In the church that I attend, we have been talking about prayer. For me, prayer raises a lot of questions such as: If God is all-knowing, why does he need us to talk to him in prayer? He knows more about us than we do ourselves. Another question is: Does our prayer really change anything because John tells us “. . .if we ask anything according to his will he hears us. And if we know that he hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have the requests that we have asked of him.” (1 John 5:14-15 ESV) So whatever we ask must be according to God’s will, not our will which appears to mean what we want does not matter.
The preacher at our church made a comment about prayer this last Sunday that addresses some of these questions. He stated that God is more concerned about how we respond to circumstances in which we find ourselves than he is in giving us what we ask for in our prayers. The purpose of prayer is to align our will with his.
We said something similar in our blog of November 12, 2017 when we wrote about the book of Ecclesiastes. Now most people interpret this book as describing what life is like without Christ. Well, life can be meaningless with or without Christ. It is not the fleeting moments of our lives that concern God but rather the decisions we make during these fleeting moments The reason is because those decisions will impact our soul and our soul lives for eternity while the momentary circumstances of our life are so temporary..
Most of our prayers ask God to remove us from the difficult situations in which we find ourselves. God’s concern is us, not the circumstances in which we find ourselves.
