Does Prayer Change Things?
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If God is sovereign, why should Christians pray?
If God is sovereign, why do we need to pray? If God has promised something, He's going to do it, right? Whether we pray about it or not, why do we need to pray? None of these promises are fulfilled mechanically, automatically, insensitively. All of these promises a personal God has made to His people And this personal God wants his people to meditate on these promises and to enter into the fulfillment of these promises by praying for the promises to be fulfilled.
You know, it's easy to forget sometimes the privilege that God has given to us, His redeemed people, that we get to enter into the fulfillment of His purposes through the gift of prayer. Hello and welcome to Renewing Your Mind. I'm glad you've joined us today. If you have benefited from this daily Bible teaching, would you consider donating to help make Renewing Your Mind available to even more people around the world? We'll send you two resources when you donate today. Well, we continue to address crucial questions that you and I may have as Christians, and today we'll hear Dr. W. Robert Godfrey discuss the importance of prayer. How should we pray, and what should we pray for? Let's join Dr. Godfrey now.
I was asked—I thought a friend on my way walking over here, do you know anything about prayer? And I thought that was a great question, and I was tempted to answer, I'm a Calvinist. Prayer is a great thing to talk about because it's so easy to make people feel guilty. You don't pray enough, do you? I'm here. not to make you feel guilty. I'm here to get us thinking as biblically as we can about this wonderful topic of prayer, and particularly about this question, does prayer change things? There are so many biblical texts that come to mind, but one of them that I thought about was where Jesus in Matthew 9 A very familiar, very famous text says, pray earnestly that the Lord of the harvest will send forth workers.
It certainly seems that Jesus thinks that prayer changes things, and He's usually a pretty reliable guide, always a very reliable guide. And when we look at the Scriptures, what do we find in the Scriptures? We find the Scriptures are full of prayer. They're full of praying people and stories of praying people. They're full of prayers in the book of Psalms that could be models of prayer for us. The ministry of Jesus was full of prayer, wasn't it? We read so often that He went out alone to pray. The ministry of Jesus was full of calls to prayer and examples of prayer and teaching on prayer. Lord, teach us to pray, the disciples said. And He did, didn't He? He gave us the Lord's Prayer as a model prayer.
And so, in the Old Testament, in the life of our Lord, in the Book of the Apostles, my good friend Terry Johnson said, you can read the Book of the Apostles to see that every great advance of the church is preceded by a prayer meeting. Prayer is central to the Scriptures, and over and over again in the epistles, we hear about prayer and a call to prayer and examples of prayer. And so this is the shortest address in this conference. Does prayer change things? Yes. Thank you very much. The real question is, isn't it, how does prayer change things? In what ways does prayer operate? And in the backdrop is this kind of nagging question. misrepresentation of Calvinism that would say if God is sovereign, then prayer can't change anything.
If God is sovereign, we don't need to pray. If God is sovereign, we don't need to evangelize. If God is sovereign, we don't need to preach. If God is sovereign, we don't need to eat. But hardly anyone ever says, well, if God is sovereign, do we need to eat? Because we know, theologically and more importantly, biblically, that God uses means to accomplish his ends. He not only sovereignly knows the end from the beginning, but he sovereignly knows how we're getting from the beginning to the end. He knows. wills to use means to accomplish his ends. And what we have to do is avoid a rationalism on the one hand that says we don't need to pray at all because God is sovereign, and a rationalism that says if we need to pray, then God must be dependent on us.
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