Why God Chose Prayer

Gregory A. Boyd is pastor of Woodland Hills Church near St. Paul, Minnesota and is one of my favorite authors, having written several of the books that are currently on my bookshelf: God at War, The Bible and Spiritual Conflict, 1997; Is God to Blame? Beyond Pat Answers to the Problem of Suffering, 2003; The Myth of a Christian Nation, How the Quest for Political Power is Destroying the Church, 2006; The Myth of a Christian Religion, Losing Your Religion for the Beauty of a Revolution, 2009).

The following are various excerpts from pages 232-234 of one other of his books - a very large and immensely helpful book entitled Satan and the Problem of Evil, Constructing a Trinitarian Warfare Theodicy, written in 2001 and published by InterVarsity Press:

“Furthermore, just as our freedom to effect things physically is irrevocable, so we may conclude that the power to effect things in prayer is also irrevocable.  Prayer is part of the general covenant of freedom that the Lord grants us, and He genuinely binds himself to it.  Scripture does not shy away from speaking of God sometimes needing humans to accomplish certain feats (Judges 5:23). Hence, we may understand that, by his own choice, God genuinely needs us to pray for certain things if they are to be accomplished, just as we may understand that God needs us to cooperate with him on a physical level for certain things to be accomplished….

…Wink captures the genuine urgency of prayer well as he comments on the fascinating narrative of prayer and spiritual conflict found in Daniel 10:

The point here seems to be that Daniel’s intercessions have made possible the intervention of God.  Prayer changes us, but it also changes what is possible for God.  Daniel’s cry was heard on the first day; it opened an aperture for God to act in concert with human freedom.  It inaugurated war in heaven.³⁴

…Wink also writes, “If we are to take the biblical understanding seriously at all, intercession….changes the world and it changes what is possible to God.”³⁵

…In my estimation, this empowering understanding of prayer makes the best sense out of the urgency with which Scripture commands us to pray.  God could have created the world differently, of course.  He could have created a world in which he did not need prayer, or any creaturely free decisions, to carry out his will.  If God needs anything, it is because he chooses to.  In my view, this is what God has done.  He chose to create a somewhat risky world in which some things genuinely hinge on what free agents do, both physically and through the power of prayer.”

Mr. Boyd goes on to give three reasons why God chose prayer to carry out his will here on earth: 

The first he labels “Personal Relationships and Empowerment” by which God empowers us to have “say-so” as a necessary tool for “morally responsible personhood” in which Boyd states that “every true interpersonal relationship requires that the parties involved be genuinely empowered over and against one another.  Where one party is wholly divested of power in relationship to the other, the dominated person becomes depersonalized. By definition, the relationship becomes impersonal rather than interpersonal. This is true of our personal relationship with God as it is with any other human.  Though we are to be unequivocally under God’s lordship, this lordship is a lordship of love that seeks to strengthen, not destroy, the personhood of the other. God thus seeks not only to influence us but also to empower us to the extent that we can influence him. Prayer is a central aspect of this realm of influence.  It preserves our personhood over and against our omnipotent Creator.”

The second reason that God chose prayer to carry out his will, according to Boyd, is for “Communication and Personal Relationships” encouraging us to “maintain consistently and even pursue more passionately our personal relationship with our Creator, and this constitutes a second possible reason why God ordained that he be significantly influenced by prayer.  The essence of any interpersonal relationship is mutually influential communication, and thus…by genuinely making things depend on whether or not we pray, God builds the necessity of a God-human communication relationship into the very structure of creation.”

And finally, God chose prayer to be “The Power of God’s Vice-regents….the very purpose for which we exist on this earth. God wants us to participate in his unending, unsurpassable triune love and to mediate this love to the segment of the cosmos under our jurisdiction….in a word, he wants his bride to reign with him on the earth (2 Timothy 2:12; Rev. 5:10; 20:6). This was his goal from the start (Genesis 1:26-27), and it will finally be accomplished in the eschaton.  In this light we may say that prayer is an essential aspect of our coreigning with God.  God wants his will carried out on earth, but he wants it carried out in cooperation with us.  Consequently, he orchestrates things such that his will is not carried out unless we are in communication with him on it.  To use an illustration from Paul Billheimer, God’s will is like a business check that must be cosigned in order to be validated.  We the church are the cosigning party, and prayer is our signing. Hence the essence of prayer is, as Jesus taught, to align our will with the Father’s will – to cosign his will, as it were – so that his rule is established “on earth as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6:10). In prayer we begin our eternal job of mediating the Father’s will and reigning with Christ on the earth.”

³⁴ Walter Wink, Unmasking the Powers; The invisible Forces That Determine Human Existence (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1986) , p. 91.

³⁵Wink, Engaging the Powers, p. 302.

I found the above texts to be some of the most helpful in moving me towards a more powerful understanding of why we pray.  I study often, I read the Word often, I pray often…but I never do any of these things as much, or even as effectively, as I believe I could.  I have always, I believe, regarded prayer as something I ought to do, and that I sometimes find difficult to do, partly by reason of not yet having sufficient knowledge or understanding of the mechanics of it. 

I relate it to a doctor telling me I need to stop (or start) a certain activity for the betterment of my health. If he just leaves it at that, without any explanation of what effect that activity might be having on my health, I most likely will not give it the importance that he, with his knowledge, understands it to be.  Knowledge is vital to us. The Bible tells us that knowledge (scriptural knowledge) is essential.

There is so much more to Boyd’s book than just these passages on prayer; subjects such as the Warfare Worldview of the Bile and the Early Church; Free Will and the Origin of Evil; Divine Foreknowledge and the Trinitarian Warfare Worldview; Issues Surrounding the Foreknowledge of God and the Openness of the Future; Risk and the Sovereignty of God; The Irrevocability and the Finitude of Freedom; Miracles, Prayer and the Arbitrariness of Life; Eternal Suffering; Hell; The Victory of God.

But these passages on prayer, in particular, have given me a new and better understanding of why I should pray. All three of the reasons stated were refreshing to me in my prayer life, yet, specifically, the third reason given above had the most impact on me as I have recently been very compelled to understand in greater depth what it means to be “the bride of Christ” having recently become “husbandless” after 23 years of marriage and having spent a few months grieving over the loss of not only my relationship and all it entailed, but also grieving over the loss of my identity as “wife.”  Thankfully the Lord helped me find my identity again, in Christ where it was all along, as He reminded me that I was HIS bride and that this divine relationship would never be at risk of ending, on that I was guaranteed with an eternal promise.

It is very clear to me that Paul greatly understood the significance of prayer and why he often said he was praying “always” and “unceasingly” for the church.  The disciples understood it as well, when they gathered together in prayer, knowing that just as a large group of people is sometimes needed to remove large physical obstacles that just one person alone could not move, so can a large group of pray-ers more effectively and more quickly move large spiritual obstacles. [This analogy was provided in this book as well.]

In both cases, Paul and the disciples truly understood that they had been made co-heirs with Christ and co-regents over that domain which Christ had returned to them by his death and resurrection: earth and all who are on it.

Without a doubt, they understood clearly both the purpose and the power of prayer and why God chose to use it to effect His will here on earth…through us…the bride of Christ…a most personal and intimate relationship where there need never be a lack of communication with each other, and where, truly, each can know what the other is thinking at all times.  What a wonderful and perfect marriage it has the potential of being…if only we, the church, would pray!  Always and unceasingly…