prayer - godthots

Prayer

What actually happens when we pray?

Does God change his mind because I ask him for something? This can't be so because either God was going to do the wrong thing and I corrected him, or he was going to do the right thing and I caused him to do something wrong. Either is impossible.

If I don't change God's mind, then why pray at all?

These questions have troubled me ever since I can remember. I know there is a lot written on the Internet and elsewhere that claims to provide answers, but I've never really been satisfied with them. Perhaps I'm cursed with an engineer's mechanistic mind and too little faith.

I'm going to go at this in layers and like Neo perhaps we can see, "just how deep the rabbit hole goes."

Layer 1: The Formula

Is it possible that there is a "formula" that has to be followed in order for our prayers to be accepted by God. This is a pretty simple way to explain the experience we've all had of not getting an affirmative answer to our prayers—we left out some critical piece of the formula, or made some other procedural mistake.

There seems to be evidence in the Bible to support the idea that there's a certain way we're to pray. The most obvious is Jesus' model prayer in Matthew 6:9-13:

Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name.
Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.
And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil:
For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever.
Amen.

There are several other places where we can find conditions that we are to meet in our prayers. We must not hold on to sin (Psalm 66:18), we must believe God will answer (Matthew 21:22, James 1:6-8), and so on.

However, this is a bit of a dodge of the issue of why we don't always get what we ask for when we pray. It makes us focus on the "mechanics" of what we are doing when we pray, as if that were the important part of the process.

Layer 2: Imitation of Jesus

We pray because Jesus prayed. He thought it was important, so therefore it is. This doesn't really answer my questions, but it's almost enough. It's certainly enough to keep me looking for the answers.

I'm going to go back through Philip Yancy's book "Prayer, Does It Make Any Difference" before I add more to this topic. He opens the book with many of the questions I'm asking here.