Why Pray if God Knows Everything?
Published March 31st, 2006 in Hearing the Word, Spiritual DisciplinesGood question!
I’d be lying if I said I’ve never asked this before. Sometimes it just seems to be a waste of time praying if God has already made up his mind about what is going to happen. Greg had the task of following his first installment on prayer with trying to answer this perplexing question…
Here’s a few things Greg said that I thought were worth writing down:
We don’t know everything, but God does.
Faith grows through answered prayers.
Pray as though God can and will change.
To pray is to know God better.
To pray is to change.
To pray is to have faith.
We pray not to make God act, but so that when God acts, we know it.
This last one, in my mind, is pure gold. We could debate for hours about whether God actually does know everything that is going to happen or whether or not prayer can actually change what God is going to do. But recognising that it is difficult to pick up on what God IS doing if we are not engaged in the disciplines is an important starting point.
What are your thoughts? Does prayer change God’s mind? Is there any scriptural basis for that type of thinking? Or is everything set in stone? Why pray….?
Because God tells us to.
I believe that God knows what is best for us, so if he says we should pray, we should.
This of course doesn’t answer the question in a warm fuzzy way, and we still don’t understand exactly what is going on, but at the end of the day, when we are running in logic circles, it answers the question.
That’s enough for me.