Big Faith Big Prayers

When I was a Protestant, our college ministry would have these really early morning prayers where all the guys would go on top of Signal Hill and pray. We would gather in a circle and go around and do a little prayer. And by itself a 2 or three minute prayer isn't bad, but, when you have a couple of guys who are just trying to flex, a 3 minute prayers in a circle of about 15 guys can mean just standing in a circle for a solid 45 minutes, and I wasn't having it. So when it was my turn to pray, all I said was, "Dear God, please bless me with millions and millions of dollars. Amen." I was kinda making a point, and I was being a butthead about it. Afterwards, my friend Max came up to me, and he told me, "Dude, I looked up and Steve just gave you the maddest look. It was hilarious." Indeed, it was. 

So, what exactly is wrong here? Maybe the execution of the prayer, in that context, but I want to look at the content. The content of the prayer did, at the time, seem kinda ridiculous. But why? Why shouldn't one ask God for such extravagant things? In the garden, we had all of creation under our dominion, and we are suppose to make everything even more fruitful. The problem of sin isn't that we accumulate too much, but that we don't accumulate enough and resources become scarce. So the desire for such possessions can't really be a problem in of itself. So, similarly, we can ask for other pretty extravagant things. "Dear God, please bless me with a Lambo. Please bless me with an awesome diamond ring. Please bless me with an awesome job. An awesome house." Etc. 

On one hand, we can treat God as a genie. A kind of Santa Claus, and that's obviously bad. But I think we can have a reaction against that which makes us almost afraid of having God bless us with all these things. And so we might be tempted to think God doesn't, or can't, give us these things. As if these things were out of Gods reach. But this is just faithlessness. Why not ask for big things? Isn't God big enough to give them to us, if He so desired? So, perhaps make it a habit to ask God for big things. Maybe you'll see an increase in faith. 

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