The Mystery of Prayer

Then the Lord said, “Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about
to do? Abraham will surely become a great and powerful nation,
and all nations on earth will be blessed through him. For I have
chosen him, so that he will direct his children and his household
after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing what is right and
just, so that the Lord will bring about for Abraham what he has
promised him.”
—Genesis 18:17–19

I was raised in a religious tradition that prayed. We prayed before meals, before meetings, before bedtime, before football games, and before rodeos (to “that Big Cowboy in the sky”).

I had no doubt that prayer did something; I just wasn’t sure what it was, and, I must confess, even after all these years, I’m still a bit confused. I don’t fully understand how prayer works.

Certainly when push comes to shove, we pray whether we understand prayer or not. It springs from us impulsively and instinctively in the face of necessity. There are no atheists in foxholes, as they say, nor in any other holes we dig for ourselves. When we’re frightened out of our wits, when we’re pushed beyond our limits, when we’re pulled out of our comfort zones, we reflexively and involuntarily resort to prayer.

Yes, indeed. In extremes, we pray. “The natural thing is to go straight to the Father’s knee,” as George MacDonald said.

Yet the questions remain, or at least they do for me. How does prayer work? God is perfect wisdom. Does He need me to tell Him what to do? He is complete goodness. Does He need me to prod Him into doing the right thing? He is infinite wisdom. Does He need my counsel? Is it possible I can ask in such a way that God must change some vast eternal plan? Can I bend His ear and bend His will to mine? As Winnie the Pooh would say, “It’s a puzzlement.”

In the midst of all my uncertainty, however, one sure thing remains: Prayer changes me. It’s one of the ways by which God turns me from the things that break my heart to the things that break His.

Take, for example, the story of Abraham and his intercession for the city of Sodom. It has particular value in understanding how prayer works, at least in terms of the way it works on me.

The story begins with God’s verdict on Sodom: “How great is the outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah and how very grave their sin!” (Genesis 18:20 NRSV). The Hebrew idiom underlying this statement can literally be rendered, “The sinners were in the Lord’s face,” suggesting a flagrant “in-your-face” attitude, a city raising its puny little fists in defiance of God.

For us Sodom was a sorry little city with no social value and worthy of nothing but immediate and catastrophic judgment, but for Abraham Sodom was flesh-and-blood people whom he knew and loved. Abraham had walked the streets of Sodom. He had talked with its citizens. He knew them by name. His nephew and family lived in the city. He had, on one occasion, delivered Sodom from a gang of thugs. It wasn’t easy for him to give up Sodom, wicked though it was. Abraham grieved for its people.

God knew Abraham’s aching heart and understood He must talk with His friend before He acted in judgment, so He and two of His angels clothed themselves with flesh and came to visit Abraham under the Oaks of Mamre.

They came bearing a gift, as visitors sometimes do, the promise that Sarah would give birth to a long-awaited son. That business done, the Lord and His angels got up to leave, and Abraham, with the politeness of a good Semitic host, got up to go with them.

Abraham, the Lord, and the two angels trudged along for some distance in silence while the Lord communed with Himself.

Here in this soliloquy (Genesis 18:17–19) we see God’s heart, His desire to let His dear friend Abraham in on His deepest secrets. “Is not this the time to take Abraham into my deepest counsel?” He says to Himself.

Was this disclosure necessary because Abraham was a superior being, more in touch with God than all the rest of us? No, indeed. God longs to reveal His heart to everyone He loves: “Surely the Sovereign Lord does nothing without revealing his plan to his servants,” the prophet said (Amos 3:7). He does so because that’s what one does for a friend.

Friends open their hearts to one another; they hold nothing back. “I have called you friends,” Jesus said to His disciples, “for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you” (John 15:15).

So when the angels turned away and went toward Sodom, “the Lord remained standing before Abraham.” Unfortunately most versions render the text, “Abraham remained standing before the Lord” (Genesis 18:22), but that’s a crashing mistake. The traditional Hebrew text states just the opposite. The original version tells us that God was actually standing before Abraham, patiently waiting for him to speak. As written, the text underscores God’s passion to communicate with all of us. He, as in Abraham’s day, stands continually before us, drawing us out, listening to our hearts, and waiting to reveal His own.

“Prayer is [God’s] idea,” Lloyd Ogilvie said. “[Our] desire to pray is the result of his greater desire to talk with us. He has something to say when we feel the urge to pray.”

What follows, then, is the well-known account of that conversation between Abraham and God, or, if you please, that rap session in which Abraham pled Sodom’s case, begging the Lord to spare Sodom for the sake of a few righteous souls and God agreeing to spare it for that number.

Abraham is faulted at times for his unwillingness to persist in his intercession, to wring Sodom’s salvation from God for the sake of his nephew Lot (who, it appears, was the only good man in town). But, believe me, Abraham was never lacking in gumption and certainly not on this occasion. No, Abraham stopped praying because for the first time he saw the situation from God’s point of view. At every step God’s justice loomed larger; at every step more of God’s justice entered into the man. In the end he was thinking more like God than ever before.

Here’s the point: Abraham’s prayer for Sodom didn’t change anything—except Abraham. God had determined to judge that audacious sin-city because there was nothing in it worth saving. By prayer Abraham entered into God’s wisdom, understood His thinking, and by it became a little more like God.

Prayer, then, whatever else it may be, is not calling God’s attention to things He’s not aware of, nor is it urging Him to do His duty. No, it’s rather a conversation in which we speak our minds and God speaks His. We talk and we listen until we get into His mind and He gets into ours.

All of which means that when we get down to praying, we don’t have to worry about what to say or how to say it. We can say whatever is in us. Though our prayers may spring from anxious fear or angry, ungodly thoughts of personal revenge, God will take those prayers into His heart and turn them into something else, and in the process He will turn us into something else.

I think that’s what Paul meant when he wrote: “Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 4:6–7).

There’s no promise here that anything or anyone is changed by our prayers except our state of mind. God’s tranquillity takes the place of our anxiety; His peace transcends our panic. Prayer, thus wrung out of us by our deepest needs, has been turned into something yet more profound. In our praying we have been transformed.

This is God at work. This is the business of prayer.

Taken from Seeing God, ©2006 by David Roper. Used by permission of Discovery House Publishers, Box 3566 Grand Rapids, MI 49501. All rights reserved.