There are some people who
are skilled at prayer. I am not one of them. R. C. Trench, the 19th-century
Anglican bishop, once described prayer as “the simplest act in all religion.” I
am inclined to agree with him. Until I start to pray. Then, a kind of
uncertainty overtakes me. I do not feel confident. It’s not that I doubt
whether God can grant my requests. I question whether He will. I often feel as
if I must somehow win God over to my side of things.

When I first learned to
pray, I thought the goal was to persuade God. But how does one do that? I believed
it had to do with the manner of my approach. I thought that before God would
answer my prayer, I had to show Him that I was sincere enough or convince Him
of the merits of my case. When that didn’t seem to work, I wondered if prayer was
more like a contractual dispute, and I had failed to grasp the terms. Prayer became
a negotiation. I made requests, sometimes even demands, and then offered
promises to God in return for the thing I wanted. That didn’t seem to work
either.

Prayer may be simple but that does not mean that it is easy.

Then someone told me
that prayer was simply a conversation with God. This view was more appealing to
me. But I quickly discovered that I am not much of a conversationalist, and
neither is God. It was hard enough for me to make small talk with ordinary
people, let alone with the Creator of the Universe. I was awkward and easily
distracted. I mumbled through my requests, like someone reading a grocery list.
If I bored myself, how must God feel? And as for God, His response to my holy
chatter, at least as far as I could tell, was mostly silence. Prayer may indeed
be simple, but that does not make it is easy.

For many who struggle
with prayer, ironically, it is God who poses the problem. How do you pray to
someone who doesn’t change His mind and who never has second thoughts? God
knows my prayers before I pray them (Ps. 139:2–4). The answer is decided before
the request has even been made (Ps. 65:24; Dan. 9:23). If there are no grounds
for persuasion, and we can convince God of nothing, how exactly is He moved by
our prayers? Should we even bother to pray? Maybe we should just wait quietly
for whatever God had decided in advance to do.

Of course, this doesn’t
fit at all with the way we talk about prayer in church. Those who pray believe
that prayer has an effect on God and that He, in turn, acts upon the world
around them. So which is it? Do our prayers move the hand that made the world?
Or is God’s hand unmovable and our sense that we are partners with Him in
prayer merely an illusion?

The theologians teach
that  God is immutable. This means that
His character, purposes, promises, and plans do not change. According to James
1:17, “Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father
of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows.” The
theologians also say that God is impassible. As theologian J. I. Packer
explains, this means “that no created beings can inflict, pain, suffering, and
distress on him at their own will.” We cannot manipulate God with our prayers.
We cannot wheedle Him until we get our way. We cannot agitate Him into action
on our behalf.

The doctrines of God’s
immutability and impassibility are a comfort when it comes to His moral
consistency. But they pose something a stumbling block where prayer is
concerned. If God doesn’t change, then it also follows that we cannot change
His mind. If I cannot make Him feel more sympathetic toward my request or
convince Him of my argument, what is the point of going to Him at all? If God
has already decided what He is going to do, and knows what we will do, then why
should I waste my breath?

These are old questions
that are hard to answer without slipping into theological difficulty. If we
lean too far in the direction of immutability and impassibility, then prayer seems
both impersonal and pointless. We might as well be praying to a mountain or a
machine. A God who is not moved by our prayers can only respond to them by
working out of His foreordained purposes with clockwork precision. What looks
to us like results has little to do with our words. The outcome will be the
outcome, no matter what we say or do. The whole thing is like one of those
clocks that tell a story. The figures may bend and twirl but not of their own
accord. They merely show up at the right time and act out the parts that the
clockmaker has programmed them to play. This is more like fatalism than prayer
as Jesus both described and modeled it.

But if we lean too far
in the other direction, we erode the divinity of God. We humanize God, but in
the process, dehumanize prayer until it is only a matter of stimulus and
response. We pray like the pagans, who “think they will be heard because of
their many words” (Matt. 6:7). We attempt to bully God with numbers, soliciting
people to pray like political activists collecting names on a petition drive. Or
we concern ourselves with empty forms, worrying over the method but ignoring God.
This paganized view diminishes God’s role to the point where prayer becomes an occult
practice. Prayer is no longer a request or even a conversation but merely a
Christianized form of word magic.  If you
speak the incantation and follow the right forms, then something is bound to
happen. “Do not be like them,” Jesus warns, “for your Father knows what you
need before you ask him” (Matt. 6:8).

God is not frozen. He is active and involved with His creatures and His creation.

Divine immutability,
whatever it means, does not mean that God is inactive or immobile. God is not
frozen. He is active and involved with His creatures and His creation. God does
not change, but He does effect change. In the same way, we shouldn’t confuse
divine impassibility with impassivity. God is not unfeeling. There are many
passages in Scripture that speak of God’s love, His anger, and even His grief.
God is not reactive, but He does respond. God is especially responsive to the
cry of prayer.

This was Jesus’ point in
the parable of the widow and the judge in Luke 18:1–8. Jesus told this parable
to His disciples “to show them that they should always pray and not give up.”
The tone of the story is one of gentle humor. Although the judge “neither
feared God nor cared what people thought,” he is brought to his knees by the
persistence of a poor widow. This scenario admits to the imbalance of power that
exists between those who pray and God who hears. It also acknowledges what we
often feel as we wait for an answer. We worry that the judge has overlooked our
case. But the moral of the story is equally clear. God is not like the unjust
judge (v. 7). He will respond, and when He does, that response will be
consistent with His character. The God to whom we pray is both a just and
compassionate judge.

Prayer is not a tool
that we use to prod a passive God into action. In reality, the movement is in
the opposite direction. God uses prayer to draw us into participation with Him
and with His work in the world. In an essay entitled “The Work of Prayer,” C.
S. Lewis observes that the participatory nature of prayer is consistent with
the way God ordinarily works. “Everyone who believes in God must therefore
admit (quite apart from the question of prayer) that God has not chosen to write
the whole of history with His own hand,” Lewis observes. “Most of the events
that go on in the universe are indeed out of our control, but not all.” Lewis
compares history to a play “in which the scene and the general outline of the
story is fixed by the author, but certain minor details are left for the actors
to improvise.”

In another essay
entitled, “The Efficacy of Prayer,” Lewis argues that it is no less strange to
think that our prayers should affect the course of events than that our actions
should do so. “They have not advised or changed God’s mind–that is, His
over-all purpose,” Lewis explains. “But that purpose will be realized in
different ways according to the actions, including the prayers, of His
creatures.” Prayer changes things. Or conversely, some things do not change if
we choose not to pray. “You do not have because you do not ask God,” James 4:2
warns.

Does God know the
outcome in advance? Does He know whether we will pray or not? Lewis does not
exactly say. But he does acknowledge the difficulty of fully grasping what it
means for God to enable free-will to co-exist with Omnipotence. Lewis seems to
say that when it comes to praying, we are true collaborators with God. At the
same time, he warns that we must not forget that God is still God. “Prayer is
not a machine. It is not magic. It is not advice offered to God,” Lewis warns.
“Our act, when we pray, must not, any more than all our other acts, be
separated from the continuous act of God Himself, in which alone all finite
causes operate.” The uncertainty always moves in our direction, never the other
way around. God is never uncertain.

If there is a key to
this cosmic puzzle, perhaps it can be found in Jesus’ prayer in Gethsemane. On
the night before His suffering, Jesus prayed. “Father,” he said, “everything is
possible for you. Take this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will”
(Mark 14:36). In this prayer, Jesus speaks both of possibility and uncertainty.
He speaks of what God can do but in a way that suggests that what Jesus wants
may not be the answer that God will grant. As Matthew’s version puts it, “. . .
if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me” (Matt. 28:39). Perhaps even
more surprising, Jesus speaks of a will of His own that diverges from His
Father’s will but is not sin. When Jesus limits His request by saying, “Yet not
what I will, but what you will,” He implies that the matter has been settled
even before the request is made.

I find the ambivalence
of Jesus’ prayer liberating because it shifts the burden of responsibility for
the answer to God. It means that I can state my request simply and honestly and
then trust God to sort out the rest. The old bishop was right. Prayer may not
be easy, but it is simple. Prayer is
as simple as the infant’s cry or the beggar’s reach. The power of prayer does
not lie in the rigor of its method or the beauty of its vocabulary. Its
efficacy does not depend upon the supplicant’s posture or the prayer’s length.
The power of prayer is simply in the asking. Our comfort in prayer is the
confidence we have that our Father knows what we need before we ask Him.

Prayer is our declaration of dependence upon the God who made the world and sustains our life. It is a moment-by-moment confession that in Him, we live and move and have our being. After all these years, prayer doesn’t seem to be any easier for me. But it really couldn’t be simpler.

John’s latest book Practicing the Present: The Neglected Art of Living in the Now (Moody Publishers) is now available. Order your copy today.