to pray, or not to pray

Prayer is such a simple-yet-complex subject - so easy to grasp ('prayer is just talking to God') yet so much can be (and has been) said. I'm no authority. I'm a feeble pray-er - prone to distraction, ill-discipline, and just not praying. But I'm also a desperate pray-er - thoroughly believing that prayer is literally our lifeline - without prayer we are as good as God-less.

I've read books on prayer, and I've purchased books on prayer - I own several more than I've actually read! I know prayer is something I need and want to be better at - I actively pray to be better at it! I want to be a gifted pray-er - gifted with discipline and passion and discernment to prevail in prayer and see God work miracles. But I find prayer hard - and not just because it takes time and effort, but also because sometimes I don't know what and how to pray. It's toilsome to work it out and toilsome to do it.

So now that I've introduced the subject and some of its attendant emotions (!), I'm going to try to summarise some of the most important things I've read and learned over the years about prayer - from books, talks, and my own struggling experience.

1. Christians must pray. God commands us to.

It's quite simple! If you're a Christian, you should also be a pray-er. (see 1 Thessalonians 5:17 for example)


2. While God can work in His world without our prayers, He chooses to work through our prayers.

We can see this particularly from Paul's letters, example, and experience - not to mention Jesus'. We shouldn't assume that if we don't pray for something, God will do it anyway. We should assume the opposite - that if we don't pray, God won't do it; knowing that He could, we ought not to presume upon Him that He will. After all, we are His servants, not the other way around.


3. God answers our prayers three different ways; this suggests to us three different types of prayers we can be praying - but shouldn't necessarily be.

You've probably heard that the three answers are 'yes, no, wait'. I'd suggest instead that they are 'yes, no, possibly'. ('Wait' comes under the category of 'yes')

There are prayers that we can be absolutely positively sure that God will answer in the affirmative. These are the 'yes prayers'. We should pray 'yes prayers' all the time, in bulk. We should love to pray them, and pray them confidently and joyously and faithfully. We should never run short of 'yes prayers'.

Yes prayers are prayers that 'claim God's promises' as written to us in His word. NB. We need to be very careful to make sure that a Bible promise is actually being made to US though before we claim it (as opposed to being made to the Israelite nation five thousand years ago for instance). But if we are sure (and you can pick any promise in the New Testament epistles and be sure, and many but not all promises in the Gospels and Acts) pray your heart out!

For example, I can always ask God to make me holy, and to do in my life what is good for me. These are sure things in 1 Thessalonians 5:23-24 and Romans 8:28 respectively, so I can go ahead and pray these 'yes prayers' till the cows come home and rejoice in the answers (regardless of what form they take!) before I've even seen them.

Then there's 'no prayers'. It's foolish to ask God for things that are the opposite to what He wants for us. For example, I can be sure that if I pray to God about whether it's ok to have an affair with the secretary (and there have certainly been Christians known to do this), I am praying a 'no prayer'. Don't be stupid; don't even go there. This is as straightforward as praying a 'yes prayer'; it's a no-brainer.

And then there's the 'possibly prayers'. These are areas of life that God has not definitively promised to act upon one way or another - like whether to go for this job or that job, or to heal person x of y illness. So how do we know what to pray for here?

Well, at this point you can still always pray a 'yes prayer', acknowledging in your head that there is in fact a difference between a 'yes prayer' and a 'possibly prayer'. So with the job example - I'd want to tell God I know that it actually doesn't matter so much to Him whether I take job x or job y, but that I remain holy and content in either job and that in either job, He will ultimately work things for my spiritual good and His glory - provided I'm loving Him. So I'll go ahead and ask for His help to decide between the two jobs, but I'll also go ahead and pray the 'yes prayers' and hold their answers as more important in the scheme of it all than the answers to the 'possibly prayers'.

And with the healing example where a fellow Christian is concerned - I'll go ahead and pray the 'yes prayers' of asking God to grow our characters, to grow us in holiness, to grow us in love for and trust in Him, to grow us in hope of heaven and perfect healing - and I'll pray the 'possibly prayer' asking for physical healing now - but consciously and deliberately place my ultimate hope and faith in the certain healing to come in heaven rather than on the temporary physical healing that may or may not come now.

So I guess what I'm trying to say is that it's a matter of perspective and priority. And I think experience (not to mention the Bible!) will continue to tell us that the prayers (and issues) that matter most to God in our lives and in our prayer life, are the 'yes prayer' issues. God makes 'yes prayer' promises to us in the Bible to show us that these are precisely His priorities for us. He invites us to go ahead and claim these promises as much as we like because they're the ones He most values giving to us - whether or not they're the ones we most value receiving!

But we make the mistake of getting all hung up on the 'possibly prayers' and we neglect to pray the 'yes prayers' and to even know what they are. We think the Christian life and the Christian prayer life is dependent on the 'possiblies' all being in place. It's not that the 'possiblies' aren't important to God - they most certainly are and He invites us to bring every realm of life before Him in prayer - but if He doesn't make a 'possibly' clear, we need to be ok with that because He's already made clear what the 'yes prayers' are for us to return our minds and priorities to.

So in summary? And this is still a work in progress in my own understanding and prayer life - pray the 'yes prayers', avoid the 'no prayers', struggle hard with the 'possibly prayers' but always return to the 'yes prayers'. In my own experience I'm seeing more how praying this way helps me to pray like Jesus, to think like Jesus, to trust and depend on God like Jesus.

Perhaps you could have a think about your own prayer life - think about which kind of prayers dominate your prayers in your own 'quiet times', your fellowship group prayer times, your family prayers. Chances are it's the 'possiblies'. Maybe it's time to re-orientate your prayer values, start praying with your Bible open, and bring those 'yes prayers' to God.