[Modified transcript of a midweek message published by Horley Baptist Church on YouTube[1], May 2020]
In a time when so many of our prayers go unanswered, is it even worth praying? Does pray even work? Maybe the first thing we need to do is rethink our approach.
I think that one of the things that this situation with COVID has highlighted is my lack of faith when it comes to prayer. I mean, it’s something that’s possibly, probably, always been there but it has highlighted the fact that I struggle with whether or not prayer truly makes a difference, whether there really is power in prayer. And probably most of us, if we are honest, we all struggled a bit with prayer. The evidence for that is the fact that our prayer meetings are fairly badly attended. I mean it’s not just because prayer meetings can be a little bit boring but actually maybe down to the fact that we don’t really think that prayer is that effective. I mean is there any difference in outcome between someone who prays and someone who doesn’t? And even if God does hear our prayers, does he really answer them?
01:11 Maybe prayer is more to do with psychologically feeling better about a situation than actually having any real effect on the outcome. See, Paul in the latter part of his letter to the church in Thessalonica, he tells them to keep praying. “It’s God’s will that you keep praying” and perhaps they needed that reminder because our natural inclination when we look at the reality that we see around us is to stop praying.
01:40 Yet when we look at Jesus’s ministry, it was punctuated with times of prayer; time and time again the Gospels tell us that Jesus took himself off and prayed to his heavenly Father. That prayer life sustained his relationship, it empowered his ministry and it directed his paths. He spent time cultivating the relationship he had with his heavenly Father. And when Jesus was explaining to the people who had seen the power of his ministry, why it was so powerful, he told them it was because he only did what he saw his Father doing, that God was always working and God revealed to him His will and His ways. The only reason Jesus was able to do what he did was because God was already doing it.
02:40 You see, without prayer, Jesus’s ministry would be completely fruitless, completely powerless. I wonder how much time do you, do we, do I spend in prayer just because I want to get to know my God better, I want to know my heavenly Father better. Perhaps our prayer life and our prayer meetings are seemingly ineffectual because we have got the foundations of our prayer life wrong. Our prayer life is driven more by our needs, our wants at any given time rather than our desire to know our heavenly Father better.
03:24 I mean, what would it look like if our prayers were all about building a relationship with our heavenly Father to such an extent that we start to see the world as God sees it? Would our hearts break for what God’s heart breaks for? Could we start to know God’s will in any given situation because we know God that much and that He has revealed to us what He is doing and why He is doing it? Can our prayers be guided not by what we wanted but by what God is already doing? Maybe then our lives would be full of miracles and power rather than disappointment and heartbreak.
04:12 See, Jesus and his disciples proved that prayer does work because they spent time building their relationship with their heavenly Father. They prayed “Father in heaven, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven“.
[1] YouTube link: Does Prayer Work? – part 1
Bible references: 1 Thessalonians 5 v17, John ch 5.
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Contributed by Martin Shorey; © the Author
