Recently I flew to Los Angeles California for some meetings and was shocked at how conditions in the city had deteriorated. Everywhere I looked there were homeless camps. I tried to imagine the desperation that might have driven people to that condition. The abuse. The abandonment. The addiction. I was only a few blocks out of the airport before I found myself completely overwhelmed.

Don’t you sometimes wish you had some kind of magic power to snap your fingers and fix the problems that leave so many people hurting and in despair?

Many Christians think this way about the Bible. They scour its words for something they can hold God to, as a promise, a kind of spell or incantation.

One of the most common is to recite 2 Chronicles 7:14, “if my people who are called by my name will humble themselves and pray, and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and forgive their sin and heal their land.”

Many people see this as a promise from God that he is obligated to fulfill if we do our part, which is to humble ourselves and pray. But I’ve come to see it as one of the unquestioned answers that could be keeping our faith at a shallow level. Here’s why.

There are two kinds of things happening in the Bible. The Bible describes things and it prescribes things. Descriptive examples are things such as God commanding Abraham to sacrifice his son, or telling about how Paul was bitten by a poisonous snake and survived.

The Bible doesn’t just describe what happened in the past, though. It also prescribes things that everyone at all times should do. The ten commandments, for example. And the sermon on the mount. These contain principles that the context makes clear are for all of us, forever.

I think that the promise that God will heal the land was a descriptive one. It was made specifically to the children of Israel, at a certain point in time, for a certain purpose. It wasn’t made to us. We are not Israel.

But here’s the good news: We don’t need to twist God’s hands behind his back by holding him to a promise that was not made to us. The testimony of Scripture, especially through the words of Jesus, shows us that the almighty Sovereign of the universe has invited us to ask and promised to answer.

God has told us to pray that his kingdom would come. He has specifically said that he will give us what we need when we pray in Jesus’s name. He has promised to forgive our sins in response to prayer and to give us wisdom. Throughout the Bible we are invited to pray, and promised that God will answer.

And in a needy world like ours, that’s a lot better than any prayer formula.