Prayer

Does it really mean anything? I have never heard anyone who is a Christian say no. I have rarely heard people of other religions say no. So what's the point?

Most Christians will agree that prayer is a place to thank God for the good things he does. Most will agree it should be a time to adore God's sacrifice in Jesus for humanity. But what about when we ask God for things? Should we? Does it make a difference?

I grew up with a very fundamentally different view of God than I have today. As I grew up, I just imagined God outside of time. I love comic books, so I just assumed that God was viewing all of life, all of time like it was a giant comic strip. He was viewing the past, present and future as one "present." He saw the end in the same way that he saw the beginning. In fact, I remember when I preached a sermon in Australia, I said that very thing.

If that is the case, then can we ask God to do something that he was not already going to do? If God is looking at each moment in time as if it is present, and God cannot be mistaken, then God can only see the actual future as it actually will happen. And if that is the case, then he will do what he will do.

And that fit pretty well with my experience with prayer. I prayed from the time I was 7 or 8 until I was at least 14 for God to bring my dad back. And he never did. God didn't listen to my prayer. So I stopped praying and asking God to do things.

Then I started to explore the idea that maybe God was not outside of time like I had otherwise suspected. I started to read authors that believed that people could argue with God, and sometimes win! I read and reread passages like Exodus 32, when God says in no uncertain terms that the Israelites were going down the crapper. He was just going to get rid of them and start over with Moses the stutterer. But Moses stuttered out a pretty good argument with God, and the scripture says that "God relented of the calamity that he was going to bring on Israel." I read places where Jesus asked God to take the cup from him, when Jesus said to ask of God, and to ask some more. If Jesus knew God better than any of us, and if Jesus thought that prayer might make a difference, then maybe it did?

Now I pray much differently. I know that God very well may decline my requests, but I believe if he does it is for a good reason. The more I reflect on my dad never returning, the more I realize God was protecting me. Why would he want me to have a hero who couldn't avoid drinking or huffing paint long enough to drive his children to school? So he said no. And I believe it was every bit as painful to God as it was to me. I believe that he cried as I did. That God wanted nothing more than to reincarnate himself to come and be there for me. Well, he wanted almost nothing more. The only thing that stopped him was that I believe he wanted me to still have choice.

And I believe that is why God is not outside of time. In order to preserve our ability to have choice, I believe God chose to enter into time when he created it. I believe that God changes, that God has emotions, that God hurts with us and that God celebrates with us. I just can't imagine why Jesus would tell us to ask for things if God had already decided if he would give them or not. I can't imagine, on the eve of horrific suffering and crucifixion, that Jesus would have asked God to create another way if it was really impossible for God to change his mind.

CS Lewis says that because of Jesus' self affirmation as God, he was either crazy, evil or actually God. Well, there is some debate about that issue today, but let me steal his logic. If Jesus told us to pray, and compared it to a persistent widow who finally changed an evil judge's mind, if he told us to pray and acted as if changing God's mind wasn't out of the question, then he must either have been crazy, or a liar, or he was God and he knew what he was talking about.