In his book Prayer: Does It Make Any Difference? Philip Yancey shares the story of David Ford, who is a professor at Cambridge in England, asked a catholic priest the most common problem he encountered in 20 years of hearing confession. Without hesitation, the priest replied, “God.”

He said that very few people he meets in confession believe that God is a God of love, forgiveness, gentleness, and compassion. They see God as someone to cower from. 

After this, Ford, the professor said, “This is perhaps the hardest truth of any to grasp. Do we wake up every morning amazed that God loves us? Do we allow our day to be shaped by God’s desire to relate to us?

Here is a truth I have seen play out in my faith journey and others: what I believe about God determines what I ask for in prayer. It determines how honest I am, how open I am. 

If I believe God wants what is right for me,  I will ask him for everything and be okay when I don’t get what I want when I want it. 

If I believe that God isn’t good and is against me, I’m less likely to pray. 

If I don’t believe God is close, I will struggle to trust him. 

If I believe that God is like my earthly father, that shapes how I relate to him. 

But, if I believe that God is everything my earthly wasn’t, that God is the perfect Father, that shapes how I pray. 

We’ll make bargains with God: “God if you do this, I’ll never do that again.” Do we think God is a slot machine? 

Followers of Jesus do this all the time, “I’ll do anything for you, but don’t send me there or ask me to do that.” Do you know what we’re saying? We’re saying that God is a God who will call us to something that will make us miserable. Make no mistake, if you believe that God’s plan for your life will make you unhappy, that will shape your prayer life. 

Now, for us to fully engage in prayer, we need to believe that we are praying to a God who loves us and hears us. To a God who will give us his attention. A God who will move close to us. 

This is the invitation that God has for us as followers of Jesus. He is a good father who wants to hear from his kids. 

But how do kids pray? How do kids ask for anything?

I have five kids, so I’ve learned a thing or two about how kids ask for things. Maybe you have some experience with this. 

What does a child ask for? Everything and anything. If a child hears about Disneyland on a commercial or that someone else is going, they want to go tomorrow. My kids heard the word Christmas the other day and thought it was this week and didn’t know why I couldn’t make it Christmas like I can change the calendar. They keep asking!

How often does a child ask for something? Repeatedly. Have you seen a child throw a temper tantrum in the cereal aisle? No, they don’t want the healthy stuff in the bag on the bottom shelf without a cartoon character on the front with no toy in it! 

Kids have this 6th sense of knowing if they are wearing you down. If you’re a parent, have you ever laid in a child’s bed with them after you told them 15 times to go to bed and that you wouldn’t do it? Every parent has. We will do anything for them to go to sleep. Sometimes we give in just to shut them up. It’s survival. 

How do kids ask? Do they make sure it is grammatically correct? Do they make sure that it fits with your budget, time table, or something you want to do? They say whatever is on their minds. They don’t think if something is appropriate to say or ask for. For us, we think, “I could never pray about that. I could never ask God for that.” Why not? We often are afraid to pray in public because we aren’t sure it will sound right or spiritual enough. We also judge our prayers. That person seemed so spiritual when they prayed; I don’t think I can pray like that so I won’t pray. There isn’t some spiritual sounding list. We are simply talking to God. 

One author said, “Prayer is where your life and God meet.”

Do you know what else kids do when they ask their parents? Children are supremely confident in their parent’s love and power. They trust them. They believe their parents want what is good (although they often think their parents will always agree with the kids on what that good is). 

If you feel connected to your parents, if you know they love you and will protect you, it makes anything possible. 

Children come to their parent’s weary, tired, needy, wandering minds, and messy. That’s how we are to go to God, our father. 

Feeling secure in God’s love helps us to pray; it helps us to dream again. 

Jesus says that praying as a child; we get God’s attention. 

Have you ever done something and thought, why did I do that? 

I remember growing up; whenever I would do something wrong, and my grandfather found out about it, he would say, “That’s not what our family does.”

We all have one of those things. 

It might be a feeling that we wished we could stop; we struggle with worry and anxiety and wish we didn’t. It might be controlling things or feeling fearful more than we want. 

Maybe you find yourself flying off the handle and see the damage it does but don’t know why.

You tell people close to you, that you are working on it, make promises to stop an addiction, but it keeps coming back. 

So what do we do? We take a class, read a book, see a counselor, which are all good things. But the problem is, most of the time we look for ways to stop being angry, to stop feeling something, to stop buying things we can’t afford or how to stop looking at porn. 

We miss the crucial thing. 

What is that?

We miss what is in us.

Often when we look to make a change, we look outside of us. The places we go, the things we do, the people we are with. This is important, but only tells us part of the story.

If you’re a follower of Jesus, this is one of the struggles you often bump into: When we start following Jesus, some of those stops immediately. We hear people say, “I was addicted to ____ for years and started following Jesus, and it was gone.” For many of us, the things we struggled with before following Jesus, we still struggle with after we follow Jesus.  We wonder if something is wrong with us. We wonder if we’re following Jesus and beat ourselves up because a good Christian shouldn’t struggle with what we struggle with.

Think about it like this: when we do anything, we are looking for something. This can be positive or negative.

Every time we take a job or go on a vacation, we are looking for something and looking for something that will fill us.

When you look at porn. Why do you do that? What are you hoping that will fill in you?

When you work too much, what are you hoping that will do for you?

When you get angry and fly off the handle, what are you hoping to feel?

When you keep all your emotions in, what are you hoping you will get?

Every time we sin, we are hoping for something. 

Again, when we think of changing something, we look for ways to improve something, but the reality is that something came from somewhere. We have to face that.

This is painful for many of us. We have to look at our stories, what has come before us, and why we do things. 

To move forward in freedom, you have to ask, why do I respond in anger? Why do I pull away from people? Where does that come from in my story? Where have I seen this in my life or family or origin?

Now, before you email me, yes, God hears and answers all our prayers. That isn’t what this post is about. Although sometimes, if we’re honest, God doesn’t answer our prayers on our timeline or in the way we want.

There is a prayer that he always answers yes to.

What is it?

It might surprise you.

It is the prayer for wisdom.

In James 1:5, we’re told that if we lack wisdom, we are to ask for it and God will give it. That he gives it generously and ungrudgingly to all.

Have you ever had a decision where you weren’t sure what to do?

Is now the time to get married? Do you marry this person? Are they the one?

Is now the time to have kids? How do you know if you are ready?

What college do you choose? What major? What happens if you get into and find out that you hate that major?

What jobs? How do you know which one is the best? 

We face decisions all the time. 

Amazingly, scientists believe that we make 35,000 decisions a day!

Some decisions you are aware of. You make a list, pro’s, con’s, trying to figure it out, talk to friends. 

Some decisions, we are entirely unaware that they are happening. 

But how do you decide?

Have you ever noticed that some people always know what to do? They have a calm about themselves. 

They not only know what to do and when to do it but once they make that decision, they stop worrying about it. They stop stressing over whether or not that was the right one.

What do they know that you and I don’t? Wisdom.

Wisdom is not based on feelings, but on knowing and trusting the power of God’s promises.

For many of us, wisdom comes through life experiences, but there is a secret sauce to decision making and wisdom, and that is asking God.

Often in a crisis though, we ask God to take something away, to do this or that, we ask for an answer, but we rarely ask for wisdom. Do you know why? My hunch is asking for wisdom puts some responsibility on us. Asking God to take it away or do something puts the responsibility all on him.

So that if I don’t get the answer I want or it doesn’t go the way I thought, I can throw up my hands and blame God. Many times, the answer to our prayers will be connected to an action we take.

Prayer is all about trust. It’s why we struggle with it. Why we don’t pray as much as we should or as bold as we should.

But what if James is right? I believe he is. God loves to give us wisdom for what is next.

Another thing we do is we ask God to show us the whole puzzle of our lives and the situation we are facing. We want to know all the steps along the way, but wisdom is simply for the next thing. I had a mentor tell me that if God showed us all the steps it would take to get somewhere, most of us wouldn’t get out of bed. And that’s true. Some of the hardest parts of my life have been some of the most beneficial, but if I knew ahead of time what I was walking into, I’m not sure I would’ve signed up.

And this is what happens for many of us in decisions: we get paralyzed by them. And then we stand still and watch the parade of life go by, and we wonder, why that person over there sees God move like they do, that their life is the adventure that it is.

So, think of the one area of your life that you need an answer. A way forward.

What if instead of asking for an answer or for God to clear the way (you can still ask those things), you ask for wisdom.

Sunday, I preached on how to hack pain and difficulty in life as part of our Life Hacks series. One of the things I wasn’t able to get to is how to walk with someone through pain, how do you let others walk with you.

This is often hard to do, from both perspectives.

When you are the one walking through the difficulty, we tend to keep it to ourselves. We don’t want to be a bother to other people; we think we should be able to handle it on our own or we struggle to wonder if people care about us.

When you are a friend watching someone walk through difficulty, it is hard to know where to start. How do you step in and help? What do they need? Especially if it is around sickness or death, it can sometimes be hard to know what to say or how to say it. Often then, we choose not to do anything, even though we’d like to.

Over the summer, I read a great book by Kate Bowler called Everything Happens for a Reason (and other lies I’ve loved). Kate was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer, and at the end, she shares how to walk with people, because it is difficult, we want to do it well, but we often find ourselves fumbling it.

According to Bowler, here are some things to not say:

• ‘Well, at least . . .’ Whoa. Hold up there. Were you about to make a comparison? At least it’s not . . . what? Stage V cancer? Don’t minimize.
• ‘In my long life, I’ve learned that . . .’ Geez. Do you want a medal? I get it! You lived forever. Well, some people are worried that they won’t, or that things are so hard they won’t want to. So ease up on the life lessons. Life is a privilege, not a reward.
• ‘It’s going to get better. I promise.’ Well, fairy godmother, that’s going to be a tough row to hoe when things go badly.
• ‘God needed an angel.’ This one takes the cake because (a) it makes God look sadistic and needy and (b) angels are, according to Christian tradition, created from scratch. Not dead people looking for a cameo in Ghost. You see how confusing it is when we just pretend that the deceased return to help you find your car keys or make pottery?
• ‘Everything happens for a reason.’ The only thing worse than saying this is pretending that you know the reason. I’ve had hundreds of people tell me the reason for my cancer. Because of my sin. Because of my unfaithfulness. Because God is fair. Because God is unfair. Because of my aversion to Brussels sprouts. I mean, no one is short of reasons. So if people tell you this, make sure you are there when they go through the cruelest moments of their lives, and start offering your own. When someone is drowning, the only thing worse than failing to throw them a life preserver is handing them a reason.
• ‘I’ve done some research and…’ I thought I should listen to my oncologist and my nutritionist and my team of specialists, but it turns out that I should be listening to you. Yes, please, tell me more about the medical secrets that only one flaxseed provider in Orlando knows. Wait, let me get a pen.
• ‘When my aunt had cancer…’ My darling dear, I know you are trying to relate to me. Now you see me and you are reminded that terrible things have happened in the world. But guess what? That is where I live, in the valley of the shadow of death. But now I’m on vacation because I’m not in the hospital or dealing with my mess. Do I have to take my sunglasses off and join you in the saddest journey down memory lane, or do you mind if I finish my mojito?
• ‘So how are the treatments going? How are you really?’ This is the toughest one of all. I can hear you trying to understand my world and be on my side. But picture the worst thing that has ever happened to you. Got it?

Here are some things to say:

• “I’d love to bring you a meal this week. Can I email you about it?” Oh, thank goodness. I am starving, but mostly I can never figure out something to tell people that I need, even if I need it. But really, bring me anything. Chocolate. A potted plant. A set of weird erasers. I remember the first gift I got that wasn’t about cancer, and I was so happy I cried. Send me funny emails filled with YouTube clips to watch during chemotherapy. Do something that suits your talents. But most important, bring me presents! 
• “You are a beautiful person.” Unless you are used to speaking in a creepy windowless-van kind of voice, comments like these go a long way. Tell your friend something about his or her life that you admire without making it feel like a eulogy.
• “I am so grateful to hear about how you’re doing. Just know that I’m on your team.” You mean I don’t have to give you an update? You asked someone else for all the gory details? Whew. Great! Now, I get to feel like you are both informed and concerned. So, don’t gild the lily. What you have said is amazing, so don’t screw it up now by being a nosy Nellie. Ask a question about any other aspect of my life. 
• “Can I give you a hug?” Some of my best moments with people have come with a hug or a hand on the arm. People who are suffering often—not always—feel isolated and want to be touched. Hospitals and big institutions, in general, tend to treat people like cyborgs or throwaways. So, ask whether your friend feels up for a hug and give her some sugar. 
• “Oh, my friend, that sounds so hard.” Perhaps the weirdest thing about having something awful happen is the fact that no one wants to hear about it. People tend to want to hear the summary, but they don’t usually want to hear it from you. And that it was awful. So, simmer down and let your friend talk for a bit. Be willing to stare down the ugliness and sadness. Life is absurdly hard, and pretending it isn’t is exhausting.
• *****Silence***** The truth is that no one knows what to say. It’s awkward. Pain is awkward. Tragedy is awkward. People’s weird, suffering bodies are awkward. But take the advice of one man who wrote to me with his policy: Show up and shut up. 

Our culture is one that likes new things.

I know I do.

Regularly I talk to people around the same topic: Wishing they were somewhere else.

Not necessarily physically (although sometimes that’s it), but wanting to be somewhere else in life.

I had a season where I was discontent with my life and where I was. I was frustrated at my lack of progress; I started to dislike where I lived, and a friend looked at me and said, “What if you’re exactly where you’re supposed to be? What if where you are right now, with how your life is, this is where God wants you?”

Honestly, I looked at him and said, “If that’s the case, then I don’t like God at the moment.”

But life and where we end up is a battle of contentment.

We often focus on other things, yet I find it interesting in Philippians, that Paul talks about contentment.

Usually, that gets attached to finances (which makes sense), but what if contentment is bigger than that?

What if it covers contentment with your career, house, your body (!), your kids?

What if you are precisely where God wants you to be?

Notice, I didn’t say you would stay there. Sometimes God needs to keep us in certain places and seasons for us to learn things for what is next, but also for others to be prepared for us in what is next.

One of my biggest struggles and I don’t think I’m alone in this is experiencing and believing God’s love for me.

And yet…

One of the strongest and clearest messages throughout the Bible is God’s love for us. We are reminded that God doesn’t forget us (even though many of us feel forgotten), that God is close to us (also though He often feels far away), and that not only has He created us in His image but He knows us, and that doesn’t scare Him away (although we always fear that the moment someone truly knows us, they’ll bolt).

And yet, many of us still struggle to believe God loves us.

We believe God loves the world. We believe that through Jesus, God will redeem and restore the world, but we have a hard time placing ourselves in that.

So we run, we hide, we put up fronts, wear masks, beat ourselves up for past mistakes, try to earn God’s love, try to prove ourselves worth God’s love, and all the while God’s love sits there.

Philip Yancey, in his book Prayer: Does It Make Any Difference? shares this story: David Ford, a professor at Cambridge, asked a Catholic priest the most common problem he encountered in twenty years of hearing confession. With no hesitation, the priest replied, “God.” Very few parishioners he meets in confession behave as if God is a God of love, forgiveness, gentleness, and compassion. They see God as someone to cower before, not as someone like Jesus, worthy of our trust. Ford comments, “This is perhaps the hardest truth of any to grasp. Do we wake up every morning amazed that we are loved by God?… Do we allow our day to be shaped by God’s desire to relate to us?”

The problem for many of us is that we read verses about God’s love for the world and us (John 3:16), that Jesus loves us (John 15:9), that God predestined us in love (Ephesians 1:4 – 5), that God sings over us (Zephaniah 3:17), that God loved us first (1 John 4:19), that God draws us to himself (John 6:44). We read Paul saying over 160 times that as a follower of Jesus, we are “in Christ,” and yet we live each day as if God is disappointed in us, indifferent towards us, mildly happy with us or “likes” us.

What if, and I say what if not because it isn’t right but because we wonder if it is.

But what if, all those verses listed above, are about you and God’s love for you?

They are.

In Colossians 3:12, Paul tells us that followers of Jesus are chosen, holy ones, dearly loved.

One of the things all of us long for is to be chosen, to be wanted, to be pursued. 

Many of us have nightmares from the playground of being chosen last for the team. Anything but the last one picked.

Not being asked to prom or the banquet, not being chosen for a scholarship, grant, or job.

Levi Lusko said God didn’t get stuck with you; He chose you.

Holy ones carry the idea that we are set apart, different. For something to be set apart, there is care with that person or thing. To be set apart carries the idea that there is a specific purpose for us, a plan, that’s why it is set apart.

Dearly loved is exactly what it sounds like. Many of us, though read that and wonder. You are dearly loved. Not just loved, dearly loved.

This is the basis for the Christian life, God’s love for you. Not what you do, not what you can do, but what God has done for you.

The most important thing about you is that God loves you.

David Benner said, “Some Christians base their identity on being a sinner. I think they have it wrong – or only half right. You are not simply a sinner; you are a deeply loved sinner. And there is all the difference in the world between the two.”

One of the questions I wrestle with personally or talk with others about is around the question: Am I really growing? Am I changing? Am I on the right path? If we don’t know or aren’t careful, we’ll give up before we should.

It can feel like you are, but then you look at your life and wonder if you are.

It’s like going to the gym, eating healthy, but the scale stays the same, and you don’t see many changes day to day, but over a more extended period, you begin to see it.

If you don’t stay focused on this longer-term picture, it can feel deflating, and you give up.

But how do you know if you’re on the right track?

Recently, I started a new sermon series on the power of your mind when it comes to change. Too often, we focus on changing behaviors, but the reality is our brain is incredibly powerful when it comes to change.

But in that series, I shared from Colossians 1, four ways to know you are on the right path of growth:

1. You can see it. This might seem obvious, but it isn’t always. The Bible calls this fruit, bearing fruit, the evidence of change. Often, we can see fruit in other people but struggle to see it in ourselves.

The test of faith and change is whether or not it makes any difference in how we live and treat others.

Have we changed? Can you see that your life is different, even in small ways?

For most of us, we want the result now, and that is when we’ll celebrate. We’ll mark when our marriage is fixed, or we hit that goal we were after. But to get to that place, we have to celebrate the small steps along the way, the 1% changes we experience and walk through daily.

2. Growing in knowledge of God. Knowledge is not just the ability to retain information or know something. Everyone in America knows how to lose weight: eat less, move more. Growing in knowledge is the ability to apply what you know.

In most places in the New Testament, faith is discussed in terms of belief in Jesus and his life, death, and resurrection.

In Colossians, faith is not just a belief in Jesus but also a faith in the power of God.

N.T. Wright said, To believe that God raised Jesus from the dead is to believe in the God who raises the dead. Such faith not merely assents to a fact about Jesus; it recognizes a truth about God.

Change comes from placing our hope in the God who has the power to raise Jesus from the dead.

3. Being strengthened with God’s power for endurance and patience. We need perseverance and patience when it comes to change because God doesn’t tell us he will take us out of difficult situations or steps, only that he will be with us. We will not be alone.

Hope in the power of God means that we have freedom from bitterness, anger, resentment, self-pity, and hopelessness.

Why? Because sometimes change will take us through our greatest fears.

What if the road that will take you where you need to go is filled with potholes, steps backward and will feel like an uphill climb both ways?

The reality of change that we rarely like to admit or talk about is that it almost always gets harder before it gets easier; it goes down before it goes up. I remember when I weighed 300 pounds and wanted to lose weight. At first, I cut out soda and lost weight. Like 10 pounds in a couple of weeks immediately. Then I put some on. Then it got harder because cutting out soda is one thing, changing portion sizes, not snacking, not having two helpings, that’s harder. Then I had to confront, why was I overweight? What did I look to food for? We can find reasons to make a change and keep it for an hour, for a day. It is when it becomes days, weeks and months that the change gets harder.

Any change will involve endurance and patience. It will not happen as quickly as we like or even the way we expected it to. While different, endurance and patience both carry this idea of not giving up, pushing forward.

You see this when a couple goes in for counseling. They want to see some change right now. But the reality is that they spent years living and interacting in unhealthy ways. That doesn’t switch overnight. Their minds and hearts towards their spouse think one way, and they are having to rewire their brains and work from new patterns of thinking.

4. Gratitude. This one is the most surprising. Gratitude matters because gratitude is a choice you make. It is not a feeling as much as a decision that a feeling follows.

We tell our kids to say thank you. Why? We are helping them to choose gratitude.

Gratitude is a choice. It is a choice to embrace all of life, the good and the bad, the joyful and the painful, all of it as a gift.

Gratitude in the small changes you see in your life and how things are changing and moving forward.

Gratitude helps us to see life in new ways and rewire our hearts and minds. The writers of Scripture knew this. Science knows this. It’s time we apply this simple tool.

How does that work?

Just by it writing down, telling a friend, acknowledging the progress you have made.