Prayer is a funny thing.
I’ve been spending more time in prayer than ever before. At the start of this renewed commitment to pray, I wanted to better understand what prayer was. To be honest, I knew in my heart that prayer was important, but I couldn’t reason out in my thinking why it was important. Even in all the books out there on prayer (and there are many) that I read, none of them seemed to adequately answer some of the questions I had about prayer.
The main question I had was this: if God is all knowing, then what’s the point of prayer? God knows everything and is much wiser than humans (Isaiah 55:8). Doesn’t it stand to argue, then, that it makes absolutely no sense for us to lay requests before God (pray) when God is clearly going to do whatever he wants anyway, whether we like it or not? How else can we explain the fact that there are so many prayer requests that seem to go unanswered while others God responds to? Who am I to tell God what I think he should do?
These were some of the thoughts that I was plagued with for some time. Then I came to understand several truths (thanks to the Holy Spirit and the Scriptures) that quickly destroyed these lies.
The first truth that helped me begin to rationalize prayer in light of God’s omniscience is that prayer is much more than supplication (requests). Prayer is the place where we commune with the living God. Prayer is more than a time where we simply present our wish list to our heavenly Santa Clause. Prayer is a time in which we spend sacred dialogue with our Father. When I began to spend my prayer time tuning into what God may be impressing on my heart that my prayer time became much richer (some folks call this contemplative prayer).
The second truth that liberated me from the chains of my previous misconceptions about prayer is that even in our supplications, God, even while being all-knowing, has willed to shape his activity in our our life circumstances according to our own human wills. This is a life-changing thought to me; a complete game-changer.
We see this principle worked out in the conversation that God has with Abraham just before destroying Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 18). In this story, God invites Abraham to share his opinion with God. He asks Abraham what Abraham thinks he should do to Sodom and Gomorra This is mind-blowing—the all knowing, all wise, eternal God would invite a human being’s voice in on a crucial dialogue. You see, this is precisely the kind of God we find in the Bible! A God that cares about what we think.
Many people miss the reality that God created the earth for humanity to govern (Genesis 1:28); albeit, humanity was created to govern it a certain way, and that is according to the loving, gracious, merciful image of God. It was never God’s plan to micromanage earth’s affairs. It makes perfect sense then that God would respect and listen to human voice when it comes to the workings of earth’s affairs. To allow humanity a say in God’s involvement on the earth is for God to respect the order in which he’s created things.
God doesn’t micromanage. God delegates authority. He wants to hear the human voice. This is prayer. This is why we must communicate with him.
