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Pray

             Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. (Philippians 4:6)

This is what the Sovereign Lord showed me: He was preparing swarms of locusts after the king’s share had been harvested and just as the late crops were coming up. When they had stripped the land clean, I cried out, “Sovereign Lord, forgive! How can Jacob survive? He is so small!”

 So the Lord relented. “This will not happen,” the Lord said.

This is what the Sovereign Lord showed me: The Sovereign Lord was calling for judgment by fire; it dried up the great deep and devoured the land. Then I cried out, “Sovereign Lord, I beg you, stop! How can Jacob survive? He is so small!”

So the Lord relented. “This will not happen either,” the Sovereign Lord said. (Amos 7:1-6)

 

Why do we pray? I know that today’s verse tells us to, but that’s not the only reason. If, as Christianity teaches, God is omniscient and omnipresent (all-knowing and all-present), all-wise and love, why take our requests to God? Surely He’s already made up His mind, and our insignificant will and preferences aren’t likely to sway Him. Or might they? The passage from Amos, above, suggests that God may listen to us. There are better-known examples when Abram wheedled God down on the number of righteous that needed to be found in Sodom in order to spare it, from fifty to ten. There’s also the time that Lot asked God to let him go to a small town rather than to the mountains, and God not only granted the request, but spared the town. Then, Moses told God that if God wasn’t going to go with them, Moses wasn’t either and when Moses argued with God about destroying the nation of Israel. David prayed even after God told him his son would die, in hope that God might change His mind.

So, part of why we pray is because God my listen to us and do as we’d like. But that’s probably not really the reason God wants us to pray. Two ideas come to mind. The first is because praying changes our minds and us, lets us discover who we are becoming and where we are on the road to becoming.

The second idea is that God wants us to pray because prayer involves our spending time with Him. He wants to spend time with us, and He has all the time in eternity to do so, including now. But that takes us back to the previous reason, because as we pray, God can reveal to us His willingness to spend time with us, and change our perspective about it.

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