DOES PRAYER WORK?

Matthew 7:7 says, "Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you."

John 15:7, "You may ask me for anything in my name, and I will do it."

Verses such as these seem to support the claim that God answers prayer but often our experiences do not. Many of us have prayed for a loved one to be healed, for a struggle to end, or for God to see us through a precarious situation, only to have our prayers unanswered. How is it that sometimes God answers our requests and other times he doesn't? Does God really hear or answer our prayers? Is praying even worth it?

I think part of the reason we often think God doesn't answer our prayers is that we don't realize when he does. God answers prayers every day, all day long for things we didn't even think to ask him for. We don't think to ask God for each breath or each new day. We don't pray to see one more sunrise of spend one more day with people we love. We forget that God is holding all things and all life together and he's doing it all around us. Thinking about life this way makes the world look very different and we finally start to realize how blessed we are. Even the person in the greatest despair has been blessed beyond measure by the grace of God.

So, our dissatisfaction with how God operates is not rooted in the fact that God doesn't answer prayers as much as it is in that we don't like his answers or when he gives them. I once heard somebody say that God always answers prayers in one of three ways - yes, no, or not yet. This is a simplified way to think about things but it drives home the fact that an answer can take other forms besides the "yes" that we long to hear.

So really the problem is not that God doesn't answer prayers, it's that he doesn't always say yes when we want him to. But doesn't the Bible say things like "ask and it will be given to you" and "ask for anything in my name and I will do it"? These two verses simply tell us to pray. Here are two more verses that tell us more about how to pray.

John 14:13-14 says, "And I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Son may bring glory to the Father. You may ask me for anything in my name, and I will do it."

1 John 5:14, "This is the confidence we have in approaching God: that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us. "

HOW TO PRAY - So according to the Bible, we are supposed to ask "in his name" (which basically means with the reputation of his name in mind) and "according to his will". This changes everything. The Westminster Confession accurately establishes that "The chief end of man is to glorify God." If this is the case, then his will becomes more important than our will and his glory more of a priority than our own. Praying in this way means that the focus of our prayers becomes the Lord instead of ourselves. We see this several times throughout the scriptures. In John 11, right before Jesus is about to raise Lazarus from the dead he prays, "Father I thank you that you heard me. I knew that you always hear me, but I said this for the benefit of the people standing here, that they may believe you sent me." In 1 Kings 19, before God consumes an ox in fire, Elijah prayed, "Today let it be known that you are God of Israel and that I am your servant (basically that I amount to nothing) and have done all these things at your word. Answer me, O Lord, answer me that these people may know that you are God." In both examples the reason for prayer was completely for God to get the glory. How many of our prayers are designed like that?

This is a hard to swallow. Essentially this means that the way God answers our prayers will always been in line with his will, and that his answer will at times be different than our requests. This means that our prayers for healing might not always be answered and that God allows "bad things" to happen because they are a part of his will. How is God good in all this? God is good and not cruel because his will is different than ours. His will is long term and spans for all eternity while ours is short term and limited by our lifetime. In the same way that a parent might allow their child to experience temporary pain or "badness" for their better growth and good, God uses all things in our life for our spiritual growth and or the growth of others which is glorifying to him.

WHY PRAY - One question cannot be avoided in all this. If God really is sovereign and already knows his will for our life, why should we bother to pray? If we can't change the outcome of things, why does praying even matter?

We pray for several reasons. One reason we pray is to strengthen our own faith. Praying helps to remind us of all the ways God is working around us and brings to our attention blessings that we ordinarily ignore. Try keeping track of prayers and ways that God is answering them and I think you will be amazed at the extent of God's grace. Seeing God work day in and out reminds us how faithful he is and strengthens our faith to trust him more in the future.

The other reason we pray is for the benefit of others. God is the world's best parent and he loves to give gracious gifts to his children so that his goodness can be made known. If we never ask God for anything, we deny God the opportunity to show himself great to the rest of the world.