In prayer we can get honest - one night a friend and I were discussing various and sundry things including his very sensible vacation of four and a half months with his family in southern France. He was rather critical on the subject of prayer. He was thinking about how much wasted prayer there is trying to get God to do a variety of things, and how little faith the people had who actually were doing the praying. I tried to redirect his thinking to my belief that prayer is more for us than it is for God. I do this by saying that prayer was a great help to me to get honest when I wanted to be truthful. I told him that above my writing desk for many years I had the picture of a Jewish scholar whom I consider to have the greatest intellectual integrity of almost any one I've ever met. As I would write I would glance up at his picture and ask myself if I was being honest about what I was writing. I think of prayer in very much this same way of getting honest. If I believe that God hears me, that God is all-knowing and that He is who we claim He is, then I must be honest when I talk to Him. Therefore I have found it very helpful simply to take a business deal, spread it out on my desk and talk to God about it exactly like I talk to another person. No great lights go on but I do get a feeling of integrity in the sense of a singleness of mind and a purity of thought and a stillness of heart that comes when I really feel that I am honest.
The flip side of that is when I don't want to be honest. I don't "lay it out on the table" acting like keeping it from Him means He won't know what's happening. We all have such constant temptations to humanize God. Intellectual integrity reminds me that God knows whether I show it to him or not ---- it is much better for me to be open.
This level of honesty works not only in business deals but relationships, family, friendships, and social interactions. Questions in all of these areas can be brought to a very honest conclusion if we learn to use prayer in that way. Put it all right out on the table and talk about it with God.
Too many people still use a ritualistic form of prayer which keeps them from having a good, honest conversation with God. I shall never forget when I first heard of conversational prayer. It was with Torrey Johnson who had established Youth for Christ. We had been talking and as we got ready to leave he said, "Let's pray." He started out by saying, "Lord, you know we're just a couple of young men here who have been chewing the rag." At this point I opened up one eye, literally, and looked around the room because I knew he was talking to somebody and I was wondering if he was in the room and also if the room was going to fold together while he talked to God like that. I had always been used to saying "thee" and "thou" and using the Olde English. But, it really is impossible, or at least very difficult, for us to have an honest conversation with God about personal matters in that language. I remember one night when we were having a laymen's meeting and we had disagreement in it and one of the men said, "Now, Lord, be with Fred 'cause you know he doesn't know what he was doing. " The truth was I really didn't know but the fact that he had mentioned it to God meant that I would be much more serious in finding out. To me, this is simply integrating prayer into our lives at the point where we need honesty.
