Spiritual Disciplines Ep. 2: Prayer

Show Notes:

Matt: Today we want to talk about our second spiritual discipline. This time, prayer.J.D., there’s a lot to be said about prayer, and you’ve written books on it, you have several Ask Me Anything episodes on it, but I want to start with a listener question from Stephanie, who asks, “How does prayer ‘move the hand of God?'”—J.D.: Wow, strong start. Yeah, Matt, I have spoken a lot about prayer

Can’t do it enough

21 Days of Prayer and Fasting. We always want to be a praying church, but we set aside times throughout the year to really emphasize it in our church and our own lives.

So, to Stephanie’s question, why do we do that? Why emphasize prayer? Does it really change things?

Let me give you three quick points about why we believe prayer “moves the hand of God.” First, the Bible makes it clear that God’s purposes are unchanging.

Verses like Numbers 23:19 are clear: God is not a man. He never learns anything new. He doesn’t wise up with experience or change his mind.

He knows the end from the beginning

So, it seems clear that God’s purposes are unchanging, but, like I said, we have to hold this in tension with another truth, which is that God’s plans are unfolding.

There’s a story in Exodus 32 says that God changed his course of action based on Moses’ prayer. But here’s the irony of the story: God is the one who tells Moses to go down and see the situation (v. 7). Moses didn’t know the people had corrupted themselves. God showed this to him.

Furthermore, the very thing that Moses uses to “change God’s mind” was God’s own promise. (And God, of course, hadn’t forgotten his promises.)

God had put Moses into a situation so that he would see the problem God already knew about, remember God’s promises, and petition God to change his course of action. Moses’ prayer itself is a result of God’s plan. God wants Moses to ask this, so he sovereignly puts him in a situation where he will ask for it.

But here’s the key: Our prayers are instrumental.

The text is clear: Without this prayer, God would have destroyed Israel. The prayer was instrumental in getting God to change his course of action. And that’s consistent with the pattern of prayer throughout Scripture. As I’ve heard it said, “Prayer moves the arm that moves the world.”

Now, many people might ask at this point, “Well, what if Moses had refused to pray? Would that mean that they would not have been saved, and would that mean that it was not God’s will to save them after all? And what does that mean if I fail to pray for something God wants me to pray for? Does that mean that the thing that I didn’t pray about wasn’t God’s will after all? Or would God have just gotten someone else to pray it?”

You may begin to feel your head aching. It’s understandable.

Those kinds of questions are the wrong ones to ask about these situations. Scripture never teaches us to think about the will of God that way.

The 19th century Princeton theologian A.A. Hodge put it this way (my paraphrase): “Does God know the day you’ll die? Yes. Has he appointed that day? Yes. Can you do anything to change that day? No. Then why do you eat? To live. What happens if you don’t eat? You die. Then if you don’t eat, and die, then would that be the day that God had appointed for you to die?

“Quit asking stupid questions and just eat. Eating is the pre-ordained way God has appointed for living.”

So, when I wrestle with this, I tell myself to quit asking stupid questions and just pray.

You see, however impossible it is for our puny minds to understand, God has sovereignly placed us in certain situations for the express purpose of praying his promises and “changing his plans,” so to speak.