Do you believe in prayer?
If so, what do you think prayer accomplishes?
Up front, I don't pray, don't really feel it accomplishes anything. Even when I was religious it seemed weird to me to be praying to ask God for something like helping folks in need when shouldn't God already know who is in need and what is needed?
Even the Lord's prayer, still asking for stuff and to be forgiven. Shouldn't God know all of this stuff without us needing to pray about it?
What does prayer do for you?
This is a good question....and a subject that has turned people away from God because of what they mistakenly think prayer is.
To establish what prayer is, we first of have to understand what it isn't.
God is not a genie, there to grant our every wish. Some people ask the most ridiculous things of God on that assumption. I am always amazed that in any given situation on social media, Americans particularly will be praying for people who are in trouble, on the assumption that it is God's job to make things better; that prayer will somehow magically make a miracle happen. How often does it make no difference at all? So our attitude toward prayer tells us something about our expectations.....however unrealistic. Having our hopes dashed is spiritually crippling because people begin to think that God doesn't care...or worse that he isn't even there.
The subject of our prayers also reveals what we expect prayer to accomplish. For example, some people will pray for their own, or a loved one's cancer to be cured....or their child to recover from a serious affliction or illness. Is this realistic? Is God sitting in heaven on his throne giving a thumbs up or a thumbs down to prayer requests?
Is that what the Bible says? Far from it.
OK, now we need to know what prayer is.
The Lord's prayer is a sample of the the appropriate subject matter for prayer. Is there anything in that prayer that leads us to believe that God will make a miracle happen for us? Or is it realistic in its approach to God, in that it leads us to be grateful for what we have, and to treat others as we would like to be treated?
The first things mentioned by Jesus were God's name to be "hallowed"....sanctified...set apart as holy.
Then there is mention of God's Kingdom to come so that everything on earth can be as good as it is in heaven.
Herein lies the true basis of our prayers.....everything is tied up with what God's Kingdom will accomplish, once it "comes". How many people have any idea about what God's Kingdom actually is?
As a demonstration of what that will mean, we have the miracles of the first century to show us first hand what it will accomplish...Jesus, as King of that Kingdom was healing the sick, and even raising of the dead. But these demonstrations were not to last. The full benefits of the kingdom will "come" only when it is ruling the whole earth.
Daniel prophesied that God's Kingdom will come with great force, crushing all corrupt human governments out of existence and replacing them. (Daniel 2:44) Once that has been accomplished, only then will the miracles of the first century be repeated on a grand scale. (Revelation 21:2-4)
People are not taught what prayer is for, and what it accomplishes. Jesus showed us that through his own prayers he needed God's help and strength to endure what he had to face. He did not pray for God to take away his suffering but to sustain him in spite of it. If God's own son needed God's help to endure what this world threw at him, (1 John 5:19) then what does that say about us? We have the same enemy...the one who made Job suffer.....the same one who put temptations before the Christ.....this is his world and he will make sure that people suffer and if he can mislead even Christians into thinking that God doesn't care about them, then he will.
Even in all our distress, we can still find things to be thankful for. In fact it is therapeutic to do so. It makes the mountains seem more like molehills and strengthens our reliance on God to see us through any trial.
I always love the concluding portion of the book of Job.....no one seems to highlight what the end of his trials meant for him.
Job 42:12; 16-17....
"So the Lord blessed Job in the second half of his life even more than in the beginning. For now he had 14,000 sheep, 6,000 camels, 1,000 teams of oxen, and 1,000 female donkeys. 13 He also gave Job seven more sons and three more daughters. . . . Job lived 140 years after that, living to see four generations of his children and grandchildren. 17 Then he died, an old man who had lived a long, full life."
If Job endured all those trial and came out victorious, so can we. Job was tested by the devil, but in reality, he represents all of us. He proved that the devil was a liar and a false accuser by never losing his faith in God even under the most extreme circumstances.
God blessed Job, and rewarded his faith and his endurance. He will see life again as a believer in the resurrection where he will have all of his children to enjoy the rest of eternity.
I believe in the power of prayer because it is an appeal to God for the strength to sustain our faith and not to unrealistically treat it as a means to a miracle. I believe that the miracles will come in due time, but for now we are no match for the devil without the help that God supplies. Prayer is our lifeline.