Why pray, if God is sovereign? 4 wonderful reminders
Moving through Pink's The Sovereignty of God, the chapter on prayer just about dried out my highlighter.
I remember in the mid-90s, right after I became a believer, I asked my Bible study leader a question: "What good does praying do when God's going to do whatever he wants anyway?"
I don't quite remember how he replied, but ever since then I've been on a quest to discover more of the multilayered answer. I've read many books on prayer, looked it up in systematic theology tomes, and discussed it with pastors and church leaders.
So, when I came across Pink's chapter, I read with particular interest. Here are his first four reasons to pray:
1. Prayer is an act of worship. "Prayer is an act of worship inasmuch as it is the prostrating of the soul before Him; inasmuch as it is a calling upon His great and holy name … inasmuch as it is the recognition of His sovereignty, owned by a submission to His will."
2. Prayer redounds to God's glory. "For in prayer we do but acknowledge our dependency on Him…. That prayer brings glory to God is further seen from the fact that prayer calls faith into exercise, and nothing from us is so honouring and pleasing to Him as the confidence of our hearts."
3. Prayer is designed by God for our humbling. "Prayer, real prayer, is a coming into the Presence of God, and a sense of His awful majesty produces a realization of our nothingness and unworthiness."
4. It increases our love for God. "'I love the Lord, because he hath heard my voice and my supplications (Ps. 116:1).' Prayer is designed by God to teach us the value of the blessings we have sought from Him, and it causes us to rejoice the more when he has bestowed upon us that for which we supplicate Him."
We've barely started answering the question of why we should pray, but as I said, there are many layers. We'll look a little deeper next week.
Peeling the onion,
Tom Harper
Founder, BiblicalLeadership.com
LinkedIn profile | Books
 | Tom Harper is publisher of BiblicalLeadership.com and executive chairman of Networld Media Group, a business-to-business publisher and event producer. He has written five books, including Servant Leader Strong: Uniting Biblical Wisdom and High-Performance Leadership (DeepWater Books, 2019) as well as the Christian business fable Through Colored Glasses and its sequel Inner Threat (DeepWater, 2022). Learn More » |
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