God Is Not a Vending Machine

THE ASSUMPTION WAS SIMPLE: prayer was for getting things from God. This chapter exists to unsay it. Prayer is communion with God, and every petition belongs inside that communion; reverse the order and prayer eventually collapses. Nobody ever sat me down and taught me the false version, and if you had asked me then whether God was a dispenser of favors, I would have been offended. But watch what a man does and you will learn his real theology. I prayed when I needed something. I judged my prayers by whether the something arrived. When it came, I called my faith strong; when it stayed away, I went hunting for the malfunction, in my faith, in my conduct, in my technique. After years of sitting with other people and their prayers, I can tell you this belief quietly runs most of us.

A vending machine is an honest piece of engineering, and I mean it no insult. You put in exact change, you press the code, and the thing drops into the tray. The whole transaction is over in a minute, and neither party owes the other anything further. You do not thank it. You do not linger beside it for the pleasure of its company. And when you pay and press and nothing drops, you feel a very specific indignation, because a contract has been broken. You slap the glass, which has never once helped, and then you stop feeding it coins. For years, without ever saying so, that was my working picture of prayer. Faith was the coinage. The promises of Scripture were the codes I punched in. God, somewhere behind the glass, was the mechanism obliged to deliver.

I tried the transaction for the first time as a boy. A piece of schoolwork was due the next morning, and on the night before, half of it was done and the rest had beaten me flat. So I took a cross, set it on top of the unfinished work, and said, "Jesus, I want you to finish my work. I'm going to shower now, and when I return, I should see the work completed." I even gave Him privacy while He worked. I came back clean and hopeful, and the disappointment dropped on me like cold water: the work sat exactly as I had left it. I laugh at that boy now, and I also recognize him, because his prayer was my adult praying without the manners. He had put in his coin and pressed his code, and he at least had a child's excuse for it. It took me years to accept the lesson handed to him that evening: the fact that God can do a thing does not mean He owes it.

That boy grew into a young man, and the picture only hardened. As a young believer I prayed, earnestly and for years, that God would make me as rich as the wealthiest man alive. I did not want the money for myself; I had settled that objection before I ever bowed my head. I prayed something like this: Would it not benefit Your Kingdom if I became that successful? With such influence I could preach the Gospel and bring people to Christ in droves. The wealth could build You a beautiful church. Why should those who proclaim Your Gospel live in poverty?

People may not be attracted to You if they see us poor. I meant every word, and I had the sequence worked out for Him too, fortune first, influence next, then the great harvest of souls, as if the Almighty had been waiting all this time on my liquidity. You may stare at this page in disbelief that a believer prayed such a prayer. I will only say that I have since heard the same prayer from many mouths, and from the inside it always sounds noble.

God never rebuked me for it. What came back was nothing, year after year of nothing, and slowly it became plain that whatever God had in mind for me, it was never that. Scripture eventually showed me why the refusal was mercy. Jesus told a parable about a rich man whose fields produced so well that his only problem was storage (Luke 12:16-21). The man built bigger barns, then stood among them talking to his own soul, promising it ease and long years. Pay attention to that word. In Scripture the word translated "soul" means the whole of a man's life, everything he is, and this man handles his own life as one more crop to stockpile and spend on himself.

Then God calls him a fool, and Scripture means something sharp by that. The fool of Psalm 14 is the man who lives as though there is no God, whatever his lips profess. This very night, God tells him, your soul is required of you: eternity breaking into time without an appointment. He had confused the size of his storage with the size of his soul. The hollow in a human heart is a space carved for communion, and no amount of consumption ever fills it; this man packed his with perishable things. He had provided for every year except eternity, and he went out of the world with full barns and empty hands, because he had stored up treasure for himself and was not rich toward God.

When I finally heard that parable, I recognized my own barns. Mine were to be built for God, which is exactly what made my version so hard to see through. Underneath, the accounting was identical: influence measured in crowds, worth measured in wealth, the Kingdom advanced by the tools the world uses to advance everything else. I had drafted a business plan and asked God to countersign it. He declined, and His declining was mercy, because praying for wealth in order to further the Kingdom turns faith itself into a transaction, and it forgets how God actually works. He works through what looks weak and humble in the eyes of the world, so that the power is unmistakably His. He also works on the worker while He works. There was a mercy under the mercy, and it took me years to accept it: I had been made, and so have you, not for comfort but for glory, and the glory God prepares for His children is never the gold of kings. Had He made me rich for the Kingdom's sake, I am fairly sure the Kingdom would have gotten very little out of me, and God would have gotten none of me at all.

Now let me state the teaching at the center of this chapter, because my foolish prayer was only one costume the error wears. The goal of prayer is communion with God. Petitions have an honored place, and I bring mine daily, but they are offered inside that communion, in its shelter and on its terms. Do not reverse the order. If the goal of my praying is that my petitions be granted, disappointment is only a matter of time, and when enough of it accumulates I will walk away from God. I have watched that happen more times than I can count. Watch, too, what the reversal does to love. A vending machine keeps perfect accounts, and a transaction is careful never to give more than it gets. Love keeps no such books. Love does not calculate; it wastes; it spends itself and files no receipt, and a heart trained to pray the machine's way stopped weighing the answer against the asking long ago. The reversed order also keeps a person a spiritual child. Hand a small child a wrapped present and the giver ceases to exist; the spiritual child is no different, more interested in the gifts than in the Parent, and cold to the thought of communing with Him.

I have sat with people on the far side of that leaving, and their unbelief is strangely personal. They tell me they no longer believe in God, and then they spend an hour telling me, with real heat, everything He failed to do: the prayers He ignored, the healing He withheld, the years they poured in for nothing. Their grief gives them away. Nobody storms out of a room that was always empty. What died in most of them was a contract someone had assured them God had signed, insert faith and receive outcome, and when it failed they did what all of us do to a machine that eats the coins. Underneath the wreckage there is usually a whisper, and I believe the whisper has an author. The devil lies to the disappointed. He tells them the request went ungranted because God ignored them, or could not manage it, or did not care. The lie only works on a man whose prayer was a transaction, because inside a transaction those are the only explanations left.

I must say a hard thing here, and I say it as a man describing his own former faith, not yours. God never signed that contract. Christianity is not first of all about God answering our prayers and handing us everything we hoped for. I have known believers who denied themselves, took up their cross, and followed Christ, yet experienced nothing they would call supernatural. No vision came, no windfall, not even a vivid dream. By the contract's arithmetic those people are failures, and I have watched that verdict settle its shame onto some of the most faithful faces I know. The verdict is a lie. The faith was never about the recovery of the wealth, the health, or the life we once had and lost. It is about our restoration as the image and likeness of God, and everything else arrives as a bonus. The truest blessing was never what I received; it is who I become in communion with Christ. A person who has grasped that much has already stepped out of the machine's shadow, whether or not a single circumstance has changed.

Jesus attacked this root directly, in the very act of teaching His disciples to pray. Before He gave them one word of the prayer we all know, He told them this about the Father who would be listening:

Therefore do not be like them. For your Father knows the things you have need of before you ask Him. (Matthew 6:8 NKJV)

That sentence unmakes every transactional theory of prayer. If prayer is a mechanism for informing God, the verse abolishes it, because He already knows. If prayer is a mechanism for persuading God, the verse abolishes that as well, for what leverage remains with a Father who counted your needs before you felt them? Now notice what the verse leaves standing. It leaves "your Father." Jesus removes the coins, the codes, and the glass, and where the machine stood He sets a Person who knew you first. Whatever prayer is for, it is for something that outlives the informing and the persuading, something still in the room when the only thing left is the relationship.

St. Augustine faced the obvious objection sixteen centuries ago: why ask at all, if God already knows? A widow named Pro-ba had written to him, anxious to pray as she ought, and his long answer to her has steadied me for years. God has no need of our asking, Augustine told her, and He commands it anyway, because the asking exercises our desire, stretches it, widens it, until the soul grows large enough to receive what God is preparing to give. The prayer does its first work on the one praying. Conversation with anyone we love does the same; only with machines do we trade goods and walk off unchanged. Proba never got a technique out of him. She got what I hope you are beginning to suspect: the asking itself was drawing her into company.

The old writers called prayer the breath of the Christian, and I finally understand why they meant it plainly. A man can think about breathing, talk about breathing, admire diagrams of the lungs, and suffocate all the same. Air does him good only when he draws it in. In the same way, a man may think about God and speak about God for fifty years and never once have a relationship with Him, because thinking about God and talking about God are not the same as breathing Him in. You can have a relationship with an idea; you cannot commune with what is not alive. Only praying is the drawing of breath. I say this with some shame, because many years as a clergyman have taught me how easy it is to handle the holy things all day without once speaking to Him. Communion can sound like a word reserved for mystics on mountains. It names something plain enough for a kitchen table: being with, remaining with, returning to. Some evenings it looks like coming to God with nothing to report and no requests to file, the way you sit down beside someone you love at the end of a long day, and the sitting is the point.

✦ ✦ ✦

YEARS INTO THIS SLOW conversion, a man who had known me a long time asked me about my praying. He had watched the shape of my life, the early rising, the returning to God in every season, and he knew perfectly well that plenty of the things I had prayed for had never happened. It was an ordinary conversation in an ordinary place, which is where the real theological questions of a life get asked. There was no malice in it, only honest puzzlement, the kind I have learned to treasure because it says out loud what politer people only think.

"Why do you keep at all this?" he said. "Does it work? Do you get your prayers answered?"

"No," I said. "I just want to commune with my God." He looked at me the way you look at a man who has answered a different question from the one you asked. But I had answered his exact question. It had simply stopped being my question somewhere along the years, and until that moment I had not noticed the change. The young man who prayed for the wealth of kings could never have said that sentence; he would have defended prayer's success rate, produced testimonies, explained the delays away. I still bring my petitions, and you will see in every chapter of this book that I never stopped bringing them. But the only outcome I have a right to expect from every prayer, without exception, is God Himself, and His will. Nothing else. Once that became true of me, the cares I carry into prayer began to weigh very little against the joy of the company, and none of them, granted or refused, can separate me from the love of Christ. There is a verse in the Psalms that maps this conversion from the inside:

When You said, "Seek My face," My heart said to You, "Your face, LORD, I will seek." (Psalm 27:8)

Notice who speaks first. The seeking that looks like our own initiative begins as God's invitation; David is answering a voice that called him first. Notice also what is sought. A face is the one thing you cannot want for any reason beyond itself. Bread you want against hunger, rain you want for the fields, but a face you want for the sake of who looks out of it. For years I watched God's hand, waiting to see what it would set in the tray, and a man can do business that way for a lifetime and never once look up at the face above the hand. In this same psalm David asks for one thing only: to dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of his life and to behold His beauty. That is a man who has finally looked up. The hand is as generous as it ever was. He has simply stopped mistaking the hand for the whole of God.

None of this means we must arrive at God's door with laundered desires. C.S. Lewis, in his letters on prayer, insisted that we must lay before God "what is in us, not what ought to be in us," and I can vouch for the counsel. The most useful prayer of my young life was that embarrassing petition for the wealth of kings. It was foolish, and it was genuinely in me, and I said it to Him out loud, which gave Him something true to work on. A respectable prayer would have left the folly inside, unconfessed, running my life from the dark. That longing was not a sin to be crushed, and I did not have to pretend it had never lived in me; and notice what God did with it once it was out in the open: He refused the currency and kept the longing.

I wanted my life to count for His Kingdom, and He has been honoring that desire ever since, in a coin I did not know existed.

He does want His children to prosper. I believe that more firmly today than I believed it when I prayed for millions. The prospering He intends is in eternal things: in wisdom, in love, in holiness, in courage, in compassion. Those are the treasures of the Kingdom, the kind moth and rust cannot touch and no market can ever crash, which is more than I could once say for the fortune I begged Him for.

People with a transactional view of prayer often lean their whole weight on one promise of Jesus. I understand the appeal. Its closing words can sound like the finest contract ever drawn up:

If you abide in Me, and My words abide in you, you will ask what you desire, and it shall be done for you. (John 15:7)

Print that last clause on a banner and you have the whole theology of my youth. But the sentence begins earlier, with abiding, the word Jesus uses for the way a branch lives inside a vine. A branch is the least transactional thing in creation. It files no requests with the vine and keeps no ledger against it. Everything it has arrives as shared life, sap in its season and fruit in its time, none of it demanded. Abide in Me, Jesus says. Let My words make their home in you. Then ask whatever you desire, because by then your desires will have lived in Him long enough to take His shape. You will ask for what He is already giving. The promise is perfectly good. It is a promise made to branches, and it reads like a blank check only to a man in a hurry who has skipped the grafting.

One honest question remains, and you may be holding it now. If God already knows my needs, and the true goal of prayer is His company, should I stop asking for things? Should my prayers grow too dignified for requests? I tried that for a season, and the whole time it dressed itself up as maturity. It was actually a new way of protecting myself from disappointment, wanting nothing so that nothing could be refused. Scripture will not allow it. Your Father knows the things you have need of before you ask Him, Jesus said, and then in almost the same breath He taught those same disciples to ask: for bread, for pardon, for deliverance, plain requests of the daily kind. He knows, and still He says ask. A command like that can only come from wanting. Somewhere in the heart of the Father is a delight in the sound of His children asking, and what kind of delight that is, anyone who has ever been tugged at by small insistent hands has already begun to guess.