There are two stories going on in the readings we used in our chapel service on Sunday. (The main texts were John 6:1-21 and Ephesians 3:14-21.)

One story is about provision. One is about prayer.
One is about meeting needs. One is about having needs.
One is about what God does. One is about what we ask.

I’m going to unpack those stories this week.

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Praying in the hospital is hard some days. We know what we want. We ask people to pray for healing. We ask friends to pray. We say, “We need as many people asking God as we possibly can get.”

When things go the way we asked, we say that God was good to us. Or we say that God is good. Or we say that we are blessed.

When things don’t go the way we asked, we’re not sure what to say. We think we can’t say, “God is bad”. Though recently I heard someone say that he was deeply disappointed in God.

I think we end up being a little less convinced the next time we pray. We hedge a little bit. We assume that God might not be as powerful as we hoped, or as aware of us.

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We can pray for health. We can pray for recovery, for wisdom for doctors, for safety in procedures. All of those are good things to ask God for. And there are specific examples of prayer happening that way.

We can go a few steps deeper than that. We can pray for peace, one of the things that Paul invites us to ask God for. We can ask for strength and courage, which are things that Paul asks his friends to pray for. We can ask for deliverance.

But in the words we read this morning, that’s not what Paul was asking God to give to the people in Ephesus.

He loved these people, by the way. He knew them by name. He was aware that people in this town got sick and died. They were misunderstood. They were at the middle of riots.

But Paul did not make these things the heart of his requests to God on their behalf.

Instead, he wanted to point them to relationship with a generous abundant compassionate God.

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More tomorrow