When Praying to Change “This World”
“My Kingdom is not of this world”
When priests and pastors lead their congregations in prayer to change hurtful conditions, individual or collective, they make two false assumptions:
1. God knows about these conditions.
2. God needs to be begged to do something about the issue.
Unfortunately, these false beliefs are built into the traditional and common prayer of petition.
A God of unconditional Love
By definition, Christians should focus on the God of unconditional Love introduced by Jesus (1 John 4:8).
Consequently, we must resolve the following questions:
1. Could God let hurtful and nefarious conditions exist?
2. Could a God of Love create major suffering for humans, animals, or the environment?
3. Could such a loving God be so callous toward its creation?
4. Can these questions be reconciled with Jesus’ teaching that “God is love”?
The metaphysical movement
The Bible shows that concepts about God’s nature evolved during the 2,000 years leading up to Jesus. It is reasonable that this conceptual evolution would continue after Jesus in the subsequent 2,000 years and beyond, driven by God-seeking men and women.
In the late nineteenth century, there was a very active metaphysical movement in the U.S. One of its expressions was exploring the nature of God.
Let’s consider some of the findings of the metaphysical movement.
Metaphysicians in the 1800s established the logical necessity for the one and only God (monotheism’s fundamental premise) to be Omnipresent, Omnipotent, and Omniscient.
Based on Jesus’ teaching, they went further and declared that God is also all-loving (Omni-love).
These metaphysicians knew that their conclusions stood in stark contrast to the evidence of the nature of human life:
How could God be all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-loving and allow for our diseases, poverty, wars, death, and catastrophic natural events?
They found the solution to this quandary in Jesus’ assertion, “My kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36).
My kingdom is not of this world
In saying this, Jesus is not suggesting that there are two worlds, “My kingdom” and “This world.”
Jesus is telling us that what humans experience is not God’s Reality but rather a subjective reality on our part.
We are clearly not experiencing what God created because we cannot perceive the eternal perfection of God’s kingdom.
Our human perception is limited by our five physical senses and subject to our conditioning. From very early childhood, we are exposed to other people’s views of the world and their views of everything surrounding us.
Since each one of us has his/her specific conditioning, in the aggregate, it creates a collective view of what we think the human reality is. And we live accordingly.
The world we live in is not a part of God’s creation. Rather, it is a distorted view of God’s Creation.
And if it is not of God, God is unaware of it.
It’s like a parent who cannot explain their child’s scary nightmare because that experience exists only in the child’s imagination — the parent has no access to the dream. The parent can only comfort the child by reminding them that the dream is not real and has no power to harm them.
Men do not see it
Our conditioning includes many false ideas that we absorbed and were unaware of during our early youth. This conditioning formed our state of mind, which was characterized by a deep sense of separation.
We learned to accept this sense of separation between ourselves and the rest of the world around us as a fact of life. It became our reality, and since this type of conditioning and sense of separation happened to everyone, it also became the collective reality.
That mindset also engendered a false sense of separation from God.
Verse 113 of Thomas’ gnostic gospel describes this collective human myopia: “The kingdom of the Father is spread out upon the earth, and men do not see it.”
The answers
Consequently, when praying to change any part of “this world,” including any human experience, we need to realize that:
1. God is unaware of disharmonies because “God is too pure to behold inequity” (Hab. 1: 13).
2. If God does not know about any disharmonies, He/She/It will do nothing about it since it is a non-reality as far as God is concerned.
The solution
The solution is not the prayer of petition but rather the “Thank-you” prayer that Jesus expressed before his miracles.
Jesus always thanked God for the eternal perfection of Its creation. He was convinced of the omnipresence of Divine perfection, and he completely lived from his belief and awareness that anything contrary to that loving perfection could only be a human misperception.
Any and all negative misperceptions need to be rectified by the conscious awareness that these things are not of God.
And whatever is not of God can have only the power we, as humans, give it.
Void of real power, an appearance would dissolve in proportion to our own conviction of this spiritual Truth. The Bible gives us several examples, such as:
1. In Mark 4:39, “And he arose and rebuked the wind, and said unto the sea, Peace, be still. And the wind ceased, and there was a great calm.”
2. In John 11:11–19, upon learning of Lazarus’s death, Jesus said to his disciples, “Our friend Lazarus is asleep, and I am going there to wake him up.”
In contrast, in prayers of petition, we go to God believing that something is wrong with Divine Creation. That’s absurd.
And it also implies that God is willing for us to suffer until we somehow offer enough appropriate supplication. To me, this seems impossible!
In short, we must remember and realize that “My Kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36).
Jon Canas
Debunking false creeds. Reclaiming the Soul of Christianity.
Site: https://bio.site/ChristicSoul
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My book: Religion, Politics, and Reclaiming the Soul of Christianity: A Spiritual Imperative for Our Time and Our Nation
