Bible Question: What does the Bible say about the purpose of prayer? --Hank |
Bible Answer: I can only quote as follows from Jesus Himself Matt 6:5 "When you pray, you are not to be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners so that they may be seen by men. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full. 6 "But you, when you pray, go into your inner room, close your door and pray to your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you. 7 "And when you are praying, do not use meaningless repetition as the Gentiles do, for they suppose that they will be heard for their many words. 8 "So do not be like them; for your Father knows what you need before you ask Him. As you can see in verse 8 and that's the main point of my post as I've been taught: Since the Lord already knows what we want AND need, prayer really doesn't do that much good directly for Him. Although I can't think of a specific scripture that would say as much, I've been taught that prayer is really intended for our benefit. In principle I think we can draw on the example from God's giving of the Ten Commandments. Of those 10 wonderful commands, only the first four were directed to God for His direct glory, the latter six were really for the benefit of mankind so we could and would be motivated to glorify God. When we as human beings take the time and make the effort to pray to God on a regular basis, we build up our relationship with Him just as we do with our earthly parent. In so doing, we think about what we are saying and invest a considerable portion of time and effort in seeing the accomplishment of our requests. So what am I saying here? I'm glad you ask. I'm saying that just as our earthly parents expect us to fend for ourselves as much as possible, our God expects us to grow up spiritually, and realize we really have very few needs that go unmet and our desires really should be held to a minimum. Thus as our thinking AND our priorities align themselves closer and closer with God's kind of thinking and priorities, we realize He's taken very good care of us and will continue to do so throughout our lives. Of course this is based on our continued maintenance of this dialouge/relationship with Him AND maintaining a healthy relationship with His other children, our fellow christians. To understand this basic principle, one has to remember that God doesn't really need ANYTHING from us. He's all-powerful in every way imagineable. (I know you know this but sometimes we all forget.) People that spend much of their lives in prayer are the closest to God for they are the ones who also study His Word to seek out the answers. You see most of God's answers are in His Holy Book; I don't think we're going to get a lot of answers from God anywhere else. I'd be the last person in the world to absolutely eliminate this option but I think that God (again) really expects us to grow up and not rely on a special, specific and individual response to our prayer. He wants us to grow and realize He's the Father of this whole world and everything in it. You, me and all the other people in the world, we're just His creation. To quote a phrase: "He made us and He can take us out." We have to realize our puny place and rank in this gigantic world of God's, most especially His spiritual world. As I've said there's bare minimal amount of scripture I can offer in support of this statement but then you're used to that from me already, huh? Good question, there fella. Good to hear from you. I miss your responses to my posts. God bless. --Rowdy |