By Hal Green
Pondering Prayer
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:
- 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 by examining your history of prayers to God. Though God knows your thoughts and needs before you do (Psalm 139:4; Matthew 6:8), you still have to voice them to attain self-knowledge. 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 have available to assist us in their healing process are words. Then I would add that we are word; our personal creation began when God 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 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.
- Self-transformation: “Thy will be done,” said Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane before his arrest and crucifixion (Matthew 26:42). 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 problem he would present to God. The prayer might begin in an 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?” (Psalm 22:1). Yet if he persevered in prayer while walking in the quiet darkness, he said that he would usually find himself now appositionally with God and God with him, as in “Me and God against the world.”
- God-appeal: We cannot help but ask, even beg God for what we seek from God. Can we ever get God to change God’s mind, so to speak? God did do so when Moses entreated God to relent from punishing Israel (Exodus 32:10-14). And more importantly, Jesus tells us to persevere in prayer, in beseeching God to answer us in an affirming way (Luke 18:1-8).
- 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 the essential means to open us to the gift of God’s presence.
(Hal Green, Ph.D., is author of Pray This Way to Connect with God. You can contact him at drhalgreen@gmail.com.)
