I wasn’t planning to post today, but as I became more involved in my personal journal, some questions began to arise about prayer.
In a couple of days, our Bible study on the Letter from James will get into prayer. I’m confused and hesitant about prayer. It seems clear from the Bible that we are urged to pray. In fact, James says near the end of Chapter 5 that “the prayer of a righteous man avails much.” That should be enough for me, but apparently, it is not. I’m am burdened by fatalism, “Que será, será.”
I have had some great prayer times, times when I am certain that God has heard me and He has responded. Why is it then, that I don’t desire prayer? Am I lazy? Is fatalism merely a cover for not caring enough about that for which I should pray to put in the time and mental effort to pray about it?
I’m in hopes that someone can straighten me out on this as it is most important. This is especially so if this “season” of my life is the one that I am supposed to be devoted to prayer and Bible study. I seem to be going around this subject in a circle. The default position is not to pray. I seem even to disdain prayer at times and think it “quaint” when other Christians talk about praying for people. I realize that this is a bad place to be.
I saw the video below that explains prayer to children. Is it that simple? It may be. See video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVHUx_EJnUs
Then I viewed a video where a pastor was saying the following about prayer.
- Distinguish between sovereignty and determinism.
- In the Bible, God responds to the prayers of His people.
- Jesus commands us to pray
- If we are to be like Jesus, Jesus prayed.
- There are issues of the balance of sovereignty and free that are antinomies (my word.) We will never understand them.
C.S. Lewis said, “My free act [of prayer] contributes to the cosmic shape. That contribution is made in eternity or ‘before all world’; but my consciousness of contributing reaches me at a particular point in the time-series.” In other words, prayer does influence God in His eternity. Likewise, whether or not we pray influences Him.
So, it the purpose of prayer to “influence” God? If that is my purpose, am I trying to usurp the prerogative of God? Does that remove the emphasis from God and put it on me and my desires or perceived needs?
Herman Dooyeweerd, the early 20th Century Dutch philosopher, a neo-Calvinist in the manner of Kuyper, held that since God is eternal, He is “atemporal,” i.e. not within time since God created time. Man’s prayers, among other things, can be “supratemporal,” above prayer. I believe that Dooyeweerd is saying that prayer pierces the bubble of the time in which we are encased by God and can be considered “atemporally” by God. His response then comes back within the bubble of time at a mark of His choosing.
As I view it, this aligns with C.S. Lewis’ thought that prayers, when uttered or thought, escape from time and reach, or as the Bible says, “influence,” God.
E.M. Bounds held that God could not work His divine will until someone prayed for him to do so. Thus, after recovering from a severe head wound in the Civil War, he eventually retired to a life of prayer in which he would pray for hours on end.
Atheist, Christopher Hitchens argued that praying to a god which is omnipotent and all-knowing would be presumptuous. For example, he interprets Ambrose Bierce’s definition of prayer by stating that “the man who prays is the one who thinks that god has arranged matters all wrong, but who also thinks that he can instruct god how to put them right.”
Speaking to the rationalist view of prayer, in this view, the ultimate goal of prayer is to help train a person to focus on divinity through philosophy and intellectual contemplation (meditation). This approach was taken by the Jewish scholar and philosopher Maimonides and the other medieval rationalists. It became popular in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic intellectual circles, but never became the most popular understanding of prayer among the laity in any of these faiths. In all three of these faiths today, a significant minority of people still hold to this approach.
In the experiential approach to prayer, , an approach with which I have spent some personal time, the purpose of prayer is to enable the person praying to gain a direct experience with God. This is prevalent in some forms of monasticism (as well as Zen.) Such prayer may be apophatic or cataphatic, that is, respectively, without the filter of the senses and with the filter of the senses. To further distinguish, apophatic prayer does not involve cognition while cataphatic prayer does involve cognition.
John Wesley, in addition to stressing individual “moral exertion,” thought that the religious experiences in the Methodist movement, paralleling the emphasis placed on idealism and experientiality of the Romantic Movement, were foundational to religious commitment as a way of life.
In the New Testament, prayer is presented as a positive command (Colossians 4:2; 1 Thessalonians 5:17). The People of God are challenged to include Christian prayer in their everyday life, even in the busy struggles of marriage (1 Corinthians 7:5) as it brings people closer to God. Jesus encouraged his disciples to pray in secret in their private rooms, using the Lord’s Prayer, as a humble response to the prayer of the Pharisees, whose practices in prayer were regarded as impious by the New Testament writers (Matthew 6:6). Jesus healed through prayer and expected his followers to do so also (Mark 16:17–18; Matthew 10:8).
Throughout the New Testament, prayer is shown to be God’s appointed method by which we obtain what He has to bestow (Matthew 7:7–11; Matthew 9:24–29; Luke 11:13. Further, the Book of James says that the lack of blessings in life results from a failure to pray (James 4:2).
Is it as simple as taking the Bible at its plain-text meaning, or am I trying to confuse the subject with “religiobabble?”
I’d appreciate your, thoughts since you spent your time reading this.
johnthebaptist15 