Word of Encouragement (2/17/2021)
Yesterday, as we continue to think about the necessity of prayer, we started to talk about the relationship between God’s predestination and our prayer. The two are not incompatible or mutually exclusive because God predestined everything—not just the result but also the process and the means, including our prayer. Why did God decide to use prayer as a means of accomplishing His purpose?
I hope one reason is obvious: God wants us to know that what we do matters in the divine scheme of things, including our prayers. When we think about the greatness of God and the absoluteness of His will (which we learn from the Scriptures), it is easy to feel small and utterly insignificant. Simply thinking about the vastness of the universe (Ps. 8:3) made David wonder, “...what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him” (Ps. 8:4)? Solomon built a majestic temple for God yet wondered, “But will God indeed dwell on the earth? Behold, heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you; how much less this house that I have built” (1 Kings 8:27)! But he went on to speak of something that amazed him even more in the very next verse: “Yet [You] have regard to the prayer of your servant and to his plea, O LORD my God, listening to the cry and to the prayer that your servant prays before you this day...” (1 Kings 8:28).
How can our prayer matter to God—the words that are uttered by infinitesimally small creatures like us with limited knowledge and understanding? If they matter, it is not because our prayer teaches God something He didn’t know in terms of what we want or how it needs to be done (God is omniscient and all-wise), or it compels God to do something He never intended or wanted to do (God’s will is sovereign and unchangeable). If our prayer matters, it is because God made our prayer an indispensable instrument in the orchestration of executing His divine plan. In this regard, we must keep in mind that God is not just a God of miracles but also providence. As a God of providence, He uses what we call “secondary causes” to accomplish His will. He doesn’t feed the birds of the sky with a supernatural miracle but with their prey in the wild. He doesn’t clothe the lilies of the field with a supernatural miracle but with the sun and the rain and the nutrients in the soil.
But if God uses our prayer as a necessary ingredient for executing His will, it is not because our prayer is like a brick or a plank that needs to be there to build a house. God does not mechanically counting our words or how many people are praying and how many times they have prayed before He acts on something (granted that even those things are all predestined by God). Jesus said, “And when you pray, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do, for they think that they will be heard for their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him” (Matt. 6:7-8). Then, He proceeded to teach us the Lord’s Prayer, short and simple yet thoughtful and profound.
Here, we have to keep in mind what God’s will is about. We know that the chief end of God’s will is His glory. But we also know that He chose to manifest His glory through our redemption in Jesus Christ. If our redemption is from sin and sin is “any want of conformity unto, or transgression of, the law of God” and the law of God is an expression of God’s will, then a crucial part of our redemption is the conformity of our hearts to God’s will. When it comes to the necessity of prayer in the execution of God’s will, we need to have this at the forefront. We will talk some more about this tomorrow. Until then, let us be humbled by this amazing fact that our prayers matter to God and start praying with a sense of awe and wonder. Have a blessed day!