Praying for the Small Stuff
By admin April 1, 2006
In Thursday’s New York Times there is an article about Joel Osteen, leader of Lakewood Church in Houston (former home of the Houston Rockets) — enough said. He’s coming out with a new book with important invectives like, “God wants you to be a winner, not a whiner.” The Times journalist made an interesting observation about Osteen’s prayer life:
He is not shy about calling on the Lord. He writes of praying for a winning basket in a basketball game, and then sinking it; and even circling a parking lot, praying for a space, and then finding it. “Better yet,” he writes, “it was the premier spot in that parking lot.”
As I read this, I can’t help but think that the majestic God of the universe is being trivialized. J.I. Packer wrote in Knowing God of a Lord who is both absolutely sovereign –presumably even of the smallest things (parking spaces?) and yet whose majesty doesn’t seem to be mocked the way I fear it is in the passage above:
He has us in His hands; but we never have Him in ours. Like us, He is personal, but unlike us He is great. In all its constant stress on the reality of God’s personal concern for His people, and on the gentleness, tenderness, sympathy, patience, and yearning compassion that He shows towards them, the Bible never lets us lose sight of His majesty, and His unlimited dominion over all His creatures (IV Press, 1973, pg. 74).
So what do you think? Is the majestic God being trivialized when we pray for something as small as a parking space or that we find our misplaced keys? If such prayers are legitimate, an expression of God’s dominion over everything, then what is it about Osteen’s prayers that are bothersome (if they bother you at all)?