It's Friday, and Lent, so how bout a little beginning look at the Prayer of Jonah. Prolly lots of us, by now, have failed at whatever little sacrifice we thought we might undertake. I mean, you, not me. I determined to get Aldi Flowers every week and I am happy to report that I've done just that. You can come over and verify the level and depth of my personal holiness because they are sitting right there. But perhaps you have picked some kind of other terrible discipline, like praying more, or fasting, in which case you are probably feeling pretty miserable right about now. What do you do when you decide to Pray More, or even Be A Better Person, and when you arrive at the designated moment to do just those things, you just can't pull it off? That's where The Prayer of Jonah will be a help to you.
Before we go on, though, it might be nice to know Why Jonah. Why not Jabez? Or better yet, Jesus? Jesus prayed some great prayers, and you're supposed to be like him. You probably even know some of those prayers by heart. I expect you've said them, and occassionally meant them, and even listened to other people saying them, or rather it. It starts with Our Father, stop me if you've heard of it. Well, that is a very good prayer. We might even say, since Jesus himself prayed it, that it is a Perfect Prayer. So you should definitly pray that prayer, possibly every day. But here's the thing, you're not perfect like Jesus. At some points in your regular life, you will feel like you are perishing (perish means to die). You may be actually dying, or you may feel like you might as well die, or you may feel like there's nothing you can do, no matter how hard you try, you're going to go on failing until you do actually die, even if that's like 20 or 50 years from now. So, when you experience that sense of Perishing, it can seem sort of, hmmmm, what's the word I'm looking for, lame to say Our Father, who art in heaven, etc, especially if you are, in fact, alone, then you might try to say My Father, but that just feels weird.
I don't think I need to go really into why The Prayer of Jabez might not be of use to you, at your personal moment of real or perceived perishing. For one thing, you didn't prolly read that book, even if someone gave it to you as a nice present. Also, who even knows who Jabez is. And furthermore also, he was praying for Land, and that may not actually be a help to you, in your dark moment. Suddenly aquiring land may turn out to be a real pain.
Of course, you could try praying The Prayer of Hezekiah, or The Prayer of Daniel, or even, The Prayer of Moses when he was really really really angry with the people of Israel and thought maybe God should kill them all right now. But consider where you are. Why are you needing to pray? You need to pray because you should have prayed before, but for whatever reason you didn't, or couldn't, and now you feel like you're going to die, or would like to die.
Jonah was in a similar circumstance.
“Then Jonah prayed to the Lord his God, from the belly of the fish.” Jonah 2:1
Jonah, we might say, was the premier, the essential Failure. When told by God directly to do one thing, he immediately packed his bag and did everything but that. He was a deliberate, rebellious, defiant, angry, sinning Failure. In so far as a person is able to fail to do what God wants them to do, he failed that far. And that utter complete failing led to a very deep profound sense of Perishing, in that he was thrown into the water, began to feel that he was drowning, there was nothing at all he could for himself in that moment, he was definitely going to die, and then God reacued him. This is why his prayer might be a good prayer for you. Was it very clear how you were supposed to live? Was God not at all ambiguous about the fact that you were to obey him and love him, and love the people around you, perfectly. Did you do it? Did you not rather fail to do both those things? Do you not carry on failing at both those things? Are you occassionally drowning in failure? Then you are in exactly the right place to pray this prayer.
Next Time: Verse Two
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