Prayer

If God knows all things why do we have to ask God through prayer?
If you can not change God’s mind, why ask God?
1. There are some examples in scripture where God changes his mind.
If prayers are only granted which are in God’s will, meaning God wants to do them, wouldn’t God make it happen regardless of a request? If not, does that mean that God’s plan is flexible or that God not running running things according to His will?
John 14:14, “Ask anything in my name and you will receive it.” However, when we ask things in Jesus’ name we don’t receive it.
1. God doesn’t impinge free will.
2. God doesn’t interfere in the laws of nature.
  1. This is deism. It also indicates that God is impotent, bound by his own laws.
  2. If he can’t disturb the natural flow of things, praying to him serves no purpose.
3. God may not answer in your time frame.
4. God may not answer you the way that you want.
James 5:16, “the prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective.”
1. What does it effect? Certainly not anything outwardly. On the other hand God could possibly be this omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient entity who has simply chosen whom he will hear and whom he will ignore arbitrarily. Either way it seems like a waste of time asking for anything of God.
Prayer is about having fellowship with God the creator.
1. How is it fellowship? One prays to an invisible being who doesn’t speak back except through a book written most recently 2000 years ago.
Prayer isn’t about changing others or the world around us, it’s about changing our own hearts.
1. Any type of meditation will do that. The word meditation comes from the Latin word meditari which means to concentrate. Meditation (prayer) “refers to a family of self-regulation practices that focus on training attention and awareness in order to bring mental processes under greater voluntary control and thereby foster general mental well-being and development and/or specific capacities such as calm, clarity, and concentration¹”
2. Isn’t this just a way to cope with unanswered prayer.

Footnotes:

Roger Walsh & Shauna L. Shapiro (2006). “The meeting of meditative disciplines and western psychology: A mutually enriching dialogue”. American Psychologist (American Psychological Association) 61 (3): 227–239. doi:10.1037/0003-066X.61.3.227. ISSN 0003-066X. PMID 16594839. [↩]

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