Is there really a "need" for me to pray against myself?
For example, sometimes I will pray "Lord, humble me" but then I will quickly revoke it and change it to "please keep me humble" or "help me to be more humble" because as much as I want to exhibit true humility in all areas of my life (or whatever it is that I am praying for), I certainly don't really want to pray for God to teach me true humility by taking everything away from me like He did to Job (okay maybe that was a little too extreme of an example).
So earlier this week I read Donald Miller's blog post (http://donmilleris.com/2011/10/11/intimacy-with-god-comes-when-we-accept-his-kindness/) where he writes about praying for Christ to defeat him with His goodness. It is a really cool phrase because it recognizes that 1) God is good 2) we are not good 3) He won't defeat us with His wrath or anger but with His kindness, His goodness, and His grace.
Prayer is a powerful thing and I think how you pray matters. Obviously God doesn't care so much for the choice of words we use but our desire to please Him. God doesn't want us to suffer or endure hardship but He wants us to grow and mature in our faith which often comes through hardship. I don't think God expects us to pray for this kind of maturing hardship per se; however, while we may not explicitly pray in this way, essentially we must admit that the intention is at least there otherwise we can't really be praying honest prayers, can we?
In the Lord's prayer, we are taught to pray "lead us not into temptation." Praying "against" ourselves doesn't mean we are praying for God to allow us to fall into the temptations or dangers of sin, but we pray for God's will to be done.....we pray for blessings and we pray for curses....whatever is in His will that will bring us closer to Him....but, ultimately, we pray for sufficient grace to resist any evil that may come our way. Even Jesus prayed "My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will."
So what does an honest prayer look like? I think when we pray for greater spiritual intimacy, we can't fully mean what we say unless we are willing to accept, with arms wide open, any good and bad that may come our way.
I do love the terminology Miller uses: "defeat me with your goodness." God's goodness will continuously rage war against our inherently sinful beings but oh what a glorious battle that is!
Perhaps the real issue isn't about the need to pray "against" ourselves but rather the need to pray honest prayers. I think at the heart of honest prayers lies the need to reflect conscious acknowledgement of the noetic effects of sin on our mind's capability of understanding the disparage in alignment between what we desire both for ourselves and in relation to God and what God wants for us.
