Prayer :Does it work?

You’re probably right, in part, at least. That’s why I added the 1 Timothy link.

But…
“You have to believe in free will, you have no choice.” I.B. Singer :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:

This might be the way the Pharisees interpret this revealing THEIR heart which is to bask in the reflected glory of God. Is God actually lacking in something that He needs us to come up with it, or is this just the scam of those using religion to line their own pockets and egos? The one who seeks glory because he has none is the devil and thus it is no wonder that Jesus looked at the Pharisees and saw only children of the devil.

What is the greatness of God?

What did Jesus say made one great?

Hint: It was not seeking glory and lording it over others.

Jesus in Matthew 20:26 and elsewhere says, " whoever would be great among you must be your servant."

So from Jesus’ perspective, for God to be great would mean that He seeks to serve others. And if God is not lacking in anything then isn’t that exactly what you would expect God to do. So I think people are getting God confused with the “god of this world.”

You cannot think that means Jesus is giving us a way to get anything we want or think we need. Frankly this is one of the most common portrayals of the Devil – one who comes into a community offering everyone exactly what they want and the result is hell on earth.

I have said it many time and I will say it again now, “hell is our heart’s desire and heaven is God’s desire for us.” If you think this makes hell sound good then you do not understand the real depravity of the human heart.

But ok, even supposing in some case what a person wants is also what God wants for us… does that mean that Jesus is offering us a way to have God set aside all the laws of nature to give us those things in whatever way that we would like. I deny that the omnipotence of God even includes an ability to do anything in whatever way He chooses as if logical consistency did not apply.

So in all these ways prayer might be understood, no it certainly does not work. Prayer is not a way to direct, manipulate or control God, let alone a way to change the rules of how the world works to what we might like. The very idea is absurd. So what can prayer do then? It can be a way of making effort when we have no idea what to do about something. I can be way of being patient and putting things in God’s hands. For these things at least prayer does work.

Is God’s name hallowed and honored throughout the world? With a lot of words, you’re trying to tell me that Jesus did not want that. I don’t think so.

We agree that God is not a vending machine into which you can plug your prayer quarters and routinely get the desired merchandise. (Neither are real vending machines always compliant. :slightly_smiling_face:) Did you not read the Laura Story verse I posted above?

Does not a little child who loves his father think of him as famous? Don’t squabbles in schoolyards tell you that children defend the honor of their parents? God the Father did not humble himself as a servant! He still is to be revered, and our hearts should want that, too!

With a few words you are trying to tell me you worship the god of this world who seeks glory and only sees greatness in lording it over others like the Pharisees.

Gosh changing your words to make you sound horrible is soooo easy. I wonder why everybody doesn’t do that? Honesty maybe?

Is making everyone believe in Him and honor Him God’s highest priority. Obviously not.

But… we certainly see God expressing a dream many times in the Bible where the people of the world have the law of God written on their hearts – doing what is right because it is good and not because they are trying to curry favor with God so they can self-righteously lord it over others like the Pharisees and so many others who use religion as a personal means to success

Nope. And I didn’t read it in the other threads you posted it either. …since you asked.

So is God the Father not great or was Jesus simply mistaken about what greatness consists of? Or is it like a class society where some people are great for lording it over others while everyone else can only be great by serving them?

Good grief. That is one of the more inane things that I’ve read.


I’m glad you understand that much.


I’m sorry you didn’t read Laura Story’s verse. It is actually quite relevant, and it’s to your loss if you don’t. You’re above reading it for some reason – don’t talk to me about humility.

Gentleman, Nick asked a sincere question, as a recent convert, about prayer.

The following kinds of answers, which are reflected in some of what I see above, are appropriate:

  1. Personal experiences with prayer.
  2. Reflections on what the Bible says about prayer.
  3. General encouragement to have faith and hope.

The following kinds of answers also reflect part of what I see above, and are not really appropriate:

  1. Responding to someone else with some kind of theological measuring contest.
  2. Descending into petty bickering because someone else did not think your post was the most enlightening thing they’ve ever read.
  3. Going off on tangents about completely unorthodox theologies.

If you simply must engage this way, do it via PM, please. :slight_smile:

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Don’t forget,

As surely as I live, says the Lord, every knee will bow before Me; every tongue will confess to God.

But not every knee will bow nor tongue confess willingly.

yes it does, but you have to understand what it is about. The worst kind of prayer isto ask God to give wisdom to our leaders. Thou shall not tempt the Lord. The democratic system causes us to select leaders that perform to our will as most people vote for self interest, so you get the leaders you vote for because they promised to you what you like to hear. To then ask God to make them wise is a joke. Better pray for giving wisdom to us to vote for leaders that cause the least damage :slight_smile: To let him fix the Santa Clauses we voted for is indeed very naive.

Te video to watch is the one from Marshall Brain The best optical illusion in the world! - YouTube or The best optical illusion in the world! - YouTube
He built his whole atheism and his book “how God works” (after all he built the “how stuff works” domain so he clearly knows :slight_smile: ) on the lack of prayer to work starting with those who would have prayed for their life in the Tsunami of Banda Aceh in 2004 and on his work in why God does not heal amputees. If you want to see how God heals amputees look how he gives them wings like Harry’s Heroes (army amputees doing challenges I could not do with all the limbs I have) or Martine Wright
or how he healed Nick Vujicic or others who live without limbs, - not by giving them the body they wished for. Healing is body mind harmony, not getting the body you wish for as in “my will be done”. It is tempting with the tools of modern surgery but ill advised as we can see in those who try it.
The concept of prayer is not to ask God to change reality as we wish as if he were the magic Genie who needs telling what to do by us (as most of us do on a weekly basis as a matter of ritual) but to ask God to change us / make us act to make his wish for reality come true.

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Thank you for this @Christy. I was trying to be as helpful to @NickolaosPappas as possible, as the wording of a prayer and its intent is very crucial to determine its impact. The pope just demonstrated this, thankfully.

The traditional Lord’s Prayer was falsely passed down as “Lead us not into temptation.” This conflicts with the beginning of prayer, “may Thy Will be done.” What value is a prayer to God to ask Him to not do something that is His Will, like testing us with temptation?

The pope corrected the Prayer and increased its effectiveness dramatically by asking God to be with us during temptation - “Lead us through temptation.” In my first post above I tried to show how important these little words are in changing the intent of prayer, and I hope this post does too.
Best Wishes, Shawn

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Praying is like flossing your teeth.

I have had great personal results when I do it, I don’t (and I think most people don’t) do it as much as I should.

There is no scientific evidence that it actually produces results.

@NickolaosPappas, your question about whether prayer “works” or not is a great question. As a Pastor I am confronted with this question in various forms many times. As a Christ-follower myself, I also have to wrestle with this question in my own life. Additionally, seeing the brokenness in the world, I have to ask myself this question with regard to the what the rest of the world experiences too.

One of the very tough things about answering your question is that it is very difficult to sometimes to define what “works” means. Using the example of the Lord’s Prayer that has been cited several times in this thread already we can note several things:

  1. Jesus encourages prayer to be personal and simple. Many English translations have Jesus’ prayer starting with something like “Our Father, who art in heaven.” This is not a very good translation for modern readers because it is far too formal for what Jesus originally taught his disciples. A translation that gets at the sense of what Jesus teaches here would be something like “Dear Dad in Heaven”. Jesus then goes on to say that we should pray that all people would praise God’s name and worship God appropriately on Earth as it is already done in heaven. You could say, “Dear Dad in Heaven, please help all the people on Earth to come to know who you really are and help them to praise you because of that.”
  2. Jesus then teaches us to pray that all the wrongs of this world would be made right. That is what he means when he tells the disciples to pray that God’s Kingdom would come, and God’s will would be done on Earth as it is in Heaven. Jesus is telling his disciples to pray in a very big way here. In theological terms we call this “eschatological”—we are praying for the coming of the divine future.
  3. Jesus also then teaches us that our prayers should not only touch on “spiritual things” like asking that people would worship God, or future things (like the Kingdom coming) but that our prayers ought to also be practical—pray for our daily bread…you could say “Dear Dad in heaven,…please provide our food today.”
  4. Jesus reminds us to then pray for God to forgive our sins—but he also reminds us that we should pray that it would be disingenuous to pray for forgiveness for our own sins if we’re not forgiving others. (“Forgive us our sins, as we forgive others”)
  5. Others have mentioned this too…the translation “Lead us not into temptation” is a bad translation…Jesus is teaching us to ask God to protect us from temptation and from the spiritual forces of evil…Satan and the like.
  6. And the last part, “For thine is the Kingdom…” is not really a part of what Jesus taught…it was a later addition by someone else.

So, Jesus teaches us to:

  • Relate to God personally: He is our “Dad in heaven”
  • Pray for the “big stuff”: “Please make the whole world right, God”
  • Pray for the everyday stuff: “Please give us food”
  • Pray for our personal spiritual needs: “Please forgive me, but please also help me to forgive others”, and “Please protect me from evil”

Now, this is what Jesus teaches us to pray. However, we need to note a few more things:

  1. Jesus is reluctant to teach his disciples “how to pray”. He only does so because they ask him to teach them how to pray like John the Baptist teaches his disciples how to pray. What Jesus really seems to want is for his disciples to figure out what to pray on their own. Jesus condemns the idea of praying with lots of fancy words, and Jesus condemns the idea of praying arrogantly. He affirms the idea of quiet, humble personal, relational prayer with God.
  2. Just because Jesus teaches us that this is how to pray, it doesn’t mean that praying in this way will get us what we want. As was noted elsewhere we are to pray for “God’s will to be done”—and not necessarily our own. Even Jesus himself prayed that the “cup of suffering” (on the cross) would be taken from him—but God effectively said, “No.”

So, for me, prayer “works” in the sense that it helps build my relationship with God. This is true, for me, in the same way that talking with my wife “works” in helping us build a relationship. When I talk with my lovely wife I don’t always end up “getting what I want”—but I do end up in a closer relationship with her. This is the primary way in which prayer “works”—in building relationship with God.

Secondarily, and somewhat incidentally, sometimes prayer “works” in the sense that God and I come to agreement about something in such a way that I get what I asked for…God gives me daily bread, God helps me forgive someone, etc., But that isn’t the point. God always “answers” my prayers…“Yes”, “No”, “Later”, “You decide”, etc., but the key isn’t God’s answer, the key is the relationship.

Do I like the fact that there are many in this world who genuinely ask God for daily bread and do not get it? Am I okay with the fact that many in the world ask God to protect them from evil, and instead they suffer abuse, or worse? No. I’m not okay with that. I’m not even okay with the fact that God doesn’t just “fix” me and make me “perfect” so that I don’t hurt people or do wrong anymore. These are some of the biggest things I talk about with God.

The key is, though, that we talk with God. That is what prayer is for, and that is how it “works”, IMHO.

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Why does actually the Lords prayer says “Let us not into temptation”. So we beg God to not temp us? I dont understand this one

Yes, I think this is a helpful translation adjustment. I think the meaning of the original text is along the lines of “help us not to yield to temptation,” the idea that God gives strength in trials to those who ask, not the idea that God might bring us to a place of temptation like the English “lead us not into temptation” implies.

I think this is really essential. Many of us have gotten the impression that prayer is transactional in nature, either a requirement to get what we want from God, or some kind of work of righteousness that earns us godliness. Prayer is relational. Its benefits are relational. God cares about us and the desires of our hearts and wants to give good gifts to his children, so it is fine and good to ask God for things in the context of our relationship with him as our Father and Provider. But most importantly, prayer (and I would include prayerfully meditating on Scripture in that) is how we encounter God as a Person, and that is how our faith is deepened, we become assured of his love for us, we experience the peace and joy of being connected to our Creator, and we hold on to the hope of his promises.

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Thanks for the question as it just gave me the eureka moment.
I prayed since the early eighties “und führe uns durch die Versuchung” which is equivalent to lead us through the temptation, because it reflected my wishful thinking about God better. The pope now discovers in his old age desperately trying to give Christianity and its core prayer more populistic appeal the same wishful God. I now revert back to the original as I suddenly see it differently. The problem is in the “Us” because the us in our society is not the self any more.
If you want to change the Lords prayer to the modern time you have to understand that we are broken at the US level (oh what doppeldeutigkeit here) as it isn’t part of the me any more. The US is the problem. Try to say My father…and forgive me my sins as I forgive those who sinned against me - at which you put God inside yourself as you can only commit a sin against God. At that point you ask the God inside you not to go the way of temptation but to free yourself of evil thoughts and then recognise the spirit within you as a separate entity again as in addressing it as “you” again.
I wish I could find the words to express what I feel but I hope some of you get the drift and might help me to say it better.

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Nick…Miracles do happen. I actually agree with Shawn Murphy in his response (of 6 days ago) to you. Yes, prayer does work. But God is no one’s fool.

I suppose that I have been around the block on this one, and I do not know what others here will say or have said — aside from Shawn. But when it comes to “prayer working,” this sometimes means we want God to do what we want, give us what we want/need (NOW, of course)…

There is usually nothing wrong with that. I can think of lots of scenarios, people I have seen or known, situations I have been in (etc etc) where prayer worked or did not…a woman who asked God to kill her husband (God said No) and the woman got mad and gave up religion (seriously — it happened)…others who got mad because God would not find them a husband and then they went off and began sleeping with their daughter’s boyfriend…

I have seen prayer result in surprising things happen — I had a severe case of sciatica and told God “you would not really heal me, would you? That was for some other era and You don’t work that way?” — and before I had even finished saying that, the pain was gone and I feel asleep — and slept unusually well.

If I have seen prayer working when I hardly expected it, I have to assume Someone is listening even if and when the outcome seems lacking or not what I wanted or somewhere far in the future … or maybe, yes, even “The Answer is NO”…

Yes, there is some faith involved in that answer. But also personal experience…

And that is my two cents’ worth.

Of course prayer works. But… God has much more information about consequences than we do. An innocent sounding request can be frought with repercussions.
The part of the Lords Prayer we should remember is:
God’s will be done on earth (as it is in Heaven ).

Perhaps that puts things more into perspective.

Richard

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I know this thread on prayer isn’t all that recent, but rather than starting a new thread, I would rather add to this thread a bit of George Macdonald wisdom I freshly ran across today regarding the efficacy of prayer. Keep in mind his conversational “query-answer” writing style as you read this. The extra paragraph breaks help call attention to that.

Excerpt from George Macdonald’s unspoken sermon (2nd series) “The Word of Jesus’ Word on Prayer”

As to the so-called scientific challenge to prove the efficacy of prayer by the result of simultaneous petition, I am almost ashamed to allude to it. There should be light enough in science itself to show the proposal absurd. A God capable of being so moved in one direction or another, is a God not worth believing in—could not be the God believed in by Jesus Christ—and he said he knew. A God that should fail to hear, receive, attend to one single prayer, the feeblest or worst, I cannot believe in; but a God that would grant every request of every man or every company of men, would be an evil God—that is no God, but a demon. That God should hang in the thought-atmosphere like a windmill, waiting till men enough should combine and send out prayer in sufficient force to turn his outspread arms, is an idea too absurd. God waits to be gracious not to be tempted. A man capable of proposing such a test, could have in his mind no worthy representative idea of a God, and might well disbelieve in any: it is better to disbelieve than believe in a God unworthy.

‘But I want to believe in God. I want to know that there is a God that answers prayer, that I may believe in him. There was a time when I believed in him. I prayed to him in great and sore trouble of heart and mind, and he did not hear me. I have not prayed since.’

How do you know that he did not hear you?

‘He did not give me what I asked, though the weal of my soul hung on it.’

In your judgment. Perhaps he knew better.

‘I am the worse for his refusal. I would have believed in him if he had heard me.’

Till the next desire came which he would not grant, and then you would have turned your God away. A desirable believer you would have made! A worthy brother to him who thought nothing fit to give the Father less than his all! You would accept of him no decision against your desire! That ungranted, there was no God, or not a good one! I think I will not argue with you more. This only I will say: God has not to consider his children only at the moment of their prayer. Should he be willing to give a man the thing he knows he would afterwards wish he had not given him? If a man be not fit to be refused, if he be not ready to be treated with love’s severity, what he wishes may perhaps be given him in order that he may wish it had not been given him; but barely to give a man what he wants because he wants it, and without farther purpose of his good, would be to let a poor ignorant child take his fate into his own hands—the cruelty of a devil. Yet is every prayer heard; and the real soul of the prayer may require, for its real answer, that it should not be granted in the form in which it is requested.

…and then from the very next sermon in the same series; “Man’s Difficulty Concerning Prayer”

‘How should any design of the All-wise be altered in response to prayer of ours!’

How are we to believe such a thing?

By reflecting that he is the All-wise, who sees before him, and will not block his path. Such objection springs from poorest idea of God in relation to us. It supposes him to have cares and plans and intentions concerning our part of creation, irrespective of us. What is the whole system of things for, but our education? Does God care for suns and planets and satellites, for divine mathematics and ordered harmonies, more than for his children? I venture to say he cares more for oxen than for those. He lays no plans irrespective of his children; and, his design being that they shall be free, active, live things, he sees that space be kept for them: they need room to struggle out of their chrysalis, to undergo the change that comes with the waking will, and to enter upon the divine sports and labours of children in the house and domain of their Father. Surely he may keep his plans in a measure unfixed, waiting the free desire of the individual soul! Is not the design of the first course of his children’s education just to bring them to the point where they shall pray? and shall his system appointed to that end be then found hard and fast, tooth-fitted and inelastic, as if informed of no live causing soul, but an unself-knowing force—so that he cannot answer the prayer because of the system which has its existence for the sake of the prayer? True, in many cases, the prayer, far more than the opportunity of answering it, is God’s end; but how will the further end of the prayer be reached, which is oneness between the heart of the child and of the Father? how will the child go on to pray if he knows the Father cannot answer him? Will not may be for love, but how with a self-imposed cannot? How could he be Father, who creating, would not make provision, would not keep room for the babbled prayers of his children? Is his perfection a mechanical one? Has he himself no room for choice—therefore can give none? There must be a Godlike region of choice as there is a human, however little we may be able to conceive it. It were a glory in such system that its suns themselves wavered and throbbed at the pulse of a new child-life.

MacDonald, George. The Complete Works of George MacDonald. Kindle Edition.

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