To the Fellow Believer Struggling With Prayer
A few times this past year, I received letters from close friends, at a time when I was struggling with very similar emotions to the ones they shared.
The struggle was with prayer. Why should we pray for something when God has already decided what the outcome will be? Do our prayers change anything? And why should I keep praying, if I don’t think God will answer me?
The fact that a few people chose to reach out to me with these questions is both humbling and convicting. Especially as these are not mere theological dilemmas, but deeply personal, emotional struggles, rising from hearts in the midst of confusion, grief, loss, pain, and guilt – emotions I was and still continue to face every day.
For many months after Isaiah’s passing, prayer seemed almost pointless to me. I still prayed, but often half-heartedly, often without words, just forcing my aching heart to send a voiceless cry to the Throne Room. Sometimes it felt like too much to even try to do that.
After all, my little brother had lain for four days on a hospital bed as thousands of Christians all across the world had prayed for one thing. What I had wanted most, what I had prayed for hardest, what had echoed every moment from the aching desires of my heart – was taken from me. Not only had those prayers not been answered the way I so terribly wanted, but it now seemed hollow to pray for anything else.
Whenever I tried, something tightened up inside me and the words refused to come out.
Pray for the Desire to Pray
Sometimes, the only thing I could find the words to pray for was that God would make me want to pray to Him.
This struggle, this pain, makes us feel vulnerable, confused, and guilty. Perhaps it seems strange – even counter-intuitive – to lay all of that at God’s feet. But I did. And believe me, God is big enough for your heart. He’s big enough for your pain, for your grief, and for your anger. But you’re not, dear believer. Pour it all out to Him. Lay it at His feet.
I would confess my hardness of heart to God – God, I don’t want to pray to you! I would tell Him, again and again, and again, what prayer felt like, and why, and that the words refused to come, that it all seemed so empty and hollow, that I couldn’t hear His voice and see what my prayers would change.
And then I would tell Him that I know He commands us to pray, and that He promises to hear our prayers. I would plead with God – sometimes through tears, sometimes through a dull, half-hearted ache in my heart – that He would change me, and make me desire to pray to Him, that He would incline my heart and my feelings to embrace His commands and His love toward me.
Sometimes, I would need to stop there. And that’s okay. But at other times, just starting with that plea for help enabled me to continue praying for longer, and opening more of my supplications and requests before God.
Sometimes, God answers prayers while you’re still praying them.
Understanding the Reason to Pray
But often, it seemed the main struggle I felt, and that my dear friends shared in their letters – was not so much addressing the dullness of our own hearts to incline us toward prayer, but why we should pray at all. If God is sovereign and has already ordained what will happen, then why should we pray to Him?
1. Pray because God commands it.
The first reason we pray is that God commands us. We are to pray for our pastors (1 Thes. 5:25), for the Church (Eph. 6:18), for fellow believers (James 5:16), for the persecuted (Heb. 13:3), for our government leaders (1 Tim. 1:1-2), for the sick (James 5:13-16), for the lost (Luke 10:2), for the saved (Eph. 3:14-21), for our enemies (Matt. 5:44), for wisdom (James 1:5), for the ability to obey (Psalm 119:145), for understanding (Jer. 33:3), for courage (Psalm 40:11-12), for fear (Psalm 51:16-17), for joy (Psalm 40:1-3), for hope (Rom. 15:13), for trust (Psalm 62:8), for growth (Eph. 1:17-18), for our desires (Phil. 4:6), for His desires (Matt. 6:10), for food (Matt. 6:11), for forgiveness (1 John 1:9), for the expansion of the Gospel (Matt. 9:37-38), for the coming of Christ (Matt. 6:10), for deliverance from temptation (Matt. 6:13), for deliverance from evil (Matt. 6:13), for blessing (Psalm 26:24-26), in the morning (Psalm 88:13), in the night (Psalm 119:62), in famine (Lam. 2:19), in abundance (Psalm 68:8-12), in sickness (James 5:15), in health (Psalm 103:2-3), in living (Psalm 156:6), in dying (Psalm 23:4; Job 13:15), in thankfulness (Psalm 69:30), without ceasing (1 Thes. 5:17), in praise (Psalm 103), and to glorify God above all things (John 14:13; Isaiah 42:12; Isaiah 43:5-7; Psalm 86:12).
But why does God command us to pray? If God is sovereign over all things and has already ordained what is to happen, do our prayers really change anything?
2. Pray because – not in spite of – God’s sovereignty.
God is sovereign and has ordained all things. Your past, your present, and future is in His hands. There is no thing, there is no person, there is no good, and there is no evil, that can divert God’s will, or change His mind, as if one of us could present new information to God that would make Him think better of what He’s ordained, or make Him suddenly realize how much what we want really means to us.
Our all-knowing, all-wise, all-loving God, knows what we ask before we ask it (Matt. 6:8). He knows our needs, our desires, the deepest longings of our heart. And He cares for us (1 Peter 5:7). His sovereignty is true, and real, and high, and it is joined in perfect wholeness to His love and compassion.
We don’t pray to God despite the fact that He is sovereign. We pray to God because He is sovereign.
The pointless prayer would be if we were praying to a God who couldn’t ordain all things – that is truly the prayer that couldn’t make a difference. It is only because God is sovereign, that we can rest in the fact that our prayers are not meaningless.
3. Pray for the same reason you preach the Gospel.
A more specific, usually intellectual struggle when it comes to prayer, is found in praying for someone’s salvation. If we believe that God has sovereignly predestined, from before the beginning of time, those who will come to Him, then what is the point of praying for the salvation of others? How would our prayer change anything if someone is either among the elect or not?
Some have extended this argument even further in saying that because God predestines before time all who will come to Him, not only do we not have to pray for someone else’s salvation, but we don’t have to preach the Gospel at all. The argument for this is that it is pointless to preach the Gospel to those whom God has not predestined because they will not come to Him either way without the effectual call of the Holy Spirit. And it is also pointless to preach the Gospel to those whom God has predestined, as whether or not we do, they will come to Christ.
This is obviously a distorted line of thinking, which would lead us to direct disobedience to God’s clear commands. But this line of thought is also a logical consequence of believing our prayers have no effect on what God has ordained.
Both praying for ourselves and others, and preaching the Gospel, are similar in that they both relate to how our human actions work in relation to God’s sovereign decrees.
So why do we preach the Gospel? Why do we pray?
4. Pray because God is a God of means
God commands us to both preach the Gospel and to pray because God is a God who uses means. God, in His holiness, in His sovereignty, in His mercy and goodness, has ordained all things – and ordained us as instruments for bringing to pass that which He has ordained.
The sovereign God in His mercy has made us – not His pawns, but His instruments. And the prayers of the righteous, affect much (James 5:16).
This scandalous love and mercy that God extends through the office of prayer, this divine decree that bends to hear the cries and pleas and voices of sinners saved by grace, the fact that God not only hears us, but uses our prayers and our work to further His kingdom, to change our hearts, to bring salvation to the lost – this is not Plan B. This is not a cosmic ploy. And this is not worthless.
This is love. This is a privilege. This is grace, granted to the heirs of God who, through Christ alone, are now able to approach the Throne of Grace and make their requests known to our King, to our Creator, to our Father, because we are redeemed and dressed in the righteous robes of the Son.
5. Pray because prayer changes you.
Our prayers are the instrument God uses to bring about His plan, but they don’t change God. They change us.
C.S. Lewis once said that a proud person cannot truly know God, because he “is always looking down on things and people.”
“Of course,” Lewis continued, “as long as you are looking down you cannot see something that is above you.”
That is one of the hardest, most beautiful, terrifying, glorious things about prayer. Prayer puts you in the presence of a Holy God. Prayer reveals yourself. It pricks the hard, buried areas of our hearts and peels them open. It convicts us. It lays us bare.
This is terrifying by itself – perhaps making us never want to pray again. What could be more terrifying, than a God who sees us for who we truly are? Than exposing ourselves to Him? Than laying our filthy hearts bare in the Divine Throne Room?
It is terrifying, indeed, if you don’t understand that you and I, dear Christian, were already exposed. You already stood before a Holy Throne Room, dressed in the filthy rags of your own heart.
And God saw.
And He who has abundantly loved you took your filthy rags, laid them on Christ, and killed Him. And He took Christ’s robes of righteousness, laid them on you, and gave you life. Because Christ died for you, because He lives again, because He has paid the depths of your sin and because you stand in Him, you may stand before God.
And as you pray, as you struggle, as the words refuse to come, the Spirit of God is praying for you also with groanings that speak what we fail to utter. And God sees. And He listens. Come to Him.
6. Pray because prayer is a gift.
God has seen the darkest parts of you, your deepest struggles, the things about yourself that you would never show to anyone. He knows your sins. He knows the dullness of your heart. He knows when your soul is aching or numb, when your throat is closing around the words that refuse to pour forth. He knows the sinfulness deep inside, the fears, the anger, and the pain.
And He wants you to pray to Him. He loves you. He who has sent His Son to die for you, how could He not also give you all things? He wants you to come to him, with all your fears, and your anger, your worry, your pain, your grief, your frustration, and your dullness of heart, and pour all these things before Him, lay yourself bare at His feet, to weep with Him, to rejoice with Him, to wind His truth and His words and His love deep around your soul.
So come to Him. And know that He who is sovereign is bending His ear, that He is using your supplications, that He is heeding your voice, and one day He will take you beyond the Throne Room, throw back of the tapestry of redemption in your life and the world, and say, “See what I made with your prayers.”
