He Hears the Desire of People Nobody Is Listening To

A woman told me she had stopped praying about something because she was ashamed of praying about it.

That is a sentence worth slowing down for. She was not ashamed of the thing. She was ashamed of the praying.

Here is what she meant. She knew about a situation. Not a headline, not a cause, something specific and local and ongoing that she had learned about and could not stop knowing about. And she had done what she could, which was very little, and it had not been enough, and it was never going to be enough because the thing was outside her reach.

So she prayed about it for a while. And then a thought arrived, and it arrived in a reasonable voice, and it said: praying about this is what you are doing instead of helping. It is a way of feeling like you have responded.

She said once that thought was in the room she could not get it out. And so she stopped praying about it, because praying felt like a performance of concern, and she would rather be honest and silent than dishonest and vocal.

I have heard a version of that from more people than I can count, and almost all of them were serious people. It is not a lazy person's problem. It is a conscientious person's problem.

What the psalm says God does

The tenth psalm is one of the angriest in the book, and it does not end where people expect.

Most of it is a description. Somebody is doing harm and getting away with it, and the psalmist spends verse after verse describing exactly how, in a level of detail that would be uncomfortable in a service. He does not soften any of it.

And then, near the end, he says this.

LORD, thou hast heard the desire of the humble: thou wilt prepare their heart, thou wilt cause thine ear to hear. (Psalm 10:17, King James Version)

Thou hast heard the desire. Not their words. Their desire. Which includes everything a person wanted and could not get into a sentence, and everything they gave up on saying because it seemed useless.

You have been heard on the thing you stopped saying out loud, and the hearing is of the desire rather than of the phrasing, and Psalm 10 puts it in the past tense while the wrong is still going on, and it is the Spirit who searches a heart and knows what was in it before anybody found words.

Notice the order in the second half. He prepares their heart, and then He causes His ear to hear. Even the praying is something He does first.

The oldest example in Scripture

This is not a poetic idea. It is the pattern at the very foundation of the Bible's biggest rescue.

And the LORD said, I have surely seen the affliction of my people which are in Egypt, and have heard their cry by reason of their taskmasters; for I know their sorrows. (Exodus 3:7)

Seen, heard, know. Three verbs, all of them His, all of them completed before Moses knows anything is happening.

And the people crying out had no plan. They had no strategy and no leverage and no ability to change one thing about their situation. Their entire contribution was the crying out, and the text does not present that as a failure. It presents it as the thing that reached heaven.

You are not being asked to bring a plan with your prayer, and the people in Egypt brought nothing but the cry (Exodus 3:7), and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries a cry that has no proposal attached to it.

That matters for the woman I described, because her whole problem was that her praying was not backed by adequate action. Scripture has never once made that a condition.

Prayer is not the substitute, it is the reach

Let me take the objection seriously rather than waving at it, because the objection is honest.

It is entirely possible to use prayer as a way of feeling responsive without being responsive. That happens. Anybody who has been in a room where a real need got prayed about and then nothing was done has felt it, and the discomfort is legitimate.

But look at what the objection actually proves. It proves that prayer can be misused where action was available. It says nothing at all about the case where action is not available, and that is the case most of us are in most of the time.

Nobody can get to every place. Most of us do not know the people. There is no lever within a thousand miles of an ordinary hand. In that situation prayer is not the substitute for reaching. It is the only reaching there is.

You are inside the case the objection never covered, and Scripture never once made a prayer conditional on the pray-er being able to back it with action (Psalm 82:3), and the Spirit is the one who is already present in a place where you have no standing at all.

You have a reach that goes further than your arms, and it was given rather than invented as a consolation for people who cannot travel (Psalm 10:17). The Spirit is the one who takes a sentence said in a kitchen into a room nobody in your life has ever entered.

And God gives His people the instruction directly, in a psalm where He is speaking to those who ought to be acting.

Defend the poor and fatherless: do justice to the afflicted and needy. (Psalm 82:3)

That instruction stands wherever a person can obey it, and this site is not going to soften it. Where you can act, act. And where you cannot, the crying out is not a lesser thing you fall back on. It is what the people in Egypt had, and it is what moved.