The Truth About Prayer That Keeps Me Praying

Why bother praying if God already has his mind made up? Does my prayer really affect what happens in this great big world?

Do you wrestle with questions like these?

C.S. Lewis did. In  “The Efficacy of Prayer,” he asked, 

Can we believe that God ever really modifies His action in response to the suggestions of men? For infinite wisdom does not need telling what is best, and infinite goodness needs no urging to do it.

Have you read Psalm 139 lately? If it’s been a while, here’s a taste.

¹ O Lord, you have searched me and known me!
² You know when I sit down and when I rise up;
    you discern my thoughts from afar.
³ You search out my path and my lying down
    and are acquainted with all my ways.
⁴ Even before a word is on my tongue,
    behold, O Lord, you know it altogether …

¹⁶ Your eyes saw my unformed substance;
in your book were written, every one of them,
    the days that were formed for me,
    when as yet there was none of them.

Psalm 139 is a jaw-dropping, mind-blowing, staggering celebration of God’s intimate and complete knowledge of each one of us. And, as much as it has steadied my soul, I’ll be honest, it has not always propelled me to pray.

Because God already knows.

Every single one of our days was “written in his book before one of them came to be” (Psalm 139:16). God knows, and makes known, “the end from the beginning” (Isaiah 46:10).  

Job spoke truth when he told God, “No purpose of yours can be thwarted” (Job 42:2) and Paul knew when he said God “works all things out to the conformity with his will” (Ephesians 1:11). 

So why pray if God already has all our days arranged? 

Why? 

Because God calls us to pray (see Matthew 6:9-13, Romans 12:12, Ephesians 6:18, Philippians 4:6, Colossians 4:2, 1 Timothy 2:1, 1 Thessalonians 5:17). Obedience is reason enough to pray. 

Why else?

Because my relationship with my Heavenly Father, as with my earthly dad, grows stronger when I talk to him. Prayer strengthens our bond. Even if, in perfect wisdom and love, God says no.

“We faint before the silent heavens,” Greg Morse writes, “not because God is unable, but because we are too unwise to know why his silence is a mercy.” It is when God is silent that I learn to trust.

Building my faith, I coming to see, may be a big reason God calls me to pray.

God chooses to use our prayers to accomplish his sovereign plans.

I know. Try to wrap your mind around that.

Lean Into Both

When I see what seem like two contrasting truths in Scripture, I am learning to lean into both. 

I write this on Wednesday, April 23rd, 2025 from Jim’s surgery recovery room. 

And I’m leaning into the twin truths that God was sovereign over my husband’s injury and surgery and also, that God granted success—the surgeon just came in and showed me photos of his tendon reattached to the radius bone–through the prayers of two dozen praying friends. 

Both/and: God is completely in control and he calls me to pray. 

If he can ordain the end, can he not also ordain the means?

1. God knew the outcome of this surgery—the end—before Jim injured his arm in a basketball game last Wednesday, indeed before Jim was even born, and 
2. God used his children’s prayers—the means— to guide the surgeon’s hand and the anesthesiologist’s eyes.

I affirm both God’s sovereign will and the actual effectiveness of our prayers (see James 5:16 for a good word on effective pray-ers). In God’s plan, our prayers are vital links in the chain of events. 

I see it throughout Scripture, but encapsulated in 2 Corinthians 1:10b-11,

On him we have set our hope that he will continue to deliver us, as you help us by your prayers. Then many will give thanks on our behalf for the gracious favor granted us in answer to the prayers of many.

Don’t you love that? Paul tells the Corinthian Christians that they helped bring about his deliverance by their prayers, that God granted favor in answer to the prayers of many.

Would grace have been granted without prayer?

I don’t know.

But I do know that God called me to pray, and that Scripture assures me that the prayers of God’s people are the means to his deliverance.

I do know that while the church was earnestly praying for Peter to be released from prison, bound between two soldiers in prison, an angel of the Lord came and released Peter’s chains and walked him right to the house where they were still praying (Acts 12:5-17). And I do know that I have prayed for freedom from more than one sort of prison, and I have been set free.

But would Peter have been freed, would I have been freed, would Jim have come through so well, without prayer? Did those prayers affect the outcome?

God could, if He chose, repair our bodies miraculously without food; or give us food without the aid of farmers, bakers, and butchers; or knowledge without the aid of learned men; or convert the heathen without missionaries. Instead, He allows soils and weather and animals and the muscles, minds, and wills of men to co-operate in the execution of His will.  

“God,” said Pascal, “instituted prayer in order to lend to His creatures the dignity of causality.” … [My prayers] have not … changed God’s mind—that is, His overall purpose. But that purpose will be realized in different ways according to the actions, including the prayers, of His creatures.

—C.S. Lewis, “The Efficacy of Prayer,” from The World’s Last Night and Other Essays

God allows us creatures to have a hand in his grand plan. He lets our prayers be the means of his good and perfect will coming to pass. “He lends us the dignity of causality,” Pascal said. “As you help us through your prayers,” Paul wrote. 

So would Jim have come through surgery so swimmingly anyway?

Only God knows for sure.

But I know that God chooses to use our actions to accomplish the events that fill all the days that were written in his book before yet one of them came to be.

This I know.

So I pray.