Episode Transcript  

One

Misguided Requests

There’s a fun book by E. Nesbit in which a group of children find a wishing fairy, who will grant them a wish a day, anything they want, but it only lasts for that day. And every day the same thing happens: First, the kids wish for something. Then the fairy grants their wish. And then things go horribly wrong.

They wish to be the most beautiful people on earth, and then no one recognizes them, so they’re shut out of their own home and go hungry all day. They wish for a lot of gold, and then when they try to buy things with it, people call the police, and they end up in jail, and go hungry all day. They wish for wings, and then they fly around, fall asleep on top of a Church steeple, and when they wake up, the wings are gone and they're trapped up on the parapet, and they go hungry till someone finally gets them down.

The story illustrates the old saying: be careful what you wish for. Because if you wish for the wrong thing, even if you get it, things won’t turn out well. With that in mind, here’s an important question: what are we asking God for in our prayers? What do we hope to get from God?

Two

What’s Worth Praying For

Of course, we can pray to God for all kinds of things, including practical things. We can pray for good health or success in our ventures, or that we sell our house. Or that our kid gets into a certain college. Or that a loved one recovers from cancer. We can pray for all kinds of spiritual things, too. We can pray for God’s clear guidance in a certain decision. We can pray that He take away some vice. We can pray that He let us feel His presence and love.  

But at the end of the day, it might be that He knows that any of those things, at least, right now, is not the main thing that will best contribute to our ultimate long-term happiness. And, what we all really want, as Augustine pointed out so long ago, is to be happy. So that should be the main thing we’re asking God for, since that is, ultimately, the thing we really want.

But then, what does happiness actually mean?

Three

The Two Ingredients for Happiness

Happiness is actually very simple. It always has two ingredients: first, encountering something good, and second, being able to appreciate it. That’s it. Every experience of happiness, great or small, happens when we encounter something good and are capable of delighting in it. And this also explains why we’re so often unhappy.

The problem is not that God is absent. God already dwells within us by grace. The problem is that we don’t perceive Him, and even if we did, we wouldn’t know how to delight in Him.

Everyone wants to be happy. But no created thing, no matter how good, can ever be enough. Everything in this world is limited, imperfect, and temporary. God alone is the infinite, perfect, and everlasting Good. Only He can satisfy the deepest desire of the human heart. And yet, the great spiritual masters all agree on this uncomfortable truth: We all want two or three things more than we love God. We give them our attention, our energy, our time—and that is what love is.  When those things are threatened, we become anxious, angry, and afraid. We wake up at 3 a.m. thinking about them. And when we lose them, or are prevented from having them, we become deeply discouraged.

These are the things we constantly think about. These are the things we ask God for in prayer. And without realizing it, they become distractions in prayer, because we are asking God for what cannot make us happy. So what should we be asking for? We should be asking for God Himself. We should be praying not just that He come to us, but that He heal us, purify us of our disordered loves, remove our blindness, and enlarge our hearts, so that when He comes, we are finally able to delight in Him.

Please God, purify me of my disordered loves so that I might love and want you and pray for and wish for you above all things!

Four

The Two Purposes of Christ’s Coming

Christ is the supreme, infinite Good brought to earth in human form. But He hasn’t only come as the supreme Good, the fulfillment of all desire, and the object of all happiness. He has also come to be the cure for our sin, the antidote to the attachments and fears and spiritual insensitivity that make us indifferent to God.

Scripture tells us to taste and see the goodness of the Lord, but Christ isn’t just sweetness and beauty. He’s also the agent who removes the foul coating from our tongues and the scales from our eyes. He brings both sweetness and the capacity for taste. He brings both hypnotic beauty and the power of sight. 

Christ, Our Savior and Our God, is both the capacity for happiness and happiness itself. He is the one we should be praying for. Christ is what we should be asking God for. He is the only thing we should have on our Christmas wish-list. Because it turns out, He’s all we could ever want.

Five

Don’t Settle for Less than Christ

The children in the Nesbitt story didn’t know what to ask for. They didn’t know what they should want. So the things they ended up wishing for always ended up backfiring.

So, as a concrete resolution, figure out what you spend the most time wanting. What do you spend the most time wishing for? What do you spend the most time petitioning God for? 

Then say to the Lord and to yourself, “Lord, I want you more than those things. I don’t need this Lord, I need you!”

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