The church I grew up in taught me early on that God answers the prayers of his people in powerful ways. Then, as I moved through college and into a teaching career, my experiences with prayer changed from those of childhood. I began to see how little I understood prayer. God didn’t answer every prayer as I expected, and some prayers he didn’t seem to answer at all. So questions began to arise: Am I asking for the right things? Does God really promise to give some sort of answer to my prayer? Can I really trust him? What if he gives me an answer I don’t like? God knows best, so why doesn’t he just do what needs to be done? Why does he want me to be involved? Why does he wait for me to pray?

As God has done a deeper work in my life and drawn me into prayer with him, some of the answers to my questions are becoming a little clearer. I’d like to share with you some of what I’ve learned about petitioning God, that is, asking him to act. The better we understand why we pray and what God actually promises, the more likely we are to hear God’s answers to our questions.

Jesus brings together some of God’s promises to us in Matthew 5:1–12. These are known as the Beatitudes. If you’re familiar with them, you may be thinking, “What does this have to do with prayer? Aren’t these about the conditions of the heart?” They are about conditions of the heart, and that has everything to do with prayer. In fact, verse 6 spells out why we pray and offers the assurance of God’s response: “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.”

Longing for righteousness

What does it mean to be hungry and thirsty for righteousness? It starts with the awareness that all is not right in our lives or in the lives of those around us, indeed in the whole world. As we see and feel how wrong everything is, we will either become numb to it (and even deny anything’s wrong), or we will begin to long for all to be put right, to hunger for righteousness, to thirst for it. And the more we feel the need for something, the stronger our desire becomes for it.

Think about the language of appetites Jesus is using here. Let’s imagine that you wake up in the morning, quite happy to have a bagel or bowl of cereal before heading off to class. Yet some days your desire for sleep outweighs your desire for food, so you rush off to class without any breakfast, knowing you’ll be able to hold off until lunch. But what happens if your study group unexpectedly reschedules to meet during the only time you had free for lunch that day, and you miss eating? When it comes time for dinner that evening, your need and desire for food will be so strong that you can hardly go on without it. It’s hungry longing like this that Jesus pictures in verse 6. E. M. Bounds, a man who prayed much and has helped many others in prayer, says it this way:

“Desire gives fervor to prayer. The soul cannot be listless when some great desire fixes and inflames it. . . . Strong desires make strong prayers. The neglect of prayer is the fearful token of dead spiritual desires. The soul has turned away from God when desire after him no longer presses it into the closet [of prayer]. There can be no true praying without desire.”

And what is the desire that God promises to satisfy? It’s the desire for righteousness, that what’s wrong would be set right in my life and in the lives of others, that all that’s wrong with the world would be made right.

Take a moment to consider your own life. What has gone wrong in your own life? Where is your life damaged because of your own sin? Because of another’s sin? And of the people in your life, whom have you harmed?

Do you long for God to set things right? For him to heal what is broken and wounded? For him to eliminate the distortions and perversions sin creates in our lives? Do you hunger and thirst for that healing? Some of us are reluctant to let ourselves long for such deep works of God, for fear he wouldn’t do anything so beautiful and wonderful, but so difficult, for us. “Surely”, we think, “God ­doesn’t mean to heal this hurting place. He doesn’t intend to free me from this ingrained sin. This is just something I have to live with.” But look at verse 3.

Owning up to Our Need

Jesus says, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” We are poor in spirit when we can see that we’re not what God intends us to be, when we face our sin, when we realize that apart from him we’re lost. We are poor in spirit when we see our need for God.

But see what he has promised us when we own up to our need? The kingdom of heaven! We are promised God himself, Immanuel, God with us, setting all things right as he establishes his reign over everything and everybody, ourselves included. The prophet Isaiah puts it this way to God’s people of Israel, in Isaiah 57:14–19:

It shall be said, “Build up, build up, prepare the way, remove every obstruction from my people’s way.” For thus says the high and lofty one that inhabits eternity, whose name is Holy: “I dwell in the high and holy place, and also with those who are contrite and humble in spirit, to revive the spirit of the humble, and to revive the heart of the contrite. For I will not continually accuse, nor will I always be angry; for then the spirits would grow faint before me, even the souls that I have made.

“Because of their wicked covetousness I was angry; I struck them, I hid and was angry; but they kept turning back to their own ways. I have seen their ways, but I will heal them; I will lead them and repay them with comfort, creating for their mourners the fruit of the lips. Peace, peace, to the far and the near, says the Lord; and I will heal them.”

Living in Faithful Expectation

God promises to heal us! He promises to guide us, to comfort us and to bring us peace. Who wouldn’t gladly receive this rich blessing the Lord longs to give us? And isn’t it great that God isn’t only concerned about his righteousness being worked out in you and me, but also in the lives of those both far and near—our families, communities, countries and even the whole world!

God has already begun to fulfill his promises in Jesus. And we see from Scripture that Jesus will return to complete what he’s begun. So where does that leave us in the meantime? For once we care about God’s working out his purposes on the earth, we are often saddened, and moved to mourn, at the ways evil prevails. We hear the promise of God’s kingdom and we want it to come, but the more we feel that its fullness is not what we’re experiencing, the harder it is to accept the way life is. Yet in Matthew 5:4, Jesus says that people who mourn are blessed.

How can this mourning be a good thing? First, because it’s a real, appropriate response to evil. If we aren’t mourning over evil, we’re not feeling its full force. If we are mourning, God promises to comfort us. This is not the comfort of denial, but the comfort of knowing that in God’s time all will be set right. And in response to that promise, we can take hope, and pray, and act in faith in God.

Sometimes we are powerless to oppose the evil that oppresses us. But those who commit themselves to living on God’s terms, in God’s way, even when it seems like doing so will cost them everything, even their lives, those are the ones Jesus calls “the meek” in verse 5. Meekness is a recognition that we’re totally dependent on God, that our very lives depend on him. Meekness frees us from returning evil for evil, which is our only option apart from God.

So what is promised us as we live in meekness and mourning? That we will be comforted as we look to him to change the way things are. Jesus’ sermon here recalls a further point in Isaiah’s prophecy, found in Isaiah 61:1–3:

The spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me; he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners; to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor, and the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all who mourn; to provide for those who mourn in Zion, to give them a garland of praise instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, the mantle of praise instead of a faint spirit. They will be called oaks of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, to display his glory.

When Jesus preached from this passage in his hometown of Nazareth (Luke 4), he stated that these Scriptures were fulfilled that day in him. So we draw hope from the knowledge that God himself promises to supply all our needs both now and then finally and completely when we reign with him.

Living God’s Way

If these first beatitudes show what it’s like to wait on God for what only he can do, the rest of them help us see how someone whose heart is set on God’s kingdom should be acting. For the desire that God’s kingdom will prevail shows itself in our asking and in our acting, if our whole heart is in it. Therefore . . .

we are merciful (verse 7); we overcome evil with good and don’t retaliate.

we are pure in heart (verse 8); we don’t turn away from God, yield to distraction or lose heart.

we, like God, become peacemakers (verse 9); in making peace we show ourselves to be God’s children.

we are committed to the path of righteousness (verse 10), even when the cost is high, knowing that “those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it” (Matthew 16:25).

So we see here that our faith, expressed in our prayer, and our obedience, seen in our actions, are brought together and help us make sense of our longing. We keep praying this way and living this way until God establishes his kingdom throughout the whole earth. God’s message is clear to us—when we hunger for his presence and cry out for him, he promises to come to us with power, to comfort us, to fill us, to bring his peace and righteousness.

Tempted not to pray

So why do we find it so difficult to live with this hunger and thirst? Why do we shrink back from living with this longing? We don’t like to live in discomfort, so we are tempted to avoid it, and there are several ways we do so. We may try to take control of a situation in wrong ways, because we don’t want to wait for God’s righteousness to be worked out in his way. We may be tempted to believe that what we already have is good enough, denying that anything is really wrong. We may attempt to distract ourselves from what’s wrong and—if we do this long enough—we can actually become numb to evil. Or we may seek satisfaction from what the world has to offer, choosing to live by the world’s promises, demands and rules, and in so doing, turn away from God.

All of these alternatives lead to frustration and, ultimately, spiritual death. They put us on the side of evil, where we become part of the problem. God calls us to life, to live in the midst of longing. He wants us to learn to live his way, whatever it costs, and to turn to him in prayer, crying out to him to work, recognizing our desperate need for him. Jesus teaches us in Matthew 6 the form our crying out is to take by introducing the prayer we call the Lord’s Prayer. He wants us to cry out, “Thy kingdom come, Lord, in my life and in the lives of all of us!”

Coming to God

What about you? Do you desire to see God set things right in you and around you? Do you long for it with a yearning that motivates you towards obedience? Are you willing to ask, even plead with God, to act on your behalf? Do you believe he desires to give you what you need?

Where we find our desire is weak, we must begin to ask God to open our eyes to our need for him. Our deepening awareness of our need produces deeper longing for the work of God in our lives, and that drives us to our knees to pray—praying that brings us into the presence of God, and seeks the righteousness he has promised to give.

“Let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need” (Hebrews 4:6).

Barbara L. Paternoster lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan. After seven years teaching students with emotional and learning disabilities, she is now raising her four children and ministering alongside her husband, James, who is on InterVarsity staff with graduate professional students at the University of Michigan.