Have you ever been scared to pray because you don’t want to say the wrong thing or because you are afraid that you can’t trust God to do what is right or that He will be angry if you are honest? Today, we’re going to talk about why we can always be ourselves when we are talking to God. And not only that, but about how having to be perfect in our prayers comes from pagan religions and not from the Bible.
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Hi! I’m Miss Tyler! Welcome to this week’s episode of Context for Kids, where I teach you guys stuff most adults don’t even know. If this is your first time hearing or if you have missed anything, you can find all the episodes archived at contextforkids.podbean.com, which has them downloadable, or at contextforkids.com, where I have transcripts for readers or on my Context for Kids YouTube channel, where I usually post slightly longer versions. All Scripture this week comes from the MTV, the Miss Tyler Version, which is the Christian Standard Bible tweaked a bit to be more understandable to kids.
Did you know that a lot of grownups are too scared to pray? Sometimes, people get the idea that God is so untrustworthy and mean that He is listening to every single word and every single thought just so He can have an excuse to do something awful to us or other people—like somehow He is waiting for permission from us to do something just terrible. Where did that kind of thinking come from and does it make any sense? Sometimes we get way too many ideas about God from how other people worshiped their gods and still do. So, we are going to talk about prayer in other ancient religions and how people have confused what those gods were like and what our God is really like. We can’t trust our God if we are thinking about Him like the people who worship a lot of gods do. Their gods were always just like people—only like people with superpowers who could be way more dangerous and mean than any human ever could!
Do you know any bullies? Bullies are kids and adults who are just mean and nasty and they are looking for an excuse to do something rotten to anyone they don’t like. What about people who are nitpickers and critical? Nitpicker is a name we call people who have to just mess with us on every little thing they think we are doing wrong no matter how unimportant it is. People who are critical are always just making us feel bad for whatever they don’t like. People like this are no fun to be around and most families have at least one person who is like this. Hopefully, we aren’t that person! I used to be very nitpicky and critical, just getting on people for whatever it was that they weren’t doing perfectly or whatever irritated me or whatever I thought they were wrong about. I thought I was helping—maybe not helping them but helping myself to make everything more like the way I wanted it to be. Being around me was not pleasant at all when I was being like that. I made people feel like I didn’t love them at all and like I didn’t see anything good about them. I am really sad about that now.
And when I became a Christian and was still doing that (and sometimes I still do it), it made God look like He must be that way too—just waiting for you to make a mistake so that He can pounce on you and make you feel bad about yourself. And I personally know that’s the opposite of what He is like. But the gods of all the nations around the children of Israel actually were like that. You never for sure knew exactly what would make them angry or even if you could do anything that was good enough to make them happy. There is a prayer that archaeologists discovered. It was written by a man going through a bunch of terrible things and he went from temple to temple, making sacrifices and trying to make all the gods happy because he didn’t know which one was angry or why they were angry and punishing him:
I wish I knew that what I am doing actually makes the gods happy! What seems like to me just makes the gods angry; The things I think are horrible are somehow okay with my gods. Who knows what the gods in heaven even want? Who understands the plans of the underworld gods? Where is anyone who has learned the ways of the gods? (rephrase mine from Walton’s Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament pg 145)
Isn’t that just awful?—Knowing that your god approves of really horrible things and doesn’t care enough to let you know what it is that they want? And because there are so many gods and goddesses, not even knowing which one is angry at you? And because there are so many gods and because they all have different personalities and likes and dislikes, what makes one of them happy might make another one angry. If two gods are fighting, and you worship one, will the other take their anger out on you? And to believe that when you die, you don’t just stop existing but you end up in the underworld and who the heck even knows what those gods will do to you—or your dead loved ones if you make them angry. It was a total nightmare. But that’s what life was like in polytheistic nations—which is a fancy way of saying “groups of people who believe in a whole lot of different gods”. We’ve talked about this many times, how really pathetic these gods were. They had to be fed every single day by priests, or they would get weak and they wouldn’t be able to do their jobs. The sun wouldn’t come up or the rains wouldn’t fall or too much rain would come down and there would be a flood, or all the animals and people would stop having babies, or whatever. Keeping the gods happy meant that they did their jobs and ignored the people. No one wanted the attention of the gods because that just got you in trouble one way or another. Bored gods were nothing but trouble. They wanted them well-fed, happy, and too busy to mess with humans! But they were also a mystery, which is what makes them a lot different from our God—who is really the only God there actually is.
God explained, through Moses and the Prophets and then perfectly in Jesus, exactly what He wants. No one had to guess. In fact, all of those laws (and some of them only made sense to the people they were originally given to because we don’t even know what they mean anymore and even the great Jewish scholars of the past couldn’t figure it out for sure)—anyway, all of those laws told the Israelites one thing. They said, “You have to be better than the world all around you. You have to love no other god except Me, and you have to love your neighbors.” And that’s hard. It’s still hard and especially since Jesus told us that our neighbors are actually everyone and not just the guy next door or the people who look like us or have the same religion or whatever. God used the commandments to tell us in every single generation forever that, “however good and kind and generous the world around you is, you have to do better to show them what I am like.” And so, we learn, little by little, to not be like the example set by the gods of the other nations who were hateful, cruel, and selfish. They loved stirring up trouble, hurting the weak, and starting wars. But if Jesus is right (and we know He is), then we have to be different than that. We can’t be thinking of ourselves and what would be good for us if it hurts someone else. Jesus never did that. In fact, He was willing to be hurt for the good of absolutely anyone who would ever believe Him. And what turns out to be good for us should be good for everyone we come in contact with.
And if God expects that from us, then we can expect even more from Him. If He wants us to be better than everyone around us, that means He is better than absolutely everyone—in fact, He is perfect. He gave us the Bible so that we could read the whole thing from front to back to learn who He is and how much He is willing to sacrifice so that we can be His people. In fact, when Moses wanted to see God, God told Moses His name, Yahweh, and said this—“Yahweh–Yahweh is a compassionate and gracious God, slow to get angry and full of faithful love and truth, always faithful and loving for a thousand generations (like 40,000 years—forever), forgiving people who decide to do wrong things, who do wrong things because they don’t care what is right, and people who just make mistakes. But that doesn’t mean there will be no consequences, because the wrong that people do can make things bad for a very long time for their own family.” (Ex 34:6-7)
God wants us to succeed, not to fail. There are plenty of humans beings who just want the worst for you and will trick you and take advantage of every mistake you make, but that isn’t what God is like at all. That’s why He is so forgiving, because He wants every single one of us to be more like Jesus and that can’t happen if He is just waiting around the corner for us to mess up so He can kill us or torture us. Believe me, if that was true, I wouldn’t have survived my twenties! Or even my forties! God knows how ridiculous we are and He also knows that, without Him, we are stuck in sin—not even knowing what is right or wrong. God wants His Kingdom on earth, the whole earth, to be a place where we all love Him and one another—that is His goal. That’s been His goal ever since the beginning. That’s why He created the Garden and put Adam and Eve in it, so that they would love Him and each other without any of the nonsense awful things we do to mess stuff up. Next week we will talk about what love means so I am gonna stop right there. I almost got off track. Again. It’s like I am a dog who sees a squirrel and forgets what they were doing!
God is going to treat you and everyone else however it takes to make His goals happen. That’s why He told Moses how patient and loving and trustworthy He is. It’s why He is so careful not to just kill us all when what we need is to be taught and loved and healed. He didn’t create us perfect. He created us with the ability to make good and bad choices and because we are His children, He cuts us a lot of slack and just rolls His eyes when we make mistakes. And when we are doing bad things, He works to change us so that we can do better. He isn’t a nitpicker, and He isn’t just critical and upset with us no matter how hard we are trying. In the Bible, there are a bunch of instructions, but you know what? They were nudges for them (and us) to learn to be better than the world around us and to save our communities when things are desperate. But behind them is always His goal to get us to love one another excellently. Unfortunately, until Jesus, people found ways to use those instructions to do what they wanted.
What does all this have to do with prayer? Everything! We have to know what God is like and what His goals are before we can settle down and be honest with Him, and before we can be honest with Him, we have to be able to trust that He is nothing like the false gods of the rest of the world—just waiting for an excuse to hurt us and the people we love. How can we be honest when we are afraid of every word we say? I know there are people like that but if God was like that then Jesus wouldn’t have died to save us—because God wouldn’t have wanted to save us.
The truth is that we can tell God anything because there is nothing we can say to Him that He doesn’t already know. But that doesn’t mean that He doesn’t want us to talk to Him about it. You can say all the wrong words about all the wrong things and all the wrong people while feeling terrible feelings and it is absolutely okay. He isn’t going to go off and do something messed up just because you are angry with someone. He will help you with your emotions because He gave you those emotions to tell you about what’s going on inside you and outside you. Emotions are our friends and also our enemies sometimes if we do the wrong things with them, but emotions aren’t ever wrong. Emotions just are whatever they are. God knows how wild and uncontrollable they can be. And sometimes, we need to be really mad when bad things are happening. And we need to cry when sad things happen. We also need to laugh during good times. So, we can come to God with all our emotions and He knows what to do with them and help us with them, so that we can control them better in the future or maybe even feel them more because He feels that way too. Do you believe that God is happy when there are wars and little children are killed because of terrible grownup decisions? No, He gets angry and He doesn’t care who those children are. So, we can tell Him in our prayers that we are angry or scared or tell Him about our good news too. It is all important to God.
Now, I didn’t used to know all this, and I would be so careful while praying. You see, I knew God was real and it was very important to me to please Him but I also didn’t trust Him at all. Someone did something terrible to me when I was about 34 years old—twenty years ago. And then he got other people against me too and it hurt worse than anything because it was in my church. My heart was broken and so I would talk to God about it and I kept asking God to fix it, but then I would get all freaked out and say, “But please don’t hurt his family God, please protect them. I don’t want them to suffer for what he is doing.” Isn’t that sad? I actually thought that God would hurt innocent people if I didn’t ask Him not to. I was a pretty new believer then and I still didn’t understand Him. It wouldn’t be until I was thirty-seven that I realized I could say absolutely anything I was thinking and feeling—even if I was angry at Him. And I have been very angry at Him many times. But prayer isn’t just magic, like they believed in the ancient world—our prayer is a talk with someone who loves us very deeply and forever. God is committed to you, forever, and He will always want you to be able to be honest with Him and trust Him because once you do, He can really start making you more like Jesus.
And I guess this is a good time to talk about the prayers of people to their false gods. I told you that it worked like a magic spell, right? First of all, they had to bring some kind of gift to that god—to bribe him or her. Their gods weren’t interested in them at all unless they brought some sort of expensive present. And then they had to say the god’s name exactly right because if they didn’t then that god wasn’t smart enough to hear them but if they did say their real name exactly right then the god had to do whatever they asked. Those gods could be bribed and controlled, and they weren’t all that smart. That’s why all the nations around Israel and also the children of Israel themselves had a hard time understanding God because He was just nothing like any of the other gods. He confused them. How could one and only one God create everything and do everything and know everything? It seemed crazy. They had to learn and it took a long time. That’s why they didn’t understand how prayer worked and why they kept worshiping God while also praying to other gods for help at the same time. They didn’t trust God to handle all their needs. They believed He was just like all the other gods who weren’t even really gods at all.
And we can still do that even when we know there is only one God. There are people who will tell you that God won’t hear you if you don’t use the right names or say the exact right things or that if you don’t understand the commandments perfectly that He won’t listen to you. And it is sad they believe that about God because with a god like that, no one can ever be good enough no matter how hard they try. That’s a god leaving you to feel hopeless and angry and that’s the sort of god that people give up on because what’s the use of believing in someone who can’t ever be pleased? Have you ever known someone like that? Someone who doesn’t like you no matter how good you behave or how much you do or anything? I do, and it is an awful way to live. What if you get straight A’s in school except for a C in PE and all they care about is that C in PE? Not everyone is good at sports—I wasn’t no matter how hard I tried. And what if you get all good grades except in math no matter how hard you try because your brain just has a tough time with numbers and equations? That’s so hard. It’s God who gives us the abilities to do certain things and not others. I have a beautiful singing voice but cannot read sheet music or play an instrument. I would get bad grades in those things. But when people blame that on you, they are really blaming God and the way He made your brain to work really well in some ways and to struggle in others. Not everyone is good at everything. Unlike people, God knows what you can and can’t accomplish. Your best really is good enough even if that best is only a C grade!
And you know what? Understanding God and our Bibles is even more complicated than anything you take in school. He isn’t nearly as hard to understand as we make Him out to be just because all these people have all of these ideas about Him being all sorts of ways because that’s how they were taught. If they had parents or a Pastor who was always yelling at them about how mean God is and how angry He is at them, that’s the god they are going to teach people about. I suppose that’s one main reason why God sent Jesus, so that we would see and hear and experience what God is and does in real life. The disciples are kind of hilarious in how much stuff they got wrong about God and how Jesus has to keep setting them straight. When two of them wanted to call down fire and brimstone on a city of Samaritans, Jesus said, “Dudes, no, that is not okay. Dang.” They kept wanting Him to be violent and He kept saying no. They wanted Him to take revenge on people who were mean to Him or wouldn’t listen to Him and He kept saying no. They wanted Him to send all the children away, and He really said no. In fact, He told His disciples that anyone messing with children was messing with Him and it would be better for them if they had a stone tied around their neck and get thrown into the sea. And then He told His disciples that not only did the angels who cared for children see God’s face up close and personal every single day, but that we should all be more like those children coming to see Him.
Jesus cared about the poor, and people in prison, and those who were hungry and thirsty and who didn’t have any warm clothes to wear, and who were sick and disabled. He cared for the people whom everyone else thought were suffering because they deserved it and didn’t deserve any special attention. He cared for all the people who were messed up in some way or another and let me tell you, the religious experts were really angry about it. And the religious experts today can be just the same. Jesus said that the most important commandments weren’t about giving enough money to God or keeping the Sabbath or any of that but were about doing what is right for other people. Giving money to God is good, but when we make things better for people who are hurting, it shows the world what God wants and how He wants to world to be a more peaceful and loving place where people don’t have to be scared anymore. They didn’t like that because some of them were rich from taking advantage of poor people. They didn’t want to hear that just keeping the commandments as written and ignoring the importance of love wasn’t good enough. There are always people who think they can please God by just doing the easy stuff, but loving people has to be learned and it is much harder. Some commandments are way more important than others and loving others and God are the two most important. If keeping one of the other commandments makes us do something to hurt someone else who is already hurting, then we aren’t making God happy at all.
That’s the God we are praying to. And so, we can say all the wrong things when we pray and it’s okay. We can be angry at Him or other people and it’s okay to trust Him with that. In fact, there is this prayer in the Bible that is really disturbing. A guy who has been through terrible things is so angry at his enemies that he wants their babies dead. What??? Who wants babies dead? Well, sometimes when we are really angry, we just forget what is right and good and we say whatever it is that comes to our mind. Because the babies of his own people were killed, he wanted his enemies to know what that feels like. He probably didn’t really want those innocent babies to die, he just wanted revenge. He wanted his enemies to feel how he was feeling. I think we can all look back to times when we felt the same way. And it is absolutely alright to be honest with God about that sort of thing. Believe me, He isn’t going to do it, but He can and will help you with how you are feeling. Not by smacking you down and saying, “Dude, that is so messed up,” but by comforting you and crying with you and not abandoning you even if it feels like everyone else has.
So, we can trust God with our messy emotions, and the messed-up things we are thinking, and our confusion, and frustration, and just everything. He isn’t looking for an excuse to smack us down for being honest, but when we are talking with Him, sometimes He talks to us about it. He doesn’t expect us to know things we don’t know or to be more mature and loving than we are right now. He’s here to help us become more like Jesus. God isn’t ever unfair even though people are. God isn’t waiting for us to mess up so that He can make fun of us like some people do. God doesn’t want to destroy us—He wants to give us life and wants to be with us forever when Jesus comes back as King of the world here on earth. The Bible says that He will wipe away all of our tears and people won’t be dying or getting sick or in wheelchairs or anything like that. My son’s body will work perfectly—that makes me happier than anything else! And no one will ever hurt you again.
I love you. I am praying for you. And I pray that you will take a chance on God today and talk with Him about anything and everything and be honest about how you feel. I promise you that He isn’t going to be mean or tricky or unfair to you. God is better than the best person you will ever know in real life.