The Hedge At The End Of Every Prayer

You say it at the end of everything now.

If it is Your will.

You say it about the big thing and you say it about a parking space. You said it last week over a meal, which you noticed at the time and thought was slightly absurd and said it anyway.

And here is what you know about it that nobody else does.

It used to mean something else.

There was a period, years back, when you said those words and they were the best part of the prayer. They meant: I have brought this to You and I actually trust You with the answer, including an answer I would not choose. They cost something to say and they were said deliberately.

Now they arrive before you have finished the request. They are not the end of a prayer, they are a hedge in front of one, and their job is to make sure that if nothing happens you never technically asked for anything.

You have turned a surrender into an insurance policy, and you did it so gradually that there was no moment where it changed.

Let me be careful here before anything else.

I am not accusing you.

There is nothing here that anybody would call sin, and I want to say plainly that the words themselves are right and good and Jesus prayed them in the worst hour anybody has ever had. I am not going to take them off you.

I am saying that you and I both know they are doing a different job now. That is all.

Handing over is not hedging

Here is a line from a psalm written by a man in genuine trouble.

But I trusted in thee, O LORD: I said, Thou art my God. My times are in thy hand: deliver me from the hand of mine enemies, and from them that persecute me.Psalm 31:14-15

Read the order of it, because the order is everything.

He says my times are in thy hand. That is the surrender. Complete, unreserved, no clause attached.

And then, in the very next breath, without a pause and without any embarrassment, he says deliver me. A direct request. An imperative, actually, addressed to God.

He does not soften the request because he has just surrendered. He does not surrender in order to avoid the request. The two sit side by side in one sentence and neither one is protecting him from the other.

That is what the words used to be for you. He is doing what you used to do.

So let me turn and speak straight at you, at that desk with the lamp on.

You are permitted to hand it over and then ask for it plainly. Not one day, not when your motives are cleaner, not once you have worked out whether it is allowed. Right now, tonight, you are in the position of the man in verse fifteen, and he did both halves in one breath with no apparatus between them. That is not my opinion. That is what is written, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a written line and lays it on a real man at a real desk.

Now, why did the hedge grow?

Because a request that was not answered started to feel like a debt you had run up, and the words let you spend without recording anything.

Never fully asking means never being fully refused. That is the arithmetic and it is elegant and it has kept a man upright for some years.

That is not faithlessness. That is a careful man protecting himself with the only material he had lying around, which happened to be a piece of true theology.

And hear this, because it is settled and not still open. You are held when you ask plainly and held when the answer is no, and the holding is not what the hedge was protecting you from anyway. The word says my times are in thy hand, which puts the whole schedule somewhere safe before a single request is made, and it is His Spirit who carries a written promise into a real study at a real hour of the night.

Surrender first, then ask straight. That is the order in the psalm and the hedge is not in it anywhere.