The Prayer of Helplessness

When I lived in the nation’s capital, I used to notice how often the Washington papers reported suicide leaps from the Calvert Street Bridge. In fact, that happens so repeatedly that the site is often called "suicide bridge."

Sensing the human drama behind these brief notices – like the plunge of the Air Corps major’s thirty-one-year-old wife with inoperable cancer, or that of the elderly man whose wife had just died – I often thought that there was probably a common denominator in all of these tragedies. Each person must have felt helpless. And I have thought, “If I could speak with such persons at the zero hour, I would try to stop them with the thought that helplessness is one of the greatest assets a human being can have.”

For I believe that the old cliché, “God helps those who help themselves,” is not only misleading but often dead wrong. My most spectacular answers to prayer have come when I was so helpless, so out of control as to be able to do nothing at all for myself.

The psalmist says: when I was hemmed in, thou hast freed me often. Gradually I have learned to recognize this hemming-in as one of God’s most loving devices for teaching us that He is real and gloriously adequate for our problems.

One such experience occurred during the writing of my first book. As the young widow of Peter Marshall, Scottish Presbyterian pastor and Chaplain of the United States Senate, I was attempting what many felt was the rather audacious project of writing his biography. About midway through the manuscript, I received a devastating criticism from one whose judgment I trusted. He told me bluntly, “You haven’t begun to get inside the man Peter Marshall.” And he was right, that was the sting of it. The realization of my inadequacy as a writer was not only an intellectual one. It was also emotional; there were plenty of tears. But out of the crisis came a major realization.

In my helplessness, there was no alternative but to put the project into God’s hands. I prayed that A Man Called Peter be His book and that the results all be His too.

And they were. I still regard as incredible the several million copies of A Man Called Peter circulating around the world. But that and the successful 20th Century Fox motion picture were of little importance compared to what I hear from time to time of lives changed through this book – of men entering the ministry through the inspiration of Peter Marshall’s life.

Why would God insist on helplessness as a prerequisite to answered prayer? One obvious reason is because our human helplessness is a bedrock fact. God is a realist and insists that we be realists too. So long as we are deluding ourselves that human resources can supply our heart’s desires, we are believing a lie. And it is impossible for prayers to be answered out of a foundation of self-deception and untruth.

Then what is the truth about our human condition? None of us have anything to do with our being born; no control over whether we are male or female, Japanese or Russian or American, white or yellow or black. Nor can we influence our ancestry, nor our basic mental or physical equipment.

After we are born, an autonomic nervous system controls every vital function that sustains life. A power that no one really understands keeps our heart beating, our lungs breathing, our blood circulating, our body temperature at 98.6 degrees.

A surgeon can cut tissues but he is helpless to force the body to bind the severed tissue together again.

We grow old relentlessly and automatically.

Self-sufficient? Scarcely!

Did Jesus have any comment to make about all this? Yes, of course, He put His finger on the very heart of the matter: “… without me ye can do nothing,” He said.

Nothing? That seems a trifle sweeping. After all, we men have made great progress. We’ve almost eliminated diseases like smallpox, bubonic plague, tuberculosis, polio, and most of the communicable diseases of childhood. We have learned to control our environment to quite an extent. We have put men on the moon. How can all that be helplessness? Most of us do not enjoy that idea. The cult of humanism in our day has trained us to believe that we are quite adequate to be masters of our own destiny.

Yet not only did Jesus insist on the truth of our helplessness; He underscored it by telling us that this same helplessness applied to Him while He wore human flesh: “I can of mine own self do nothing: The Father in me doeth the works.” In this as in everything else, He was setting the pattern of perfect humanity.

The Scriptures spell out for us point by point how helpless we are in relation to our spiritual lives as well as our physical ones.

We feel an impulse towards God. We think that we are reaching out for Him. Not so, Jesus told us, “No one is able to come to me unless he is drawn by the Father…”

We want salvation from our sins, and eternal life. We think that we can earn this salvation. No. the truth is “…it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast.”

So far as the virtues and graces we need for victory in our lives – faith, joy, patience, peace of mind, the ability to love the wretched and the unlovely – there is no way we can work up such qualities. Paul tells us in Galatians 5:22, 23 that these are the gifts of the Holy Spirit. They can be had in no other way. “…A man can receive nothing, except it be given him from heaven.”

With helplessness alone, one would be like a bird trying to fly with one wing. But when the other wing of God’s adequacy is added to our helplessness, then the bird can soar triumphantly above and through problems that hitherto have defeated us.

Why is prayer so startlingly effective when we admit our helplessness? First, as we have seen, because God insists on our facing up to the true facts of our human situation. Thus we lay under our prayer-structure the firm foundation of truth rather than self-delusion or wishful thinking.

This recognition and acknowledgement of our helplessness is also the quickest way to that right attitude which God recognizes as essential to prayer. It deals a mortal blow to the most serious sin of all – man’s independence that ignores God.

Another reason is that we cannot learn firsthand about God – what He is like, His love for us as individuals, and His real power – so long as we are relying on ourselves and other people. Any fellowship with Jesus is the true purpose of life and the only foundation for eternity. It is real, this daily fellowship He offers us.

So, if your every human plan and calculation has miscarried, if, one by one, human props have been knocked out, and doors have shut in your face, take heart. God is trying to get a message through to you, and the message is: “Stop depending on inadequate human resources. Let me handle the matter.”

One sunny day in the future, you will look back and your heart will overflow with praise to God that He cared about you enough to shut you up to Him alone. Without that stringently kind providence you could never have learned firsthand the amazing power of the Prayer of Helplessness.