One of the most significant and often repeated questions is, “Why pray?” What is the purpose of prayer? What are you supposed to get out of it? Here are four goals of prayer:
1. Self-discovery: What do you seek? How strongly do you seek it? How long have you sought it? You can learn a great deal about yourself and who you really are by examining your history of prayers to God. Though God knows our thoughts and needs before you do (Ps 139:4; Mat 6:8), you still have to voice them. It is essential to your well-being to let your desires, your hopes as well as your fears, become word. As a therapist, I would tell my clients that all we had available to assist us in their healing process are words. Then I would add that we are word; our personal creation began when God mystically addressed us into being, saying in effect: “Let there be, you!” Therefore, we do not just have language; we are language, the language of God. Yet if we do not speak what is in our hearts, how will we know what is really bothering us, what we truly desire as well as fear? The Psalms well demonstrate that God has given us permission to say whatever is on our heart and mind. We just need to keep on praying until we gain a sense of having said and maybe discovered what is going on within us.
2. Self-transformation: “Thy will be done,” said Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane before His arrest (Matt 26:42 KJV). One of my seminary professors often prayed while walking outside in the early evening, off and away from other persons. Though he did not usually say anything out loud, there was nonetheless a lot going on in him. He said that at the beginning of his prayer, he typically had some problematic issue he wanted to present to God. Here, the prayer might begin in an apparently oppositional manner, like many of the Psalms, e.g. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning? O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer; and by night, but find no rest” (Ps 22:1-2). Yet if he persevered in prayer sufficiently while walking in the quiet darkness, he said that he would usually find himself now appositionally with God and God with him, as in the “Me and God against the world.”
3. God-appeal: We simply cannot help but ask, even beg God for what we seek God to do for us. Can we ever get God to change God’s mind, so to say? God did when Moses entreated God to relent from punishing Israel (Exod 32:10-14). And even more importantly, Jesus tells us to persevere in prayer, in beseeching God to answer us in an affirming way (Luke 18:1-8).
Many years ago, I asked God to help me find a golf ball I had just hit into the woods. Then I felt stupid, asking the high and holy God for a mere golf ball. Feeling like an embarrassed child, I apologized to God and withdrew my request. Yet at once God unexpectedly spoke telepathically to me: “Don’t you tell me what is important! If you want something, ask for it!”
Mind you, that does not mean you will get it! But if something is on your heart, lift the words of your heart to God, from whom all words come, and unto whom all words will return.
4. God-encounter: This is the most important “why” of prayer. Here the only desire is to encounter God, leading toward not just a temporary communion, but ultimate union after this life. Prayer is simply the only means available to open us sufficiently to receive the pure gift of God’s presence. [/NL1-4]
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