“But the angel said to him, “Do not be afraid, Zechariah, because your prayer has been heard. Your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you will name him John.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Have you ever prayed for something and didn’t get it? That can be a disheartening experience. We pray, and pray, and pray, and…nothing. Eventually we start to wonder why we should even bother. I mean, we’ve been praying for minutes and nothing has happened. Or maybe you’ve been praying a bit longer than that. But then we find all kinds of encouragement in the Scriptures to turn to prayer. The various authors obviously considered prayer to be quite a gift. Let’s talk about this next gift of Advent and if it really is.

Prayer can be a frustrating thing. Well, prayer itself isn’t necessarily frustrating. The frustration comes when we understand its purpose incorrectly. Perhaps the single most significant misunderstanding of prayer is that it is a means of getting what we want. We pray in order to make something happen that we want to happen.

That’s it. For so many people—including even you at least from time to time I suspect…I’ve certainly been there—that’s the whole of our praying. We want to have something we don’t currently have. We want a particular circumstance to go a particular way. We want someone to get well…soon. We want to avoid a certain outcome whose likelihood we have contributed to in some way. We want to pass a test. We want. But we know we can’t make it happen on our own. So, we pray. Why? Because of a belief that there just may be a higher power who can influence (or force) things to go in the direction we want.

If this is our understanding of prayer—and again, whether or not you’re willing to acknowledge this out loud, I suspect it is your tacit understanding of prayer at least sometimes—then we will occasionally be happy and consider prayer a good and useful thing. After all, by the law of averages, sometimes things go our way. Sometimes we get what we want.

But not always. Maybe not even often. In this much more common set of circumstances, if you have a personality that is inclined toward hope, you might say to yourself, “Maybe next time,” and keep on praying for other things. Maybe even that same thing. If, on the other hand, you have a personality a bit more inclined toward pessimism, perhaps you’ll give it a few more times, but you’ll more likely conclude the whole thing was a sham from the start—how silly to believe in some kind of a universal, cosmic vending machine that gives us what we want when we ask—and give up on the notion of prayer altogether.

The truth is, both conclusions are right…and also wrong. The bigger problem, though, is an incorrect understanding of prayer which itself stems from an incorrect understanding of God. The purpose of prayer is to talk to God. Prayer is the means God has given us of communicating with Him in order to deepen and grow our relationship with Him.

My kids talk to me. As they get older they talk to me a little less than they used to, but they still talk to me. Actually, I still have one who has an amazing capacity to never…ever…run out of things to say. I love it…most of the time. Still, they talk to me. And when they talk to me, they often ask me things. More specifically, they ask me for things. They ask if I’ll do this or that for them. They ask if I’ll give them things. They ask if they can do things.

I’m (mostly) glad when they do that. And, I generally try to do as many things with or for them as I can. But I don’t do everything they ask. Not even close really. They ask for a lot of things to which my answer is no. Sometimes they’re more okay with that than others. But if their asking for things was the sum total of our relationship, that would be a pretty sad state of affairs.

I am vastly more interested in them than merely what they want from me. I want to just hear their thoughts on things. Even when they are wrong, I still want to hear it. It may be the silliest thing in the world, but at least they’re talking to me. I want to tell them things too. Sometimes I tell them what I want them to do, but I also love sharing my thoughts on things. I do that just to share, but I also do it in order to teach them what I believe is right. I do it in order to shape their worldview. I do it in order to have an impact on the kind of men they grow up to be.

The same is true of God with us. And if we think prayer is just a means of getting what we want, we’ll both miss out on so much more.

Zechariah and his wife, Elizabeth, had been praying for a child for years. And in that time they had watched the window in which they knew that could happen open and then close. Perhaps they kept praying after that, but maybe not. Maybe they had given up on it. They didn’t give up on God because they had a proper belief framework for Him that factored in, “No,” as a possible answer to prayer, but they had given up on this prayer. Bitterly I suspect. Yet here came this angel at a totally unexpected time saying that God had in fact heard their prayer and was at last going to give them what they wanted. It was simply going to be on His timing.

Sometimes praying for things we want does finally go that way when we stick with it. Sometimes it goes that way long after we haven’t. Sometimes it doesn’t because God knows better than we do. Whichever way it goes, though, that’s only a fraction of the gift prayer is intended to be. This Advent season, may you receive this particularly sweet gift to the fullest extent God intends for it to bless you. Receive the gift of prayer and know God in Christ more fully for who He is.