Why do we need to pray?

DAILY BYTE

Yesterday, I mentioned that we would be using questions to interpret this week’s text (Luke 11. 1-13). The first question we will be using is the question WHY. Have you ever wondered why we pray or why we need to pray? If God already knows everything about everything, then why do we need to pray all?

You may well have heard that old saying, ‘Prayer changes things’. Richard Foster changes that saying to read, ‘Prayer changes US’. God’s great desire behind prayer is more about changing us than about changing our circumstances. Of course prayer can radically and powerfully change circumstances; it is just that God’s highest priority is to change us first.

Let’s not forget that the first line of the Lord’s Prayer, (after the opening address of ‘Father’), are the words ‘Hallowed by your name. Your Kingdom come.’ Richard Rohr sums up this part of the prayer by saying that whenever we pray to God ‘your Kingdom come,’ we are also saying ‘and MY Kingdom go’. Remember Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane where he prayed a prayer that was not answered, ‘Take this cup of suffering from me,’ but immediately after this he prayed, ‘yet not my will, but yours be done’.

E. Stanley Jones explained this concept by using the illustration of throwing out a boat hook from a boat and catching land and then pulling. He then queried that if we did so, would we pull the land to the boat, or would we pull the boat to the land?

In the same way, prayer is not the pulling of God into our will, but rather the aligning of our will to that of God’s. Prayer is not changing God’s mind on matters for Jesus makes it clear in Luke 11. 1-13 that God is already pure love and grace and already has our best interests at heart. No, the deepest and most profound purpose of prayer is that it changes our mind and our hearts.

Prayer is a process where God’s Kingdom comes and our kingdoms go!
Perhaps then the very nature of prayer is that it is MEANT to be a struggle.

Remember how often Jesus taught persistence in prayer (including the story of the friend at midnight). Perhaps it is because the very act of prayer, repeated and persistent prayer, is an absolutely indispensable part of our overall journey of change and transformation.

Prayer enlarges our awareness of God and of the universe. Prayer assumes that there is more to the world than we can experience just through our five senses. Just as blind people often develop a superior sense of hearing, and deaf people a superior sense of touch, so prayer is a way of developing a superior sense of the Spirit within us.

Prayer opens the eyes of our hearts.

In our busy, busy world filled with deadlines and stress, prayer is a way of keeping our spirits from being consumed and drained. Prayer reminds us what is truly important in life. Taking time off to pray is a protest against our society endless rush and busyness because souls can die from a lack of reflection!

Prayer changes us in some quite incredibly and profound ways – and that’s one of the most important reasons WHY we NEED to pray.

PRAY AS YOU GO

O Lord, teach us not only how to pray but also the importance of WHY we need to pray. Help us to be open to way your Spirit will change and transform us even us we open our hearts to you. We do truly pray that your name would be hallowed in our lives. We also pray that your Kingdom WILL come and that our kingdom will go. Amen.

FOCUS VERSE

Luke 11:2 (NRSV)

He said to them, ‘When you pray, say: Father, hallowed be your name.
Your kingdom come.’