Give Me Neither Poverty Nor Riches Is a Strange Thing to Pray

Somebody asked me a question once that I could not answer properly for about a year.

He said: how much am I allowed to ask for.

He was not being greedy and he was not being clever. He genuinely did not know. He had heard teaching about contentment, and teaching about not loving money, and teaching about God being able to do more than we ask, and none of it had told him how much was an honest number to say out loud.

So he asked for nothing specific. He prayed general prayers about provision and never named an amount, and he had been doing that for about fifteen years.

That is more common than people think. A person who does not know what is acceptable to ask for very often solves the problem by asking vaguely, and a vague request cannot be answered visibly, so nothing ever seems to happen, and after a while they stop.

There is one prayer in Proverbs that names an amount, and it is the only one I know of.

The only prayer in Proverbs

The last chapter of Proverbs opens with a man called Agur, who nobody knows anything about, and who says he is more brutish than any man and has not learned wisdom. And then, uniquely in the book, he prays.

Remove far from me vanity and lies: give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with food convenient for me. (Proverbs 30:8, King James Version)

Food convenient for me. That is an old phrase and the sense of it is the portion that is my portion. The amount appropriate to this person, in this life, not a general amount and not a maximum.

He is asking for a specific size, and the size is defined by what is fitting rather than by what is possible.

You have permission to ask for a size rather than only for an outcome, and the one prayer in Proverbs does exactly that, and Proverbs 30 asks for a portion rather than for a supply without limit, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a person able to name a number without either greed or false modesty.

The two reasons he gives

What makes this prayer honest rather than pious is the next verse, because he explains himself, and both halves of the explanation are about himself rather than about money.

Lest I be full, and deny thee, and say, Who is the LORD? or lest I be poor, and steal, and take the name of my God in vain. (Proverbs 30:9)

He is not making a statement about wealth being bad. He is making a statement about what each condition would do to him.

Too much, and he would forget who God is. Too little, and he would do something that would drag God's name through it.

That is a man who knows himself and is praying accordingly, and it is the least religious sounding prayer in the book of Proverbs.

And notice that he does not resolve which condition is better. He does not decide that poverty is more holy or that plenty is a blessing. He simply says what each one would do to him and asks accordingly.

You are not being asked to have a theory about money before you may pray about it, and Proverbs 30 declines to settle the question and prays anyway. The same Spirit is the one who lets a person ask honestly out of a position they have not finished thinking through.

You are allowed to pray about what a circumstance would do to you rather than only about the circumstance, and Proverbs 30:9 gives two reasons and both of them are about the man praying, and it is the Spirit who gives a person that kind of self knowledge without turning it into self absorption.

I want to be plain about one thing, because this passage attracts nonsense. Nothing here suggests that praying this way changes anybody's finances. It is not a formula and it will not be treated as one on this site. What it changes is the shape of the request.

The petition already has a size in it

Go back to the fourth petition and notice that Jesus does the same thing.

Give us this day our daily bread. (Matthew 6:11)

Bread. Not abundance and not sufficiency in the abstract. A specific and quite modest item, for a specific period, and the whole request is about four words long.

That is a request with a size in it, and the size is small and definite and unembarrassed.

Which means the reason so many of us pray vaguely is not that Scripture is vague. Scripture is remarkably concrete about this and we have made it abstract, mostly out of a fear of sounding greedy.

You have been handed a request with a size and a period already in it, and neither of them is enormous (Matthew 6:11), and the Spirit is the one who takes the embarrassment out of naming a definite thing.

And Paul, who had been through both ends of it, describes having learned something rather than having received a fixed amount.

I know both how to be abased, and I know how to abound: every where and in all things I am instructed. (Philippians 4:12)

I am instructed. That is the language of somebody who was taught over time, in both conditions, and it is a very different thing from a man who found a level and stayed there.