A couple of weeks ago, I was dealing with some back pain. I don’t know if I had pulled a muscle or something else, but it nagged me for about a week. So that Sunday after church, I asked a friend of mine who’s a major prayer warrior to pray with me for my back. Right then and there, he put his hand on the part of my back that was hurting and prayed for me.
It took a few days for the pain to go away completely, but I began to feel some relief the minute he prayed for me. As long as the person praying is praying for the Lord’s will to be done, I’m a firm believer in prayer.
I’ve heard people who aren’t believers in the God of the Bible refer to prayers as “magic incantations” that don’t accomplish anything, but that’s not what prayer is at all. There’s nothing “magic” about communicating with the God of the universe.
“Biblical prayer must be set in contrast with many other schemes for influencing deity common in the ancient Near East,” notes the Dictionary of Biblical Imagery. “Biblical faith excludes any attempt to use magic or formula to control or placate God.”
Theology professor Layton Talbert riffs on this statement about prayer when he writes, “Prayer is not a spiritual power, but a means of communicating and conversing with an All-Powerful Person. Prayer is ‘powerful’—that is, meaningful and effective—only when and because it accesses a relationship with the one true God.”
Circling back to that definition of prayer from the Dictionary of Biblical Imagery, Talbert reminds us that an understanding of what God’s Word says about prayer is crucial to our understanding of prayer itself. He mentions the stories of two Old Testament kings who prayed bold prayers and experienced bold results.
Asa, one of the kings of Judah who followed the Lord, faced an army for which his military was unprepared. But in 2 Chronicles 14:11, he prayed, “O Lord, there is none like you to help, between the mighty and the weak. Help us, O Lord our God, for we rely on you, and in your name we have come against this multitude. O Lord, you are our God; let not man prevail against you.” The army of Judah triumphs with God’s help!
Talbert says that the lesson from Asa’s prayer is that “We pray most effectually not when we are needy (which is always), but when we are conscious that we are needy.” But two chapters later, Asa did the opposite; the army was ready, so he didn’t rely on the Lord and reaped the consequences.
Related: Sunday Thoughts: Suffocating Selfishness
Hezekiah was another faithful king of Judah who, in Talbert’s words, “received astonishing answers to astonishing prayers.” In 2 Chronicles 30:18-20, he prayed for the people who were ritually unprepared for worship but whose hearts were ready: “Hezekiah had prayed for them, saying, ‘May the good Lord pardon everyone who sets his heart to seek God, the Lord, the God of his fathers, even though not according to the sanctuary’s rules of cleanness.’ And the Lord heard Hezekiah and healed the people.” He later prayed for a miraculous victory from an enemy and for God to prolong his life after an illness — and God answered both prayers!
“A genuinely godly king who experienced astonishing answers to prayer, he succumbed to the perpetual stumbling block of the spiritual: presumption and pride in the face of the goodness and grace of God,” Talbert writes of Hezekiah. “We must remember that remarkable answers to prayer have nothing to do with our deservedness or our ‘power in prayer,’ but with the goodness and grace of a great and powerful God.”
Turning to the New Testament, Talbert turns to some of Jesus’ teachings on prayer. Jesus reminded His followers (and us) to be persistent in prayer, and He gave an example of what faith-filled prayers can accomplish with the Lord’s help.
In Matthew 21, following Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem and His cleansing of the temple, He saw a fig tree that was unfruitful. He cursed the tree, and it died. The disciples marveled at what just happened, and Jesus had an interesting response.
“Truly, I say to you, if you have faith and do not doubt, you will not only do what has been done to the fig tree, but even if you say to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and thrown into the sea,’ it will happen,” verse 21 reads. “And whatever you ask in prayer, you will receive, if you have faith.”
Lest you’re tempted to think that Jesus was expressing some “name it and claim it” philosophy, Talbert gets to the heart of what Jesus told His disciples.
“Jesus’s point, however, is not that prayer is so powerful that it can move a literal mountain into the sea (who would need to ask for this?),” he writes. “The issue is the absence of any limitation to what God can do when his people ask with faith in him. Jesus applies this specifically to believing prayer, which knows no boundaries because God has no boundaries apart from his character and his will.”
Related: Sunday Thoughts: Enduring to the End
In the conclusion of his essay, Talbert reminds us why prayer is powerful. Hint: it’s not about us.
“The power of prayer resides not in the prayer itself, nor in its fervency or tenacity, but in the God to whom we pray,” he writes. “Prayer is powerful only in that it accesses the omnipotence, compassion, and justice of the God who has promised to hear and answer the prayers of his people.”
One more example from the Bible drives this point home, and Talbert quotes the late, great John Stott for this example.
“The narrative of Peter’s imprisonment in Acts 12 vividly juxtaposes ‘the world and the church, arrayed against one another, each wielding an appropriate weapon. … On the one side was the authority of Herod, the power of the sword and the security of the prison. On the other side, the church turned to prayer, which is the only power which the powerless possess’—because it appeals ‘to him who is able to do far more abundantly beyond all that we ask or think, according to the power that works within us’” (Ephesians 3:20).
It's easy to see that prayer isn’t magic, and there’s nothing special about us when we pray. Instead, prayer is so powerful because of the powerful God who answers those prayers. How exciting is it to share our concerns and needs with the same God who answered the prayers in the Bible?
Join the conversation as a VIP Member