PRAYER WORKS
Nathan Attwood
Pastor, Marianna First United Methodist Church
"The prayer of the righteous is powerful and effective." James 5:16.
HOW does prayer work?
Obviously, prayer is conversation with God. In prayer, we talk openly and heart to heart with God. Prayer can be individual or communal. We can pray using written prayers like the Lord's Prayer or we can pray extemporaneously. Biblical prayer can include intercession for others, requests for our needs and even wants, repentance, prayers for leaders and community, wordless silent prayer soaking God's presence, prayer for guidance, prayers of gratitude for things God has done, prayers of praise and adoration for who God is, and so on.
But HOW does prayer work? What is the mechanism? That's a tricky question. All the answers seem to create problems.
Does prayer change God's mind? Does God intend to do one thing and then when we pray, God does something else instead? Sometimes, the Bible seems to suggest it does. Several times, God intended to destroy the Hebrew people and the Bible seems to indicate that Moses talked him out of it. But if God is God and God knows better, why would God plan to do one thing and then do something else because we asked him to? Doesn't that seem a little manipulative and perhaps even a bit magical? Doesn't it seem a bit odd that God, who is all-knowing and perfectly good would change his mind about anything, and especially to turn his mind toward what we want and away from what he wants?
Well, then perhaps we should only pray for what God wants. Maybe instead of asking God for anything, maybe we should just pray God's will be done and leave it up to him. Maybe that's what a prayer of faith is, a prayer that trusts God for whatever God wants and doesn't seek the will of the person who prays to be done. Jesus prayed "not my will, but yours." The Lord's prayer says, "Thy will be done."
Except, Jesus also explicitly tells us to ask, seek, and knock. The Epistle of James says that Elijah asked God to stop the rain and God stopped the rain, so we should pray and expect God to do what we ask.
Some people think that the way we get what we ask for is to believe we will get it hard enough, and that the believing is a kind of spiritual force--"faith"--that opens God's hand and moves God to action. I've become wary of that thinking. I've found it makes people think that when they don't get what they pray for, they blame themselves for not believing enough. This can be particularly painful when the prayer is for healing for a sick loved one. Faith means trust in God, not trust in our ability to believe in God. It's God who heals, not our spiritual capacity for believing something hard enough.
I've also known many people who think that the way prayer works is that praying moves spiritual forces, that when we pray, our prayer aids angels who fight on our behalf and pushes back against malevolent spiritual beings. In this kind of thinking, prayer becomes a kind of fight between good and evil and the people who pray are soldiers in a spiritual war. My concern for this way of thinking of how prayer works is that it sets aside the primary purpose of prayer, to develop a loving, relational conversation with God through Christ. When I used to pray that way, I found I spent my prayer against the devil instead of talking to Jesus. That just doesn't seem biblical to me, and certainly it didn't grow my relationship with God or make me into a person whose heart was like the heart of Christ.
One way prayer seems to work is that God teaches us in prayer how to think like a Christ-like person, to learn the ways of God as we spend time with God, to become people who manage life differently. The Epistle of James seems to suggest prayer works this way when he says that if any person lacks wisdom, that person should ask of God and God would grant wisdom, because God is generous and does not hold back from his children. So, maybe the way God affects things through prayer is to change not the situation but to change the person who prays, to make the person who prays more wise and Christ-like so that the person affects the situation differently. Undoubtedly, God does work this way in prayer, but if we believe this is the only way prayer works, we tend to think that things are up to us, we become people who no longer see God's providence shaping the world. We develop a kind of practical atheism--a sense that God exists but doesn't do anything, that the real work must be done by God's people.
Well, that's just wrong. God does do things. God works miracles. God doesn't always work miracles the way I want or according to the timetable I want. Prayer doesn't take away the reality of the corruptibility and mortality of the body, so when we pray and people die it's not because there's something wrong with our prayer. It just means that Jesus hasn't returned yet. Also, sometimes people ARE healed.
I don't know why sometimes people get healed and sometimes they don't. I don't know why God acts in response to prayer in ways God would not otherwise. I don't know what happens in the spiritual realm when God's people pray and I'm frankly pretty weirded out by teachings that purport to know exactly how these things work. I don't know the degree to which prayer changes situations and the degree to which prayer changes me. I don't know exactly why God seems to respond more directly to the shared prayer of groups of people than merely individuals alone, but scripture and experience seem to demonstrate this is so.
I've heard all the teachings about these things and thought through the implications and theological problems they cause. I've read the passages and compared them. I've had firm opinions on these things that I no longer believe. I don't know exactly how prayer works. But I know prayer works.
As the old saying goes, I don't know how a brown cow eats green grass and then gives white milk that churns into yellow butter. But what I don't understand does not keep me from buttering my bagel each morning.
There's a lot I don't know about how prayer works. I don't need to know. I just know prayer works. God knows how prayer works. Humbly, obediently, trustingly, I open my heart to share and to listen. God moves. I don't need to know how. I know the One who hears and answers.