Whose Choice Anyway

Committee of Privileges! - which investigates issues likely to bring Parliament into contempt.

While I pondered on whether to introduce the Bill I also prayed about it. Since childhood I have relied on prayer, as millions of others do - uncertain how the prayer may be answered but confident that God listens and that through the working of His Spirit he will provide the answers. One of the greatest gifts which God gives us is free will - and that is the inevitable answer to those who ask why doesn't God intervene directly to stop this or that. We are free to listen and to then act or to reject and to go our own way. Solutions lie in our own hands.

When we pray the Lord's Prayer we pray that the Kingdom should come on earth as well as in heaven. This most powerful of prayers is not that God will intervene to stop famine, hunger, poverty or war. It is a request that His Spirit will fire our hearts and minds and use us as lightning conductors - enabling us to proclaim and strive for the justice on earth which is central to Our Lord's teachings. It is easy to blame God for man's shortcomings. It is also popular to say that you could never believe in a God who 'allows' pain. C.S. Lewis was right when he said that pain is God's megaphone through which He speaks to a deaf world.

Prayer is a way of talking to God and pleading a cause with Him, but it is also a two-way process. Listening for God amidst the cacophony of our self-centred and success-oriented world is one of the hardest things to do. For the Christian prayer is not a piece of superstitious nonsense. It is at the heart of the promise Jesus gave his disciples. In his first letter St John puts it like this: 'We are quite confident that if we ask Him for anything, and it is in accordance with His will, He will hear us; and, knowing that whatever we may ask, He hears us, we know that we have already been granted what we asked of Him' (1 John 5.14-15, Jerusalem Bible).

Our Lord is quite specific in His promise that 'I tell you solemnly once again, if two of you on earth agree to ask anything at all, it will be granted to you by my Father in heaven. For where two or three meet in my name, I shall be there with them' (Matthew 18.19-20, Jerusalem Bible).

Prayer is also a part of the spiritual warfare in which Christians must be prepared to engage. Can anyone doubt that at the heart of the abortion business lies a force which is intrinsically evil? It has become unfashionable in the 1980s to think in terms of the devil as corrupting and personally destructive. But the word Satan means the enemy and he appears throughout the New and Old Testaments as tempter and corruptor. We make his defeat at the Cross effective by prayer and by fasting. We may sometimes appear to be a rather puny army, with few or no weapons; but as in the story of Jericho, when the order is given to march around the walls and to storm them with our prayers alone, we can be staggered by the results.