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“I WANT A CARBINE ACTION TWO-HUNDRED SHOT LIGHTNING LOADER RANGE MODEL AIR RIFLE BB GUN”

You pray a good prayer. An unselfish prayer, asking for entirely appropriate things. You KNOW they’re good things. And then God just plain and simple doesn’t come through. Your wish list goes unfulfilled. If God is this perfect Father, why is Christmas morning so often a disappointment?

In their book, Letters to God, compilers Eric Marshall and Stuart Hample have one from a young man named Louis. And he really gives God the business:

“Dear God. I wrote You before. Do You remember? I did what You promised but You didn’t send me a horse yet. What about it? Louis.”

Are you still waiting for a horse too? Sometimes on a childhood level, we get a bit frustrated with Mom and Dad. They ask us: “Honey, what would you like for Christmas?” So we tell them. We make a big list. And lo and behold, on the 25th of December, they give us a bunch of other stuff instead. The things we put down . . . they don’t come through with it. I’m in my mid-50s, and my folks still do that sometimes. I carefully put down, in my best handwriting: “New Lexus. Yacht that sleeps eight. RV that sleeps six.” And what do I open up on Christmas morning? Maybe a can of tennis balls.

Well, this is tongue-in-cheek, and even though I’ve never gotten a pony, Joe and Ann Melashenko have done remarkably well at making Lonnie, Joedy, Dallas, Eugene, and Rudy happy during the Yuletide seasons. But as we continue in our radio series, THE PERFECT ADOPTION, and discover that the Bible is trying to convey to us how God in heaven actually IS the perfect Father, we have to sometimes sign our own names to this Louis’ complaint letter. “God, if You’re this wonderful Dad, if You love us with an infinite love, then why are Your Christmas presents so noticeably FINITE? Where’s the horse? Where’s the Lexus? Where’s the healing from arthritic pain? Where’s the financial blessing?” Joe and Ann Melashenko can be forgiven for not putting a Lexus under my tree because they’re living on a fixed income, but God owns all the cattle — and horses and cars — on a thousand hills and Toyota dealerships. What is the problem here?

Well, let’s go back to our “second textbook” for this study, and that’s the wonderful book, Knowing God, by Dr. James Packer. We explored yesterday what the concept of adoption might imply regarding Christian conduct, and about the fact that we are all, in a sense, the presidential First Sons and the First Daughters living in the White House, with reporters and CNN camera crews camped out on the front steps watching us all the time. But now, what about Christian prayer? Dr. Packer immediately asserts:

“Adoption appears in the Sermon [on the Mount] as the BASIS of Christian prayer.”

And sure enough. In Matthew 6, right in the heart of this Magna Carta of the family of God, Jesus our Brother tells us:

“This, then, is how you should pray: ‘Our Father . . .’ As Jesus always prayed to His God as Father (Abba in Aramaic, an intimate family word), so must His followers do. Jesus could say to His Father, ‘You always hear Me’” — that’s in John 11:42 — “and He wants His disciples to know that, as God’s adopted children, the same is true of them. The Father is always accessible to His children and is never too preoccupied to listen to what they have to say. This is the basis of Christian prayer.”

We might think we already know all this, but friend, have you ever paused to really make sure that your prayers were in the vein of: “Hello, Dad. I love You. I need You. Thanks for caring about me. And here’s what’s happening in my life right now”? Are our prayers really like that all the time?

Packer goes on to make two wonderful points. First of all, if we realize that our prayers are conversations with a loving Dad, is it necessary to, as the Bible puts it, “babble like pagans,” cramming in a lot of words or repeating the same mindless prayer mantra 5,000 times? Is that necessary? Do loving parents respond well to that? Does that indicate a warm, mature, growing, abiding, thinking relationship?

His second point is that a child who knows that Dad loves him or her can go to the parental throne on December 24 with absolute confidence.

“Prayer may be free and bold,” Packer suggests. “We need not hesitate to imitate the sublime ‘cheek’ of the child who is not afraid to ask his parents for anything, because he knows he can count completely on their love. ‘Ask and it will be given to you . . . Everyone who asks receives . . . If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask Him!’” That’s all from Matthew 7 and this very Sermon on the Mount, of course.

I don’t know how many of you listening here on this Thursday are parents, but try to imagine being the perfect parent. Your love for your child is perfect and infinite, and so are your resources. What would you like to give them? And in what spirit would you like for them to ask?

This takes us back to the pony and the Lexus, doesn’t it? Why does God sometimes say no when His adopted children, whom He dearly loves, ask Him for things? The classic example, of course, is of Ralphie Parker, who is counting down to Christmas, and wants, more than anything in life, in fact, more than life itself: “A Red Ryder Carbine Action Two-Hundred Shot Lightning Loader Range Model Air Rifle BB Gun.” But every time he asks, Mom responds with the same predictable, tired answer: “You’ll shoot your eye out.” The narrator in the film intones: “That deadly phrase, uttered many times, by hundreds of mothers was not surmountable by any means known to kiddom.” Speaking of adoption and prayer, the story by Jean Shepherd is ironically entitled “In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash.” But do we trust God when He too says no to our Christmas list and gives us socks and a new spiral-bound school notebook instead of a Red Ryder?

Here’s the answer as Packer expresses it:

“Sometimes we ask for the wrong thing! It is God’s prerogative to give good things, things that we have need of, and if in our unwisdom we ask for things that do not come under these headings, God, like any good parent, reserves the right to say, ‘No, not that; it wouldn’t be good for you — but have this instead.’”

And so comes the question: Do we trust Dad? When what we want seems so right, and the timing we envision seems so perfect and necessary, can we wait and keep on trusting when God’s Christmas list seems to us to be misguided?

In the classic book, The Meaning of Prayer, Harry Emerson Fosdick tells the story of a humble Christian mother named Monica. She had a great burden for her son, who hadn’t yet surrendered his life to the Lord. Certainly that was the prayer that filled her every petition to heaven. “Lord, save my son!” Then the wayward boy made plans to sail from Northern Africa, where a praying mother could keep an eye on things, to Italy, where she could not.

“She could not endure losing him from her influence,” Fosdick writes. “If under her care, he still was far from Christ, what would he be in Italy, home of licentiousness and splendor, of manifold and alluring temptations?”

You talk about an obviously good prayer! This was the Red Ryder Rifle prayer of all time! But even as she was on her knees, her pleasure-seeking son got on the boat and sailed out of her life. He sailed away to the bright lights of Italy, where he met a man named Ambrose. And it was under the friendship and tutelage of Ambrose, in the very place Mama had prayed he would never go, that the man we know today as St. Augustine became a Christian. And Fosdick quietly concludes:

“The form of her petition was denied; the substance of her desire was granted.”

Because her main prayer, her real heart prayer, was not “Keep my son out of Italy,” but “Save him, Lord! Please save him!” Which is exactly what God did, in the way that a good Father knew best how to accomplish.

Have you, as a parent, ever said to your child: “Wait. Trust me; you need to wait. Waiting will be the best thing”? That’s hard to say, and even harder to hear. It’s hard to trust in a “Wait,” when it seems so clear that right now, today, this instant, Lord, is when we should get a “yes” from heaven. This Dr. Fosdick quotes from the legendary Charles Spurgeon, who once wrote as follows about waiting:

“It may be your prayer is like a ship, which, when it goes on a very long voyage, does not come home laden so soon; but when it does come home, it has a richer freight. Mere ‘coasters’ will bring you coals, or such like ordinary things; but they that go afar to Tarshish return with gold and ivory. Coasting prayers, such as we pray every day, bring us many necessaries, but there are great prayers, which, like the old Spanish galleons, cross the main ocean, and are longer out of sight, but come home deep laden with a golden freight.”

And just imagine that day, that long-awaited day, when a loving Dad and a faithfully trusting adopted son meet at the harbor. “See what I have for you, Son,” says the Father, almost bursting with the love held so long in His heart. And the Son can scarcely take it in. “Dad,” he manages to say, “it was worth the wait. What a perfect Father You are.”