shows how uneven this can get, all in one chapter. King Herod has the apostle James killed with the sword.

[19:38] Successfully, it happens. Then he arrests Peter and plans to do the same to him. So the church in that area gathers in a house that belongs to a woman named Mary, and they pray for Peter hard late into the night. God sends a messenger, an angelos, and Peter walks out of prison. He goes straight to that house and knocks on the door, and a servant girl named Rhoda hears his voice, and she's so excited that she runs back inside without opening the door. She tells everyone Peter is standing outside, and the room full of people who've just been praying for exactly that outcome tell her, Yeah, you're out of your mind. I think it's one of the most honest and one of the funniest scenes in the whole Bible. Peter came home to a prayer meeting that couldn't believe its own answer. Their faith was shaky, and the answer came anyway. As for James, who was successfully killed with the sword, Luke never tells us why.

[20:25] He doesn't hint that anybody prayed less for James or prayed wrongly. He records it in a sentence and then just keeps going. That's what war is like. Outcomes are real, they're uneven. They don't line up with who deserved what. There are casualties. The difference between those two rooms in the NICU was real. And I I won't pretend that it wasn't, but it isn't a grade or a performance review on either family. I have the voice in the the the back of my head that I'm imagining some of you have going on in your mind too while we're talking about this. Okay, Tim, but God is still God. If he could get Peter out, he could have gotten James out. If he stepped in for one baby, he could have stepped in for the other baby. So every time he doesn't, isn't that still his choice? I think that's probably the hardest question in this conversation. I can't, I can't make that question disappear. Daniel's story helps some because it shows God wanting to answer on the very first day, and his answer is still running.

[21:15] into resistance Boyd puts the rest of it this way to understand why any event unfolded the exact way it did, we would have to know every single human and or angelic decision ever made that influenced the event. None of us has that view. We're standing in one hallway of one hospital, and the war is a lot bigger than just that hallway. It doesn't settle every question. It does move the mystery out of God's heart and into the size and tangle of a world full of real choices being made by people who are on the same team as God, as well as people who are against God and his purposes. Job wanted to see the whole picture too. He begged for it. How many are my iniquities and sins, God? Make known to me my rebellion and my sin. Later, he more or less demands the paperwork. He says, Let the Almighty answer me and the indictment which my adversary has written. Just show me the charges. Tell me the reason.

[22:01] God does show up for Job, and that alone is a big deal, right? What he talks about for four chapters in response to Job, he talks about the stars, the weather, the wild animals, the monsters of the sea. He never once mentions a scene in heaven that we, the readers, saw in chapters one and two. He never mentions the adversary. Job goes the rest of his life without seeing the list that he asked for. What he got instead was God himself showing up and talking to him. If I'm being really, really honest with you, I think that ending kind of bothers me. It feels like God just changes the sh the subject a little bit. But there's a sense in which it's the kindest thing in the whole book. Think about what a formula would have to say if the Bible gave us one here. If there were a rule for which babies live, this much prayer, this much faith, this kind of parent, then every small grave would come stamped with a reason. Every grieving mom would lie awake trying to figure out what she did wrong. Because there's no formula, we can stand beside a grave like that with the

[22:52] whole Bible behind us and the God who inspired it and say with total confidence that nobody earned this and God hates it. So where I've landed is I don't know why that room and not the other one. Nobody does And I don't trust anyone who claims to, but I do know what God is like, because I've watched Jesus look at a woman who'd been bent over for 18 years, called it bondage, and set her free. That's the God who was in that NICU, and he was on the side of both babies. My friend, again, who wrote this letter saw, I think more or less where all this leads before I ever wrote back. It's right there in her letter. She said, if he doesn't intervene, then why do we ask him for things? If there's no formula and God works through the doctors anyway, and an answer can be held up by powers we can't even see, hindered by enemies God has that are beyond our ability even to comprehend, then why pray at all? And her other question comes on right behind it. Is there a right and a wrong way to pray?

[23:39] I think both of her questions rest on something deeper, and I believe that's true for most of us. What you believe God is like shapes the way that you talk to him, relate to him. If you believe he hands out answers to people who earn them, you pray like you're filling out a loan application and hoping you got every box right and filled in everything correctly, so you don't have to do it again. If you believe he's the one who chose which baby went home and which one lived deliberately, maybe even before time began, it gets hard to pray to him at all. I've done my fair share of wrestling with that myself. If any of this is hitting a little close to home, there's a good chance that one specific lie about God is affecting the way that you think about all of these things. I built a two-minute quiz to help you name it. It's the first link in the description. Once you can name a lie, it gets a lot easier to set it aside. My short answer to her first question is I I think that we ask

[24:27] because God gave us two real ways to change what happens in this world, and prayer is one of them. It's a it's a false choice if you think it's between praying and doing something. We are we are commissioned in some sense to ask and to pray and to intercede because we live in the middle of a war, and prayer is one of the ways God's people fight in. C.S. Lewis took on her question uh in a short essay called Work and Prayer. He lets the other side state its case, and he states it fairly. The thing you ask for is either good or else it is not. If it is, then a good and wise God will do it anyway. If it is not, then he won't. In other words, why bother asking? God already knows what's best and he'll do it with you or without you. Lewis's reply makes me laugh every time I read it. He says, Why wash your hands? If God intends for them to be clean, they'll come clean without your washing them.

[25:14] Imagine saying that to your kid at the kitchen sink, right? Go wash up for dinner. Nah, Dad, you know, if God wants my hands clean, they'll be clean. Nobody buys that for a second, because we all know washing your hands and the soap actually does something. So Lewis is showing that the logic behind this that makes prayer pointless also makes everything else pointless. Planting a garden, cooking a meal, going to medical school. God will do it anyway, cancels out one of those things. It cancels out all of them. Then Lewis quotes uh Blaise Pascal, who said that God, quote, instituted prayer in order to allow his creatures the dignity of causality, the dignity of causality. Causality just means causing things. Pascal is saying God set up prayer so that we would have the honor of actually making things happen in the world. Lewis pushes it yet another step further. He says, It would perhaps be truer to say that he invented both prayer and physical action for that purpose.

[26:03] He sums it up like this the two methods by which we are allowed to produce events may be called work and prayer. I feel like that settles the God or the doctor's split from the other direction, right? The doctor's skill is one way God lets a human being cause real good in the world. A mother praying beside an incubator is the other way. God gave out both of the these paths, these ways that humans can contribute, and he honors both. So the nurse adjust.ing the oxygen at three in the morning, and someone praying in the waiting room, doing the same kind of thing Both of them are using the honor God gave them to change what happens next. In the Bible, that second way often looks a lot like the first. Prayer takes effort, sometimes it takes a really long time. James says Elijah was a man with a nature like ours. He was an ordinary person, the kind who gets tired and scared and loses sight of things.

[26:52] But if we we go find our way over to the story that uh James is referencing here in 1 Kings 18, the land has gone without rain for years. Elijah went up to the top of Mount Carmel, and he bowed down on the ground and put his face between his knees, and he said to his servant, Go up to look toward the sea. And he went up and looked and said, There's nothing. And he said, Go again. The servant comes back with nothing to report, so Elijah says, Go back. He says it seven times, seven times. And on the seventh trip, the servant sees a cloud as small as a man's hand. There we are. Small as a man's hand or a palm of a man's hand. And then the rain pours down. The text never scolds Elijah for the first six trips. Who knows, but that there was a spiritual power impeding the answer to Elijah's prayer. Could be. Nobody says his faith was weak on the third try. He keeps his face on the ground and he keeps sending the servant back. And in the Bible, that's what praying hard looks like.

[27:41] It looks like somebody holding their ground even when it doesn't seem like there's an answer coming. He takes this picture even further. He asks the church for help, and look at how he words it strive together with me in your prayers. The word he uses for strive here, sunagonisastai, means fighting along someone, shoulder to shoulder. It's the same exact word, or it's built on the same fight word, all used for Epaphras, agonizing in prayer. With a piece here, the syn, that means together, fighting alongside someone, shoulder to shoulder. And this is the only place in the whole New Testament where that specific word phrasing appears. Jesus uses that same family of words when he stands in front of Pilate. He says that if his kingdom worked like the kingdoms of this world, quote, my servants would be fighting. He'd already made that clear Earlier that night in the garden, Peter pulled a sword and cut off a man's ear, or cut off a man's head, depending on how you head at the ear, depending on how you translate it.

[28:29] Jesus told him, Put your sword into the sheath. Luke tells us Jesus touched the ear and healed him. Then Paul picks up that same fight word and gives it to a room full of people praying. So as far as I can tell, that's how the kingdom of Jesus fights. It seems like it fights on its knees in prayer to God, but it also acts and does things in the world, and both are valid. But Paul tells them exactly what to fight for. He says, That I may be rescued from those who are disobedient in Judea. He's asking for real protection from real danger to his real life. So if you were to pray for a baby in a NICU, you're standing next to that family in a fight, the same way Paul asked the Romans to stand next to him. Then you let the surgeon do her work because she's in the fight too. If you've ever been tempted to scoff at the idea of a prayer warrior, the Bible is very clear that that's one of the ways in which you do spiritual battle against God's enemies, and the way that you further the battle

[29:19] lines of Jesus' kingdom. Prayer and doing things. But the other half of my friend's question of whether there's a right or a wrong way to pray, I think there is maybe a wrong way, and I would say it's probably the dishonest way. It means bringing God a cleaned up version of yourself because you think that's the only version that he'll listen to. I'm talking about just being, just be unfiltered with your heavenly father. He knows you. There's nothing about you that's hidden from him. The number of words, the right phrases, the amount of faith you could scrape together in a hospital hallway, the Bible never makes any of those the test. Again, the the the bad deal we already dealt with earlier is dead and gone. I'm leaving it buried. No family ever lost a baby too soon because they prayed wrong. I think the dishonest prayer is that loan application kind, where you try to get every box right. Thank you for this day, Lord. I know you have a plan, blah, while inside your screaming. I think a lot of us learned to pray like that.

[30:06] It was modeled for a lot of us. The Bible's own prayer book sounds nothing like it. Psalm 13 opens with, How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long shall I take counsel in my soul? How long will my enemy be exalted over me? That's four how longs in two verses. God put that song in his people's worship book, which means they sang it together out loud. We talked about that verse last time, but let's talk about Psalm 44. The people singing in it say, All this has come upon us, but we have not forgotten you, and we have not dealt falsely with your covenant. They're telling God they didn't earn this. And then they say, Arouse yourself. Why do you sleep, O Lord? In a psalm in God's own word, God's people tell God to wake up and do something. Doesn't mean they're right, but it does mean that they were allowed to say it. Habakkuk also, how long, O Lord, will I call for help and you will

[30:54] not hear? I cry out to you, violence. He's pointing it out, there's violence, yet you don't save. He says, I'll stand on my guardpost and station myself on my rampart, and I will watch to see what he will speak to me. He takes his complaint up onto the city wall and he waits for God to answer it. And God does answer him. But in his answer, he never once tells Habakkuk to sit down and be quiet. He invites his people to call to him for help. I am still in the middle of praying some how long prayers around some people who have said some really, really awful lies about both my wife and myself, and frankly, my children. On the one hand, I look at their situation and I see God's patience and his desire to see people restored and his his willingness to as long as there is any chance that this person will repent to not bring judgment. And I feel a really strong welling up of an imprecatory sense in me

[31:45] to go and pray something over these people saying, God, how long? How long are you gonna let this continue on? And I don't know what God's answer is, and he does know better than I do. But the idea is like if you've if you've stopped praying about something, because the only words you have left are angry ones, bring God the angry ones. He has a whole book full of them already, and he doesn't turn you away for praying with those things. Paul says something in Romans 8 that I think answers my friend's question more directly than anything else in the Bible. He writes, We do not know how to pray as we should, but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. Paul prayed as hard as anyone who ever lived, and he admits that none of us knows the right way, and that includes him. If you were to go and kind of look deeper around that verse, Paul uses the same groaning word in three different forms three times in five verses. The root is stenazō, and it's the sound a person makes when the pain

[32:33] is too big for sentences. First, the whole creation groans, and Paul says it suffers the pains of childbirth. The world is like a woman in labor, hurting because something new is about to be born. Next, we groan, waiting eagerly for the redemption of our body, and last, the spirit groans for us. Three times Paul reaches for stenazō, creation, us, and then God himself in the form of the spirit. So when you can't pray a single sentence on the nights, all you have is groaning, weeping. The spirit of God is praying inside of that sound, interpreting for you. That sound is a prayer, and God is groaning right alongside you. You can ask God for anything. Paul asked the Romans to fight for his rescue. You can ask for yours. There's one prayer of Paul's that I've really grown to love. I did an entire video on it, and it's his prayer at the end of Ephesians 1.

[33:21] He's praying for the church, if you'll remember, and every request is about what they'll see. I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened so that you will know what is the hope of his calling, what are the riches of the glory of his inheritance in the saints, and what is the surpassing greatness of his power toward us who believe. And then he tells them which power he means. He says, It's the power that God used, quote, when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion. He uses all these different power words, right? It's the Bible's names for the powers in the war, the same kind of power as the Prince of Persia who held up Daniel's answer. So Paul is praying that his friends will see something very important. It's a series of things really that he wants them to understand. But the one who beat death is seated above every power that fights against him.

[34:06] Nothing in that prayer asks God to change their circumstances. Paul wants them to see their whole world differently. And Paul knew what it was like to pray for his circumstances and not get what he asked for. If you've ever read 2 Corinthians 12, he tells us about something he calls a thorn, a messenger of Satan. What it is, there's a whole bunch of discussion. Paul is not super explicit or clear about it, but whatever it was, he begged God three times to take it away and it stayed. The answer that he got was, My grace is sufficient for you. He didn't get the rescue he asked for. He got enough grace to carry what he was left with. He got strength from God to endure. I think that that's the shape I want my own prayers to take in a hard season. I keep asking for the rescue because Paul did. I also ask for eyes to see who is really on the throne, and for strength to carry what doesn't change. When God answers those two prayers, he has never once answered those ones late, as far as I'm aware.

[34:54] Sight is what my friend needed most in that NICU. The heaviest thing underneath her letter is a question about God's face. When he looked at the other room where a family was saying goodbye, what did he feel? Paul prayed that we would have eyes to see that. I believe the Bible answers that question, and I think that the clearest place it gives the answer is at a grave. We talked about it last week, didn't we? Jesus had a friend named Lazarus, and Lazarus died.. And by the time Jesus arrived, Lazarus's sister Mary was weeping, and the people who came with her were weeping too John says that when Jesus saw them, he was deeply angry in his spirit. The snort of a war horse comes back. He was angry at death, and he was going to do something about it. And then two verses later, John tells us Jesus wept. Again, he knows exactly what he's about to do. In a few minutes, he's going to call Lazarus out of that tomb alive. He knows how the story ends, and he still stands in front of that grave, both angry and in tears. Angry at death itself, the thing that took his friend and broke the hearts

[35:43] of the people he loved, and in tears at the brokenness and the suffering. Paul gives that anger a name. In 1 Corinthians 15, he writes that the last enemy that will be abolished or defeated is death. God is putting an end to his enemies one by one systematically, and death is on the list. It's the last one to go. So when God looked at that other room where a family was saying goodbye, I think he looked at it the way that Jesus looked at Lazarus's tomb. He grieved with those parents, and he was furious at the enemy that took their baby. And it probably only stealed, strengthened his resolve to do the ultimate thing that he could about it. And that day is ahead of us, friends. There's one more thing I want you to see about God's face. On the cross, Jesus prayed a psalm. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? The first words of Psalm 22. In the worst hour of his life, the Son of God prayed one of the rawest prayers in the whole book, as an honest outpouring of his feelings to his own God, to himself, to his other member of the Godhead.

[36:36] So if anyone ever tells you an honest prayer like that is a faithless one, I'd point them to the cross and to Jesus himself. That psalm goes somewhere interesting, doesn't stay where it starts. Further, it says, Nor has he hidden his face from him, but when he cried to him for help, he heard. Psalm thirteen was afraid that God had hidden his face. The Psalm Jesus prayed from, the cross says he never did He heard, and God raised him from the dead. Paul finishes that same chapter in 1 Corinthians by mocking death to its face. Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting? That is the hope for the babies who didn't come home. They're not lost to him. The one who wept at Lazarus's grave has already walked out of his own, and he's coming to finish off the enemy that took them. Resurrection means death doesn't get the final word over a single one of those children. I believe God will raise them to life in real bodies in a world he has made new, and I cannot wait to see it.

[37:25] So the woman who wrote me that letter, and to everyone who could have written it, here are my answers as plainly as I know how to give them. You asked why we pray. We pray because God gave us two real ways to change what happens in his world work and prayer, and he honors both of them. You asked if God actually intervenes, yes. He hears, he responds, and most often he moves through the people closest to the need, like the nurses and the doctors in that unit. You asked why we'd ask for anything if it's all set in stone. I don't believe that it is. The future is open, and your asking really does change things. You asking and you acting, you have no idea what hangs in the balance of your decisions. You asked why he steps in for some and not for all. I don't know why one room and not the other, and I won't pretend that I do. But we live in a world at war, full of wills that fight against his, and the outcomes come out uneven, in a way that even God is displeased with.

[38:14] But nobody earned a death, and no family's grief is a grade on their faith. You ask if there's a right and a wrong way to pray. I think the only wrong way is the dishonest way. Bring God your real words, even the angry ones. When the words run out, the spirit is groaning right there with you. And please stop calling your questions uneducated. These are the questions. The questions. Job asked them. David screamed them in the Psalms. Habakkuk called them up onto a city wall. God kept every one of those questions and put them in his own book, his own word to humanity. You're scared because you care whether or not this is true. And I think that's what grown-up faith feels like. So what can we do about that this week? First, find the thing that you stopped praying about You probably already know what that thing is. You expect God's never going to give you an answer. Pray one Psalm 13 style prayer about it. Start with how long? Say what you really feel. Don't clean it up.

[39:00] Say it out loud if you can. The way God's people sang those words out loud from their own Psalter. Second, pick one person and pray something like an Ephesians 1 prayer over them by name. Something like God, open the eyes of her heart. Let her see the hope you've called her to. Let her see that the power that raised Jesus is seated above everything that's fighting against her. You're asking God for sight, the same thing Paul asked for his friends. Third, thank one person whose hands God used for you. Maybe it's a nurse or a doctor or a teacher, or the neighbor who showed up with dinner when you couldn't cook. Send them a text or write them a card and tell them what I believe is true. God used your hands. You might be the first person who ever told them their work was God's work. You told me that you were terrified and ready to walk away. I'll tell you what I really think is happening. You're standing at the edge of leaving a God who was never real to begin with. The vending machine God. Put in the right prayers with enough faith, and a healthy baby drops out the bottom.

[39:48] Come up short and you get nothing. He saves babies as a reward and lets them die as a verdict. You can walk away from that God. I'll help you carry him out. I don't think he's the real deal. But don't walk away from the God who wept at that grave. Sit down here at the edge with me for a while. Bring every question you've got. I'm not scared of a single one, and neither is he. He's right here alongside us, weeping at the things that deserve to be wept over, angry at the things that deserve his anger, and the story is not over. I cannot wait until we can both see the ending, where evil is overthrown and finally gets its comeuppance. He wants us with him there on that day, and I believe it'll be glorious.