Put crudely, this means it does not really matter if God is out there at all. But the only immediate change effected by the prayer is in me. I may pray to do a good job at work, and because I am praying along such lines my determination is reinforced, I am slightly changed for the better, and the result may be that my work really improves. Because I pray for certain things (they hold), I focus on them and strive for them, and I myself am changed. Others argue that the only change prayer effects is within the person praying. In fact, if God is not really all-powerful, one might wonder, in darker moments, how we can be certain that he will make the universe turn out all right in the end. So prayer does change things, after all – even if the price of these sorts of reasoning is that God is not as powerful, and therefore not as trustworthy, as we might have thought. Then, of course, he grants some requests but turns down others simply because he can't do any better. Or, one might reason that God is powerful, but somewhat aloof, unwilling to do very much until we ask him. If God has already done everything he can to bring her to himself, but somehow she won't give in, why bother asking him to save her? Isn't it a little indecent to pressure God to do more when he has already done the best he can? Suppose you are praying for the conversion of your sister. If God is not absolutely sovereign, goes this line of reasoning, maybe the reason he does not answer your prayers as you would like is that he can't. Surely there is no other reasonable option: we simply have to conclude that God cannot be utterly sovereign, absolutely omnipotent." The entire business becomes pretty phony. Certainly there is little point in encouraging people to be fervent or passionate in prayer: your encouragement has been ordained, and if they listen to you and offer fervent prayer that, too, has been ordained. In either case it is hard to see how our prayers actually change anything. If in that sort of universe we pray, well, we pray only if God has ordained that we pray if we do not pray, God has ordained that, too. We would lose our freedom we would become mere puppets, chunks of matter moved around by a despotic Deity. Surely that would reduce the entire universe to a toy, God's toy. They reason something like this: "Frankly, it seems to us that although God is extraordinarily powerful, it is unreasonable to think he is all-powerful, absolutely sovereign. Indeed, that is precisely why some people argue that God must be severely limited in certain ways. 1:11), then in what meaningful sense can we say that prayer changes things? If prayer changes things, how can we believe that God is sovereign and all-knowing? How can we hold that he has his plans all worked out and that these plans cannot fail? If not a bird falls from the heavens without his decree, if we live and move and have our being under his sovereignty, if he works out everything in conformity with the purpose of his will (Eph. Countless sermons have been preached, countless prayers prayed, under this assumption: "Prayer changes things." You find plaques promulgating this notion everywhere.
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