August 11, 2012 – sheaoakley.com

Prayer, Anger and Honesty

Honest prayer may sometimes mean sharing our worst emotions towards God with God.Most of us try very hard to present to our Lord the most pious self we like to think of ourselves as being. We attempt to always come across as humble, loving, caring, holy people. This is especially the case with any public prayer we may be called to take part in but it also tends to hold true even when we are “alone” with God trying to talk to Him.

This goes beyond the old joke about “King James prayers” in which we suddenly find ourselves using words like “thee” and “thou”. What I am talking about goes far further than archaic syntax. What happens is that we try to come across as what we think God would want us to be when we attempt to communicate with Him. We somehow think (whether consciously or unconsciously) that He will be fooled by the outward piety we have learned to sometimes use as a shield against Him seeing what is really going on in our hearts. At such moments we forget what the word “omniscient” means. God is all knowing. When we try to appear as humble, loving servants of the King when we are actually (if hopefully only for the moment) resentful, bitter opponents of what we feel is a tyrant, God is well aware of it. He knows our hearts. It does us no good to sugarcoat our real feelings.

In my opinion our Lord would rather hear an honest, angry rant than a dishonest, cloying prayer from one of his struggling children. At least the one doing the ranting is being voluntarily transparent before a God who knows what is really going on at that moment anyway. As a Christian counselor once suggested to me maybe, just maybe, the God of the cross is secure enough in Himself to sustain an angry, if ultimately unwarranted, complaint from someone He loves. We generally avoid sharing our uglier emotions with, and even towards, God for one reason and one reason alone: we are afraid of incurring His wrath.

But wrath is not the response of God to men like Job, Jeremiah, and some of the bitterer psalmists, all of whom voice their negative feelings to God freely and apparently without the fear of a sudden lightning bolt in their direction. In Job’s case one of his infamous “counselors” asks him in chapter 33, verse 13 “why do you complain against God?” (NAS) and at least one translation actually renders the word “complain” as “rage”. Yet God does not destroy Job for his anger, perhaps because He gives grace to those who, like Job, are in great pain.

Let it be clear that I am not here advocating anger with God for the sake of anger with God. Nor am I claiming that even the most honest anger we express to Him is without sin. The truth is that any antagonism towards an innately perfect being cannot finally be justified in the legal sense of the word.

The issue is more whether that Perfect Being prefers the sin of anger to be compounded by the sin of hypocrisy, and this is what we do when we bring our false selves to God in prayer. If we are not feeling warm, fuzzy feelings towards our Lord it is better if we are honest, even brutally honest, with Him about how we are really feeling. At least such honesty “clears the air” and sometimes leads us beyond the anger to what might really be ailing us. Things like pain, hurt, and loss.

Elsewhere in the Scriptures we are told the truth will set us free. Part of living a truthful, and thus free, life is loving and trusting God enough to share the truth of how we are really feeling with Him when it really counts, and that might be more often than we are aware. Many times, as fallen creatures living in a fallen world we desperately need to express our pain, even pain we are not altogether un-responsible for, to the only One who can redeem us from it.

Never be afraid to be honest with that Redeemer.