How Prayer Works

Praying with child-like faith and trust

10/12/2017

Luke 11:5-13 Jesus said to his disciples: "And I tell you, ask and you will receive; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks, receives; and the one who seeks, finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened. What father among you would hand his son a snake when he asks for a fish? Or hand him a scorpion when he asks for an egg? If you then, who are wicked, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him?"

            Let me ask you an important and imperative question: Does prayer work? What I mean is when you’ve knelt down to ask God for some favor or make some request, did the Man Upstairs come through for you? Some people dedicate countless hours to prayer, like cloistered Carmelite nuns; they believe prayer works. However, others scoff at prayer as superstition, like the philosopher Fredrick Nietzsche, who said, “If they want me to believe in their Savior, they will have to sing me better hymns” (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 99). He meant hymns of praise, like prayer, are fruitless and futile.  I am the spiritual director of several men studying to become deacons and the first order of business when we meet – and it’s really the only order of business – is prayer: what it is and how you do it, and how you don’t do it. Let me suggest to you three ways how not to prayer and finally a way on how to pray, which is just what Jesus says in the gospel.

              The first incorrect approach to pray is from a scientific mentality. Some answer the problem of prayer by doing a scientific, statistical study. Let’s take one hundred people, each from different religions, and have them pray to God for a specific item, and then see to whom God says “yes” and to whom God says “no.” Then we’ll discover which kind of prayer works. But prayer cannot be examined under a microscope any more than faith or hope or love can be.  Science is the wrong tool to experiment on prayer.

                 The second incorrect approach is by our over-zealous Christian friends who say you have to pray with great faith. If you didn’t get what you asked for – a mansion in Malibu or a Caribbean cruise – then you didn’t pray with enough faith. Some tele-evangelists – although not all of them – fall into this extreme view. This is sometimes called the “Health and Wealth Gospel.” God wants you to be healthy and wealthy, and if you’re not rich and famous, then you need to pray with more faith. Of course, the one unassailable answer to this view is Jesus himself, who died with no health or wealth on the Cross. The great Presbyterian preacher from Scotland, George MacDonald, said: “Jesus suffered and died on the cross, not so that we wouldn’t have to, but so that our suffering might be like his.” Simply praying with more zeal doesn’t necessarily make prayer work.

                The third error regarding prayer is to see it as a purely personal and private matter. And this is the great mistake of the modern American mentality. We have outlawed prayer in schools, and the only sign of public prayer is a few moment of silence. But when we fail to pray, to lift our hearts to God – both in public and in private – we lose our humanity. We become no better than the animals (who, by the way, actually pray and praise the Creator in their own way!). That is, we become less than the animals when we cut ourselves off from God by abandoning prayer. The Roman philosopher Cicero said public prayer, which he called “religio,” was the highest good of a society, its “summum bonum.” Making prayer a purely private affair is also wrong-headed.

                The best way to pray is as a small child speaking to his or her father, a father who loves him or her more than the child can fathom. Just like children ask to eat a second piece of chocolate cake and sometimes mom or dad says “yes” and sometimes “no,” so too our heavenly Father sometimes says “yes” and sometimes “no.” In the gospel Jesus explains: “If you then, who are wicked, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the Father in Heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him?” In other words, the best prayer is child-like prayer, not scientific prayer, not super-zealous prayer, not purely private prayer. That is the best way to pray and how to measure its efficacy.

               Let me conclude with a touching quotation on prayer by C. S. Lewis. The Oxford don wrote: “I pray because I can’t help myself. I pray because I’m helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time – waking and sleeping. It doesn’t change God, it changes me.” That’s spoken like a child who’s finally figured out how prayer works.

Praised be Jesus Christ!