Prayer doesn’t work.
Yes, you heard me right. Prayer doesn’t work in the sense that it’s not a method of getting what you want. Whenever someone wants something that they can’t get, they’re often told to pray for it.
Or when something happens, thanksgiving is often in the form of “thank you all for praying for me.”
This leads to the unfortunate implication that prayer is some sort of currency that grants wishes. It effectively reduces God to a slot machine, where the tokens are prayers. Insert enough prayers, and out pops your winnings.
So why pray?
To talk to God. Prayer is, as many sites will tell you, a form of communication with God. I’d like to think of it as making a phone call to God, which is why I usually begin my prayers with “hello God”, since that’s what you’d do in a regular conversation with a regular person.
Prayer helps us verbalise and give form to what we want to say, and what we think, to God. If you didn’t pray to God, you’d just have this vague amorphous feeling of insecurity or gratitude or longing, but you wouldn’t quite know what it is. Not at least until you sat down to think about it. And you’re not likely to do that, unless you’re praying to God. So it helps us firm up our thoughts, and ultimately to know what we want. He already knows what we want, but we usually don’t.
And also, prayer is there for God to talk to us. Of course, He has multiple avenues to talk to us, whether it be through the Bible, other Christians, or completely strange and random things, as befits His mysterious ways. But prayer is one of His methods as well, because He sometimes uses us to talk to ourselves.
If you don’t have a lot of time to pray, the Lord’s Prayer is a quick way to cover all the bases, as long as you take the time to mean what you pray. Which is what I do on busy mornings when I, er, wake up late.
Otherwise, using the ACTS acronym (Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, Supplication) generally helps to put things in perspective.
Adoration of God prepares your mindset for the rest of prayer, and also puts things in perspective when you praise and worship Him.
Confessing your sins and asking forgiveness for them makes you more humble and less demanding, when you recount your own weaknesses and how you have sinned against others and God. It sounds terribly preachy, but sometimes we all need a reminder that we have hurt other people, and that we’re not perfect. Of course, this part of prayer is the last thing I ever want to do too, which is why it’s probably best that it’s at the beginning of prayer.
Thanksgiving, again, helps put things in perspective by being grateful for what you have and what God has given you. Like with confession, it serves as a reminder that we’re not as infallible as we think, and to bring a more gentle attitude to others, and God.
Supplication is such an old word, but another way to put it is “prayer requests”. This is my favourite part of prayer. I think this is everybody’s favourite part of prayer. But prayer requests can be broken into two parts – praying for others and praying for self. Just as with other things in life, you should always put your favourite portion at the end to ensure you fulfill all the other portions, and so I pray for myself last. Ironically, by this time in the prayer, I usually am not so demanding with the things I want. Which works well, because prayer isn’t a method of granting wishes in the first place.
Have you prayed today?
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