If God Is Sovereign, Why Pray?
If you are like me, you have sometimes wondered about the collision between the Bible’s teaching on God’s immutable sovereignty over all things and the call for Christians to be diligent in prayer. In our fallen and finite minds, we tend to think that prayer is about changing God’s mind, or somehow offering God suggestions in the hope that we might persuade him to take up our cause. But the Bible plainly tells us God’s mind is already made up—perfectly, wisely, circumspectly, and unchangeabley—from all eternity. So why pray?
This is one of the many questions we will tackle as we work through the chapter on God’s immutability in A.W. Pink’s “The Attributes of God”. This is the book we will be studying together for our Lord’s Day Discipleship ministry in 2023. As I have been preparing the study guide, I took a few minutes to provide a concise answer to this important question. Much more could and should be said about this subject, but perhaps these initial thoughts will be of some help. A right understanding of God’s sovereignty should never produce prayerlessness in God’s beloved people, (Acts 4:24-31). In fact, it should have the very opposite effect!
Q: Why should we pray to a God who has immutably fixed all things according to his sovereign will?
The prayers of God’s people are part of God’s sovereign plan. God has planned to accomplish his will through the prayers of his praying people. We do not pray to change God’s mind, to get him on our side, or to inform God of things he does not already know. We pray in order to trustingly lay hold of the goodness which God has already ordained for and promised to his beloved children in Christ (Rm 8:28).
Think about it, if God isn’t sovereign, then why would we pray to him at all? In that case, we would be asking God to do what he is incapable of doing. That would be both foolish and fruitless. But if God is sovereign—as the Scriptures everywhere confirm—then we know that God is not only listening to the prayers of his people, but also able to act in wisdom, authority, and power for their good, according to the pleasure of his will.
Far from being a barrier to prayer, God’s sovereignty is actually the ground of our confidence in prayer. When we pray to the “Sovereign Lord,” we remember that each of our days were written in his book before even one of them came to pass (Ps 139:16; Acts 4:24). We remember that “all things are [his] servants”—even evil is subjugated to accomplish his holy bidding, (Ps 119:91). We do not forget that our “Father knows what [we] need before we ask” him (Matt 6:8) because he chose to set his love upon us long before we learned to love him in return, (I Jn 4:10). We do not forget that “nothing is impossible for God,” (Gen 18:14; Lk 1:37). Above all we remember that for the children of God “all the promises of God find their ‘yes’ in” Christ, and so we eagerly lay hold of them through prayer, (II Cor 1:20).
Nevertheless, from the perspective of human responsibility it is also true and important to say with Scripture that “you have not because you ask not,” (Jm 4:2). Prayerlessness can never be blamed on a proper understanding of God’s sovereignty. No, no, no. Prayerlessness actually reveals a misunderstanding and poor application of the doctrine of God’s sovereignty. It is because we know that God is sovereign that we should pray with all the more confidence and joy knowing that God has planned to use “all things”—including our prayers—to fulfill his perfect and unchangeable will for our lives, (Rm 8:28).
Our next Lord’s Day Discipleship season will begin the first Sunday in February 2023. I hope you and your family will join us!