The Importance of Your Praying

Genesis 20:7 NIV

 Now return the man's wife, for he is a prophet, and he will pray for you and you will live. But if you do not return her, you may be sure that you and all yours will die."

What is the Big Deal about Prayer?

I have a shirt that across the front has in bold, bright letters, “Pray”.  I enjoy the reaction it stirs.  I usually wear it when I am going to be around a lot of different people.  It would be fun to have a web cam record the response of those who notice it for the first time.  A typical reaction is for a person to glance at the letters, then pause a moment as if trying to grasp the meaning of the word found on my shirt.  Almost always, the woman or man quickly looks away without meeting my eyes.  It is as if I stop being a real person to many, just a walking billboard.  Some smile and tell me they like the shirt, most try to pretend they didn’t see it or me.  I did not realize prayer was controversial, or something that made people uncomfortable.  Perhaps it is now; maybe prayer is no longer recognized as a critical part of being human; not thought to be important to making life better.

It seems odd that there has to be a rationale given for prayer but perhaps one must be given.    Does it really matter if you pray or not?  Is anyone affected by the shortness of your praying or your lack of prayer?  The problem is that you almost never get any feedback on how you pray.  If you diet or don’t, you see how you are doing.  When you send a check to a charity, you get a note back thanking you for the support and perhaps even a report of how much help you provide.  If you save for your retirement, eventually you find out what your disciplined living did for you.  Fail to keep oil in your car and at some point you will find out how important oil is to your car engine.  It is not like that with prayer.  How do you ever find out what your praying did or didn’t do for yourself or others?  You never get a report card.  No one knows how effective your praying is and you probably don’t know either.  Unless you are someone like George Muller who kept rigorous records of his praying and how his prayer requests fared, you probably haven’t a clue about your prayer success rate.  The default setting for most people is that they just don’t pray much for themselves or others because they don’t know why they should.  Is there a reason why you should pray often?  Let us look at this question carefully because it may really matter how much you pray.

The Bible has an intriguing account of prayer that must be considered.  The book of Job is most famous for its report of the terrible suffering of Job and how he tried to understand why God let him face such horror.  Yet it could be argued that the most important point made in the book is not even the narrative of Job and his trials but rather what we are told at the end.  Job had three friends who came to him ostensibly to comfort him but ended up berating Job for imaginary wrongs he had committed.  The friends decided that Job had to have been a terrible sinner for God to make him suffer so much.  More than half the book is a dialogue between Job and his friends; the later accusing Job of secret sins and the former denying the charges and asserting his holiness.  Famously Job pleads for someone to intervene for him, someone to defend him to God.  He insists, “…God has wronged me and drawn his net around me. “ (Job 19:6 NIV)

The final chapters of Job are given over to the Lord’s response to Job’s accusations.  God never explains His actions; He merely makes it clear that He is sovereign Lord over all and that no one rises above Him in authority and power.  God challenges Job to bring his charges directly to Him.  The Lord said to Job:  "Will the one who contends with the Almighty correct him?  Let him who accuses God answer him!"  (Job 40:1-2 NIV)  Job’s response is quick and decided.  Then Job answered the Lord:  "I am unworthy — how can I reply to you?  I put my hand over my mouth.  I spoke once, but I have no answer — twice, but I will say no more."  (Job 40:3-5 NIV)  Then we come upon perhaps the most compelling aspect of the entire book…at least as far as we discover the value God gives His people and the part they play in the course of history.

At the conclusion of the book of Job, the Lord turns to Job’s friends and addresses their critique of Job.  After the Lord had said these things to Job, he said to Eliphaz the Temanite, "I am angry with you and your two friends, because you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has.  So now take seven bulls and seven rams and go to my servant Job and sacrifice a burnt offering for yourselves. My servant Job will pray for you, and I will accept his prayer and not deal with you according to your folly.  (Job 42:7-8 NIV)  What an astonishing revelation!  God will wait for someone to pray before He acts.  In this case it is Job.  Consider the implication.  After God’s monologue in which He declares His supreme authority over the universe, He warns Job’s friends that if they do not want to face the consequences of making false accusations against Job, they must depend upon Job to pray for God’s mercy.  Why did God have Job pray for his friends?  Clearly it was because the friends needed Job to pray for them.

This is a stupendous revelation!  God waited for Job to pray before He decided the fate of Job’s three friends.  It is as if you did not want to act until one of your friends gave her opinion.  Or it is more like your father not punishing your brother until you said whether he should or not.  Prayer has a real effect with God and changes the course of human events.  Remember what Jesus said about His people?  I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master's business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you. (John 15:15 NIV)  One characteristic of friendship is that friends influence each other.  They start to think alike as the bond between them strengthens.  Friendship is never a one-way street.  Friendship is by definition the linking of people so that they impact each other through love and loyalty.  If prayer is the way we bond with God, then it seems reasonable that in our prayers, there is a back and forth impact that takes place between us.  As your friend, God cares about what matters to you and He is affected by the way you think and how you feel about things.  We think of God as some isolated independent being who does everything on His own but He isn’t.  Our Lord is your friend and your Father and He loves you as your friend and your Father.   That is why prayer is so important.  God is, in some way that cannot be explained, influenced by you.

Consider the implications of Ephesians 6:18.  And pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests. With this in mind, be alert and always keep on praying for all the saints. (NIV)  Jude 20 has a similar admonition.  But you, dear friends, build yourselves up in your most holy faith and pray in the Holy Spirit. (NIV)  This verse, when considered in its original Greek setting is almost identical to Ephesians 6:18 because it literally directs us to “in the Holy Spirit continually be praying ones”.  To pray “in” the Holy Spirit is like a fish living “in” the ocean or a bird living “in” the atmosphere.  The “in” of being in the Holy Spirit is an “in” of complete immersion, of total envelopment.  The bird absorbs the atmosphere as well as moves within it.  If you pray in the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit is all about you in your praying.  He is “in” what you pray, the guide to your praying, He is why you pray and the reason you have trust in God as you pray.  When you “pray in the Holy Spirit”, it means that the Holy Spirit is a part of every aspect of your praying.

But how does God our friend want us to pray?  He wants us to pray about anything the Holy Spirit brings to mind but especially He wants us to pray for every single Christian who comes to mind.  Why should we pray so much?  It is because God cares about our opinion of things: He wants to hear what we have to say about others.  In fact He cares so much that He waits for us to pray before He acts.  Job had the same task we have, to bring his concerns about people to God and ask for Him to help them.  How can we know what to pray about for others?  When we are in the Holy Spirit, immersed in Him, thinking with Him and through Him, we will get it right.  Our prayers will match what God wants to do for them.

Without the Holy Spirit directing our thinking as we pray, it is a hit or miss proposition.  Praying becomes irrational and filled with chaos.  The Spirit straightens out our praying, makes it coherent.  We know what we ought to pray and how we should pray because the Holy Spirit makes sense of it for us.  We have the foundation for confident praying in Romans 8, perhaps the most important chapter in the entire Bible.  In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express.  And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints in accordance with God's will.  (Romans 8:26-27 NIV)

Let this sink in a moment.  On our own we have no idea how to pray.  In our sin weakened state we are incompetent at prayer.  But with the Holy Spirit working within us, we have no limits in prayer, there is no ceiling.  Just think about what you could do for others if you become locked in on the Holy Spirit and were in total sync with God.  You could bring real peace and joy to the world…to those your love.  Imagine the good you could do if you took prayer seriously; if you made it your top priority!  It would not be a stretch to state that the book of James provides us with the greatest encouragement to pray found anywhere in literature.  Consider its implication.

Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective.  Elijah was a man just like us. He prayed earnestly that it would not rain, and it did not rain on the land for three and a half years.  Again he prayed, and the heavens gave rain, and the earth produced its crops.  (James 5:16-18 NIV)  Elijah was a person just like you with all your faults and weaknesses, with all kinds of idiosyncrasies and quirks just like you.  Yet he could pray and a drought came to pass because of his praying and then after three and a half years the drought ended because of his praying.  That could be you, praying just like Elijah.  You may argue that you aren’t righteous though.  The truth is that because of Christ in you, your righteousness exceeds the righteousness of Elijah and all the other greats of the Old Testament.  But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin. (1 John 1:7 NIV)  And this is my prayer: that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight, so that you may be able to discern what is best and may be pure and blameless until the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ — to the glory and praise of God.  (Philippians 1:9-11 NIV)  It is not a righteousness issue for you when it comes to praying.  It is a willingness issue.  Are you willing to stay close enough to the Holy Spirit that you can make a supernatural difference in your circle of influence when you pray?  Do you through the most powerful tool you have, prayer, want to make the lives of others better.  You can.  You just have to decide if you are willing to put in the effort to pray.