Why Do We Pray, Anyway?
God already knows everything, right?by Lynn Ellis
While leading my Bible study one night not too long ago - picture a dozen or so 14 year old girls - I was trying to keep them on track as we talked about temptation. And then pretty much out of nowhere Meg said, "Why do we pray if God knows everything anyway and has a plan for everything?" I must admit I blew off the question, claiming to want to stay with the subject at hand. Honestly, I had no idea how to answer her question.
I often wonder why I pray. Do I intend to sway the plans of God so that I get what I want in this world? Do I have a deep desire to spend time talking to him just like I talk to my closest friends, all about the struggles and temptations and triumphs of my life? Do I pray out of a sense of obligation, knowing that God has commanded us to pray? Do I want to be more like Jesus, a man who prayed a lot? The answer is probably all of these.
Prayer and me
My prayer life is not the kind of model a pastor would hold up to the congregation and challenge them to emulate. There are days when I spend no more than 30 seconds saying something to God and not one moment trying to listen to anything he says to me. And there are days that I spend hours wrestling with God and doing a lot of talking and trying to listen. Consistency is not the mark of my relationship with God.
Yet I personally know the power of prayer. When I was a pagan college student, I had friends who were Christians. I knew that there was something different about them. They knew I was a woman in dire need of Jesus. And so they prayed. For two years the morning prayer group on the campus of Middlebury College prayed for my salvation. And lo and behold, it worked. They actually prayed me into the kingdom.
God's eyes
I joined that prayer group after I met Jesus. Every morning we prayed for a different country of the world, using Operation World as our guide. I learned about the world in greater depth than I had in any of my college classes; praying helped me begin to see the world through God's eyes.
I still need to try to answer Meg's question. The only thing I can come up with is this: we pray because it is commanded; we pray to be more like Jesus; we pray in an attempt to influence God's will; we pray to have the possibility of seeing the world through God's eyes; we pray to try to make sense out of the chaos that surrounds us; and at the very core of who we are we pray because our deepest need and desire is to know God, and somehow in the very mysterious scheme of life, prayer is one of the ways we do that.
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