Does Prayer Really Change Things?

Mike Hosey, Elder

Prayer changes things!  It's one of the most common phrases in Church World. Go to any church of any denomination, sit there for almost any length of time and you're going to hear it said at some point. 

In fact, it is said so much that it has become very much a cliché, and the honest truth of it is too often destroyed. Sometimes its power is even transformed into a lie that is dangerous to kingdom work.

This is how we often interpret the phrase: "When my life gets messed up by my own worldliness, or by external circumstances beyond my control, all I have to do is pray and God will change my life to one where everything is hunky dory and unicorns vomit rainbows."

That exaggeration isn't too far from the truth. We tend to oversimplify the statement in favor of our comforts and pleasures.  While it is true that prayer can change our circumstances, and that such change can be, and often is for the better, it is not true that God is obligated to "fix" our world.  God is more interested in changing us to be more like Jesus than he is interested in changing our immediate environment (Romans 8:29; 1 Peter 1:6-7).

And that's where prayer plays its biggest role. Prayer changes us. It puts God in the forefront of our minds. It allows us to think about God, to communicate with him, and ultimately to submit our desires to his will.  This doesn't mean that we can't or shouldn't ask for things that we desire or need. God is interested in those things, too (Matthew 7:7-11). It's just that he's more interested in changing us, and He will use whatever it takes to do that. Sometimes that takes leaving us in our environment and having us depend on his Spirit more than our material, physical, or emotional world.

Think about it. When God tells us he will give us the desires of our heart (Psalms 37:4) or that he will do whatever we ask in Jesus' name (John 14:13), he doesn't mean any desire or anything. Some things are evil, and so are some of our desires. And some things are neither good nor evil. They're just not part of his plan.