By: Bryce Masek, Pastor Central Sunrise Mountain
Have you ever found yourself praying to God about the most petty and trivial of things? Possibly things like: “Lord, I’m running late. Please give me, out of your vast and rich supply in Heaven, all of the green traffic lights.” Or maybe: “Father, help guide me in your paths of righteousness, towards an open parking spot.” Or something more like this: “Almighty God, I really shouldn’t have eaten that, and now my belly hurts. The God who raised Lazarus, please resurrect my gut.”
Although these are examples of some very insignificant requests, sometimes our prayers are a bit more somber and desperate. Maybe you’ve prayed something along the lines of: “Lord, I need your help. I need you in this situation. The only way I’m going to get through this is if you get me through it, God.”
Thankfully, our God is a God of rescue. And He does show up when we need Him most. In fact, that’s what we celebrate during this Advent season: that light stepped down into our world, even while we were turned away from Him and lost in our own darkness; that the Divine became earthbound and met us in the midst of our mess. That said, Jesus is also so much more than that.
It can be easy to think of God as merely some kind of 911 operator or a genie in a bottle; a celestial entity waiting on standby on a cloud nearby, ready to pounce at a moment’s notice to help rescue us, right when we need Him most. But if I’m being honest, my prayer life can sometimes look a lot like this, reduced to nothing more than me asking God to intervene on my behalf again and again and again. Casual distance that is interrupted by pleas for divine intervention.
This immediate-focused and self-centered mindset and practice that many of us adopt when it comes to prayer makes me think a lot of a theatrical device born in ancient Greece called “Deus Ex Machina,” literally translated as “god from the machine.” It was a crane-like device used to lower an actor playing a god onto the stage to solve a complex plot problem. The term has since evolved into a literary and dramatic term for a contrived, sudden, and improbable resolution to a story’s conflict.
What if this Christmas season, instead of adopting a Deus Ex Machina mindset (asking God to lower Himself down on a crane contraption), we instead sought God and requested His presence in our everyday, ordinary circumstances? And what if we chose to see Him, to see the miraculous in our mundane? What if our prayers were structured in such a way that His presence was invited into every dark corner and dull space? “Lord help me with this conversation I’m about to have.” “Father, use me to be a light to others today.” “Jesus, allow my racing thoughts and ungrateful heart to find moments of joy and contentment today.”
I’ve been praying for divine intervention so much in my life, but that intervention has already occurred and I can live and rest in it. God is already here, accessible, and responsive. Psalm 139:7-12 (MSG) says it this way:
“Is there anyplace I can go to avoid your Spirit? to be out of your sight? If I climb to the sky, you’re there! If I go underground, you’re there! If I flew on morning’s wings to the far western horizon, You’d find me in a minute—you’re already there waiting! Then I said to myself, ‘Oh, he even sees me in the dark! At night I’m immersed in the light!’ It’s a fact: darkness isn’t dark to you; night and day, darkness and light, they’re all the same to you.”
God has been divinely intervening on our behalf and for our benefit for as long as our earth has existed. He did it in the Old Testament, He did it through the person of Christ in the New Testament, and He does it today.
God doesn’t need to lower Himself down on a crane. He just wants you to open the door.