by Garrett Glende

It took me a while to figure out how to start writing this post. My usual format, if you haven’t noticed, is to refer back to the previous week’s article and give some sort of linking phrase to tie it all together. I felt like being a tad more creative tonight, but nothing really came to mind immediately. Then it hit me – maybe I should pray! I know what you’re thinking, “God obviously doesn’t answer prayer cuz that sure ain’t creative.” Maybe so, but at least it’s something. Plus it goes to show how often I fail to seek God’s help in my own life and I have a feeling many of you can relate as well.

In chapter eighteen of Grudem’s Systematic Theology, he defines prayer and fleshes out some of the basic concepts of the practice. He writes that prayer is “personal communication with God” and includes “prayers of request for ourselves or for others, confession of sin, adoration, praise and thanksgiving, and also God communicating to us indications of his response.” The concept is simple: we converse with God. But there is much more to it than just that. We aren’t just hanging out talking with God over a cup of coffee. We are communing with the sovereign Lord of the universe. He is a righteous and holy God, so we must not approach Him flippantly. He demands respect and reverence for no other reason but that He alone is God and we are not.

But what does prayer actually do? Does God hear our prayers? And what is its purpose? Personally, I often find myself wondering if God really does hear my prayers. It’s easy to think that my performance determines the generosity of God in responding to my prayers, but this is not a biblical perspective. Prayer does change the way God acts, as we see in the life of Moses when he prayed that God would not bring His judgment against the people and God “relented from the disaster that he had spoken of bringing on his people” (Ex 32:11-14). Grudem writes of James 4:2 (“you do not have, because you do not ask”) that “failure to ask deprives us of what God would otherwise have given us.” Surely God does hear our prayers, for He is omnipresent and omniscient, seeing and knowing our every thought. But this does not mean that all prayers are answered in the way we would like. We must seek God’s will in prayer, as a means of laying aside our own desires and trusting that God’s plan is perfect. Many times God’s will may be obvious if it is illustrated in Scripture, but there are other circumstances that the Bible is silent about. We must do our best to pray in accordance with the things that God has revealed to us, trusting them to be true and relying on God to give us wisdom about things that are not present in His word. In this way, the purpose of prayer is to increase our dependence on God and to develop an attitude of humility. The proud person does not often pray because he believes that He does not need to go to God for daily sustenance. Not only is a humble heart cultivated, but we can also express our thankfulness to God through prayer, giving Him the praise that He deserves. These elements, along with the confession of sin, are a basic outline of what we do when we pray and are explained by the familiar model ACTS (adoration, confession, thanksgiving, supplication). In prayer, we come before God and praise Him for who He is, confess our sins, express our gratitude, and ask for His will to be done in our lives.

The application here seems obvious. We need to pray. If we think we pray enough, we should pray more. JC Ryle, in his pamphlet titled “A Call to Prayer,” challenges the prayerless man with the following thoughts: “I warn you that you are in a position of fearful danger. If you die in your present state, you are a lost soul. You will only rise again to be eternally miserable. I warn you that of all professing Christians you are most utterly without excuse. There is not a single good reason that you can show for living without prayer.” So I would just want to echo the same question that Ryle asks: Do you pray? It should be as natural for a Christian to pray as it is for a husband to talk with his wife or for a son to speak with a father, but so often professing Christians fail in this area. If someone claims to have an intimate relationship with another person, yet never speaks with them, does this relationship truly exist? I would venture to say that it doesn’t. So how can a person claim to know God, yet rarely come before Him in prayer? It may be that there really isn’t a true relationship at all. These are somber words, but I fear it to be the case for many.

We must seek to understand the riches and blessings that God provides us through prayer. It is through prayer that we are empowered by the Holy Spirit to be useful for God’s kingdom purposes. All effective Christian ministry is fueled by an intense devotion to seeking God’s will in communion with Him. It is my own prayer that we would all humble ourselves, recognizing that we need to pray without ceasing, fully aware of our own insufficiencies, and trusting in Christ to provide all that we need.