Hopeless Prayer

I am not going to quote the whole article from the Christianity Today about prayer and the Chilean Miners. It is not long, read it yourself if you have time.

Probably most of us have sent up a prayer for these folks. Most people in the situation these miners were in do not survive. This is miraculous. This is unique. I praise God.

I also feel a lot of gratefulness that the value of these 33 lives, probably not worth much monetarily, was considered so great that millions of dollars was spent to get them out and make sure they had as good a conditions as possible while they were getting them out. It is amazing that this situation was given so much press coverage. I give God a lot of credit for that too.

How many of us are like Mr. Galli, we pray without much faith. But we do pray. Hopefully we do. Perhaps the act of prayer itself shows a teeny bit of faith.

If one has to have Biblical examples one can look to the psalms. There were many times the psalmist has little faith.

Yet last night in Greek class we were translating the part in John about the fig tree that Jesus cursed because he was hungry and it did not have fruit. In response to the disciples comments he told them in no uncertain terms, that they themselves could do this very same thing, if they had faith. And even greater: If they spoke to the mountain and commanded, "Fall into the sea!" it would be done for them. Do we believe him?

He challenged them in the strongest of terms on other occasions about the results of faith, even the smallest amount of faith.

Do we believe Jesus? No I think we want to somehow say he didn't really mean it without calling him a liar.

I am challenged and I do try to have faith.