Prayer and Faith

I wanted to talk about prayer a bit in the blog post this week, and for good reason: we have two upcoming prayer events in the next two months.

On May 31st, our normal end-of-the-month prayer meeting will be expanded into a 24-hour fast. We try to do this a few times a year whenever there is a month with five Sundays. Everyone in the church is invited to fast for 24 hours, starting at 5 pm on Saturday and lasting until we break the fast together with a potluck dinner at 5 pm on Sunday. You don’t have to fast from food to participate—some people choose to fast from their phones, from all media, or from something else.

Then on June 19th, we will be having a prayer workshop titled “How to Pray” (very original title, I know). Whether you are unfamiliar with how prayer works or already have prayer as a part of your daily routine, the workshop will be an encouragement to know and experience God more deeply through prayer. You can sign up to attend here. 

I have been thinking a bit about prayer these last few weeks, so I thought I would share something about the relationship between prayer and faith.

Prayer presents a lot of challenges to ordinary human reasoning, and atheists love to poke holes in the very idea of prayer (this is not new—people have been doing this since at least the ancient Greeks, and probably earlier). A lot of it boils down to a simple question: why pray? If God already knows what we need, why do we have to ask Him for it? If God knows all things and determines all things, what possible role would our human prayers have in His sovereign plan?

These are certainly interesting questions, but I think the logical conundrums inherent in them are vastly overstated. Much of the difficulty vanishes when we understand that God desires and establishes a relationship with us—that He instructs us to address Him as and consider Him to be a Father and a friend. A good father provides for his children, yet also desires to talk to them and know them.

Prayer is therefore best conceived as something that is for us—something that God commands us to do for our own good.

God remains knowable and approachable to His creation even after their descent into sin. As John Owen observes in his work on prayer, prayer is not something that man needs to be taught, but something he instinctively does as he reaches out toward God. Every religion created by man involves some conception of prayer, often mixed into offerings and sacrifices designed to ensure that man’s voice is heard. It is only in the revealed religion of Abraham that God is shown to be always ready and willing to hear from His people.

But even more than this, God has determined that His plans will be accomplished in and through the prayers of His people. Therefore, even when He issues a promise—even when His word is secured by solemn oaths—He brings about His purposes in response to the entreaties of His people.

The best example of this is in the book of Daniel. When the prophet Daniel, reading the scroll of Jeremiah, understands that the exile is temporary and that the time set for it should soon be ending, his response is perhaps unexpected.

You can think of it this way: if I told you I was coming to see you at 9 pm, you would simply wait for 9 pm to arrive and then discover whether I had kept my word. You (probably) would not text me every hour asking and begging me to arrive at 9 pm.

But this is what Daniel does.

Rather than simply waiting for the exile to end as the Lord had promised, Daniel begins to fast and pray with intensity for God to do what He had promised to do. The promises of God seem to have this effect. Rather than making a person passive before the Lord’s will, they instead send them into bold action. They believe the word of the Lord, and therefore act and participate in the fulfillment of the promise.

This is what faith looks like.

And prayer is deeply intertwined with faith. We pray because we believe the words of God inviting us to come and lay our petitions at His feet. We pray because we believe in the benevolence and love of God toward us. We pray because we trust His ability to fulfill what He has said.

Daniel prays, and by praying participates in the purposes of God. This is why God has ordained that all of His purposes will be accomplished in and through our prayers. We are thereby caught up in the very works and purposes of God—we become participants in His sovereignty.

What will you dare to pray for? What do you want from Him, and what has He promised to do? Will you ask? Will you pray?