Why Pray If God Knows Everything

Why Pray If God Knows Everything

Collin Leong. March 20, 2016

Introduction

How many of you have heard the question: if God already knows everything and is control of everything, then why do we need to pray? He knows what we think, what we are going to do, and where we are going, even before we do. He knows what will happen in the future of every individual, family, nation, and the world, so what's the point of praying?

Christians who neglect prayers probably do so either because they have never fully understood the reason or the power of prayer. I'm sharing my thoughts about the paradox of  "What's the point of praying?" to help myself and others find purpose in praying. 

We all know, however, that the Bible makes plenty of emphasis on praying, and in fact, to "pray unceasingly" (1 Thes. 5:17). Someone counted Jesus praying 25 different times in the Gospels, and the words "pray", "prayer" or "praying" occur over 50 times in the New Testament. 

So why is prayer so important? As I ponder about this, four basic reasons came to me that I  think is sufficient to motivate myself (and hopefully you as well) to pray more.

What is Prayer?

Before I get into the reasons, let's also qualify what we mean by prayer.  Prayer, along with Praise and Sacrifice (fasting, tithing) are forms of Worship. No wonder prayers are often inter-mingled with outpouring of praise, songs, lifting of hands, and are inseparable bed-fellows with fasting. While prayer is often expressed with audible words, it does not have to always be so.

Prayer is the only mechanism that I know of, that allows creatures of flesh cross over to the spiritual dimension. 

The bible says "for we do not know how to pray as we should, but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words; and He who searches the hearts knows what the mind of the Spirit is..." (Rom 8:26,27). 

Prayer allows us to communicate our thanksgiving, our feelings and our petition to God's spirit directly. What privilege we have been given! But there is more. Prayer gives us supernatural power in the spiritual realm, and I elaborate on this in a section below. 

Our hearts' longing can be expressed not just verbally, but through thoughts and contemplation, emotional expression, praise or songs, and even inexpressible groaning deep in our soul. In other words, prayer is a posture of your soul (spirit and mind), more than words or actions. Paul instructed in Corinthians: "I will pray with the spirit and I will pray with the mind also" (1 Cor 14:15).

In fact, based on these scriptures, God doesn't just hear your words but interpret your longings (and sincerity) through the mind of the Spirit, who understands you more than you do yourself. As a posture, it's where the attitude of humility, reverence and boldness are perfectly inter-twined together to transmit and receive expressions to/from God.

Without such a posture, a man saying a bunch of words ending with "amen" is just going through the motion; He may as well be speaking to a rock because his heart is obviously somewhere else other than at the foot of God's throne.  And God has no respect for men who utter pious sounding words but his heart is insincere or has ulterior motives. "If I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not hear me." (Ps 66:18).  

If we have the wrong posture or motives, then it is no wonder why we feel our prayers are ineffective and meaningless, and it would be no surprise to find us abandoning prayer life.

Now with a better understanding of what is genuine prayer, let's look at the important reasons we should pray.

Reasons to Pray

1. Prayer delights God

The sacrifice of the wicked is an abomination to the Lord, but the prayer of the upright is his delight. (Proverbs 15:8)

Which father or mother does not wish their children to constantly greet them and communicate with them, even if the subject is nothing new to them? As parents, we want our children to show their appreciation, tell us their problems, ask us for help. Similarly, God derives pleasure because He loves us and desires an intimate relationship with us. 

It doesn't matter to God that He already "knows" everything about us. That's not the point here. Rather, He wants us to know that He knows, and He wants us to know He cares. I can always tell when my children comes home from a school test and didn't do well. They will be quiet about it. I know it, but I still want them to feel uninhabited to approach me and tell me about it. I could approach them first, but that would be less pleasurable for me. 

This answers the question "why do I need to pray if God already knows everything." God is delighted when we come to him with what he already knows. This is probably the ONLY reason where prayer "benefits" or blesses God. The rest of the reasons are for our benefits. But if we truly love God, then this reason alone - to delight Him - should be enough to motivate us to pray even when we don't feel like it.

2. Prayer strengthens our faith.

"Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened." (Matt. 7:7-8)

When we see God answer our prayers, God becomes more real and closer to us. Even to "see" how God respond to us takes a special spiritual insight, and that comes with experience having prayers answered as well as prayers rejected.  

We learn of God's dependability and faithfulness through answered prayers. But as we mature in our faith, we have a better patience and understanding why our petitions are sometimes unanswered or rejected, and that no longer shakes our faith. 

We must remember that is it not God's intention for us to base our faith on answered miracles but on His Word - the Bible. "So faith comes from hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ." (Roman 10:17)  Having said that, a Christian's spiritual maturity and faith will never out-grow the need to pray and to experience answered prayers; in fact, the mark of faith and maturity is when we share the delight with God in our private prayer communion.

On the contrary, a Christian who stops praying because "God never answers my prayers" are probably stunted in his growth at some point as he either can't see or can't understand how God answered his prayers, or his prayers were not genuine (wrong heart posture) or with wrong motives.  "You ask and do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, so that you may spend it on your pleasures." (James 4:3)

3. Prayer deepens our understanding of God's will. 

"Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all comprehension, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus." (Phil. 4:6-7)

God still make things happen according to His will even if we don't pray. But the loss is ours because we won't be involved in it, and we won't learn how God think and act.

To a prayer-less Christian, things just happen randomly. If things go their way, they are fine. If things go against their way, oh, the fuss they can kick up. Isn't this why when things are great, we don't pray but when something goes wrong, and when we can't fix it, we rush to God and demand that He make things right (for us)? And we have no idea why these things happen, we just know we don't like it. We get anxious.

The verse above says that whatever circumstances you are in, God will give you peace and understanding why it's happening when you go to Him in prayer, and hence your anxiety will be removed.  In fact, instead of relying our faith only on answered prayers, we also learn to see that God has our best interest even when He denies our request, or when He answers it differently than what we expected.

David was an example of someone with close commune with God.  Even when he sinned and get into trouble, he knew it was God who was punishing him. For example, when God denied David's request to spare the life of his son, David received the peace and wisdom that others cannot understand. (See 2 Samuel 12.) In the repentant Psalms 51 which he wrote right after this incident, David said: "Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight; so you are right in your verdict and justified when you judge." (Psalms 51:4)

God communes with us in two ways - through the Word, and through the Spirit. ("But an hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; for such people the Father seeks to be His worshipers." John 4:23) 

The Word was given so that pre-believers can know about God and what God expects, even without having the Holy Spirit in their hearts. Many people believed in Christ just merely by reading the scriptures. However, when a believer is given the Holy Spirit, a second way to understand God and to know Him is through prayer in the Spirit. "With all prayer and petition pray at all times in the Spirit..." (Eph 6:18a).

This is what makes a Christian's heart sensitive to God's personal leading instead of merely to continue having head knowledge only. Our communion with God through prayer helps us understand His will supernaturally, and when we understand it and pray in-line or in-sync to it, then His answer to our prayers will always be "yes", because He is essentially carrying out His own will - but with our participation and acceptance. But when we pray for our own will - conscious or unconsciously - then we will receive a "no" answer (like David did), but God will help us to understand why and give us peace.

4. Prayer engages us in spiritual warfare

This is the part of prayer that not many have a good understanding. We live in a 4 dimensional world and our minds orientate everything to what we can see and feel in the physical world. That's why our prayers are biased towards petitioning for our needs. We forget that prayer also gives us supernatural powers in the spiritual realm. 

For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the powers, against the world forces of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places. (Eph 6:12)

In our modern and materialistic world, Satan has distracted us from the spiritual battle field. I grew up in a village with temples that hosts spiritual possession events. Devotees can cut out their tongue and watch it dance on the altar. They walk on fire and dip their hands in boiling oil. During my university days in Canada, I have seen supernatural oppression in friends from other religion when they were about to receive Christ. The demons literally threw the bible and text books all over a friend's apartment. I myself have experience physical oppression where I was paralyzed by an invisible spirit, and I was only released when I rebuked it by the blood of Christ.

If you have such experiences, then you know that the spiritual realm interacts with our physical realm. The Bible refers to believers as "Soldiers of Christ" because we are a fighting a spiritual war against evil and dark powers that want to win over souls. These spirits want to make Christians ineffective by growing cold and quarrel with one another.  To join the battle against darkness, we can only do it through prayer in the Spirit. Do it in our own strength, we will lose. Why?

When an eagle attacks a snake, the eagle doesn't wrestle with it on the ground. That is the snake's domain. The eagle brings the battle to the air, where the snake has no power. Then it lets go the snake to the mercy of gravity. When we fight each other, argue with unbelievers, and try to change the order of things on earth, we have no advantages and that's exactly what Satan wants us to be distracted with. Instead, we are to bring the fight into the spiritual realm and soar with the strength of God.

"With all prayer and petition pray at all times in the Spirit, and with this in view, be on the alert with all perseverance and petition for all the saints" (Eph 6:18)

The exhortation to pray in Eph. 6:18  was right after the passage about putting on the full armor God (v13 to 17). Have you ever wondered why prayer itself wasn't part of the armor? I think its because of this: the armor gets you ready for battle, BUT you are not in the battle until you pray in the Spirit! Prayer thrust us into where the battle is supposed to be fought - not the physical here against your spouse, kids, skeptic friends, or the corrupted society or the politicians! 

II Cor. 10:3-14 says: "For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds"  

Look around you. Do you see any weapons that have "divine power" to destroy strongholds of evil? You can't find it. It only exist in the spiritual realm, where our prayers bring us into, and where our weapons (the armor in Ephesians 6) are endowed with divine power.

Prayer the only way to prepare ourselves with the armor of God and to get us ready to defend the spiritual attacks. When we work, we work but when we pray, God works 

What are "strongholds?" In Mark 9, there was an account of a demon possession of a boy but the disciples were not able to drive it out. After Jesus drove it out with a single command, the disciples asked him why they couldn't do it. Jesus answered "This kind cannot come out by anything but prayer." (Matthew 17 added "prayer and fasting.")

In Matthew 26:41, Jesus told his disciples "Keep watching and praying that you may not enter into temptation; the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." Temptations are lures to sin. When we make compromises towards it, Satan has a foothold. When we enter fully into it and are trapped, Satan has a stronghold for that part of our lives. Just like that demon possession, it's difficult to escape from a stronghold - only prayers  can destroy strongholds or prevent it from being built.

"Be alert and of sober mind. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour." 1 Peter 5:8

Do you want to protect or release your self, your family, and your church from strongholds and bondages? Nothing will do that except through prayers!

Conclusion

Prayers delight God, exercises our faith, and deepen our understanding of His will work. It  helps us to grow and to love Him more. Without prayer, our growth will be retarded. For our physical body to grow, we need to eat, we need to digest, and we need to exercise. If the Word is our spiritual food,  then prayer/worship is the spiritual digestion, and service is the spiritual exercise.

Lastly, remember the warfare is still on! We need to pray that Satan's schemes against Christians as well as pre-believers are foiled. They build strongholds, we tear them down with prayers. The power of prayer is not in the prayer itself, but by the fact that it brings our battle to the correct strategic location - the spiritual realm where our Lord rules.