Why Pray When God Already Knows...

Reflections on the reason we pray

Over the past several writings I have touched on prayer which, of course, inevitably leads to questions. Questions about how, when, and why God doesn’t answer. Questions about hearing God and how to quiet our own hearts and minds enough to hear if God wishes to break the silence. I have talked about those questions in a variety of ways, but the question I have on my mind for this writing is this: why pray when God already knows… knows what? Well, everything. All of it. What we know and what we don’t know. The present, past, and future. What’s best for us and what’s just plain foolish. If God already knows it all, right down to everything going on in our lives and what we need most, why pray?

That is not a silly question, not really. I think about Jesus in the midst of that great Sermon on the Mount, and He is talking to His disciples about prayer. Three times in Matthew 6:5-8 He says, “when you pray.” When – as if it is an expectation. As if He knows that, sooner or later, in some circumstance or another, even the most hardened unbeliever may have a prayer emerge from their lips, even if it is as simple as a groan, a sigh, or a single word, “mercy.”

When you pray, don’t be like the hypocrites. You have heard them, I know I have. The phrases that come from their lips may sound soothing, powerful, downright persuasive. But they are just pretending, acting, seeking attention – maybe even seeking to manipulate you. I thank God I haven’t heard many prayers like that, but I have heard a few. Jesus tells us that we are better off to pray in secret. We can’t make a show of it there, and we won’t be so nervous about impressing others with our eloquence. And while you’re at it, Jesus says, don’t feel like you have to go on and on and on in prayer, piling word upon word with the belief you have to convince God to reward your effort. No, use real words, the ones that come to your mind, the ones that reflect your heart and soul, your hopes and fears.

Jesus says a lot in a few verses, and He adds these words that capture my attention, Matthew 6:8, “Your Father knows what you need before you ask Him.”

God knows. Let that sink in. Allow yourself to be overwhelmed by the implications. God is never surprised by anything in your life. He is never caught off guard, never shocked, and nothing ever comes to Him like a bombshell. He is never caught catnapping – Psalm 121 says God doesn’t sleep nor slumber! Psalm 139 says nothing is hidden from His sight. According to Jesus He even knows such trivial things as the hair-count on your head or when a sparrow falls from the sky. And all the things that are happening in the world that have us worried and wide-awake at night? God already knows, what is today, tomorrow, a year from now, the last day you take a breath on this earth – He knows.

I find that a great relief when it comes to prayer. God knows what we need, knows what is on our hearts, knows where self-centeredness kicks in, knows when we are trying to manipulate Him through some magic formula we have heard or read somewhere. You know what I mean, “Just pray like this, using these words, and God has no choice, He will give you exactly what you want!” I have read some of those books that say things like that, especially early in my walk with Christ. When I was yearning for guidance, in the dark about the future, fearful of what to do next, I turned to some of those books, trying to use just the right words, the right terminology, to get God to do what I wanted. Did you catch that? What I wanted. Prayer as manipulation. Trying to control God. Telling Him what to do. Treating Him like a genie in a bottle. I have to tell you, I am so glad that is not the way prayer works – if it did and God answered some of my foolish prayers I prayed, I would be in big trouble.

But God is not like that – He knows. We don’t have to inform Him as if He is ignorant about what is going on. As a young pastor I remember one man who used prayer to make announcements. What he said sounded like a prayer, at least at first. He would address God as Father, he would give thanks for Jesus, and then he would ask God to be with the church family who on such-and-such a date would have an activity at 7 pm to which all are invited. I always found myself smiling, grateful everyone had their eyes closed, and I imagined God looking at His datebook to see if He had that day and time open so He could attend. Fanciful, yes, but I do wonder how many of our prayers are of this nature, where we inform God about something as if He does not know what is going on.

When you pray, Jesus says, remember, God knows… and He does, which makes the question as to why we should pray all the more important. I thought about that a lot in the early days after I woke up in the hospital to find that hundreds of people had been praying for me for months. What was the content of their prayers? A lot of folks told me – they prayed for healing! They prayed for the Covid inflammation in my brain to suddenly leave, my non-functioning kidney’s to start working at 100%, and for me to wake up. And they didn’t stop there – they prayed for me to be able to get back in the pulpit, preach and pastor with new authority, impact the lives of others with the story of a real honest-to-goodness miracle.

Some of that happened. I did wake up, though I was confused and weak, resembling more a cadaver than anything else. It took weeks for my eyes to focus correctly, even longer for my index finger to stay still long enough to text a message on my tablet, and more than a year before my brain came even close to what it had been before. As to my kidneys, I am still in end-stage kidney failure, on dialysis, awaiting a kidney transplant, alive and doing better than many but not anything like I was before it all started. I suspect there were those who believe I wasn’t healed one hundred percent because those doing the praying weren’t specific enough, or they didn’t use the right words, or they didn’t have the faith to move the mountain of Covid and kidney failure out of my life. I don’t know how many thought that, but frankly, I think they are wrong.

All of that brings me back to my question – why pray if God already knows? Almost two decades ago I asked my church family to respond to this question: “If you could ask God one question about prayer, what would it be?” I received a number of questions and preached for weeks seeking to answer each one, but the question that caught me off guard was this very one – Why pray when God already knows what I need (or want)? Sounds simple enough, but I realized that there was something off about the question. What got my attention right away was the rationale implied by that question. What is prayer? It is a means of informing God. What is prayer? It is asking for what you need or want or don’t have. What is prayer? It is compiling a prayer list, going through it day by day, asking God to work and enlisting others to join you. But is that all, or even mostly, what prayer is? Prayer often does include asking, but in Scripture it is so much more. I like Frederick Bruner’s statement, “Prayer is not an intelligence briefing for God: it is intelligent conversation with him.” And I might add, prayer is not an attempt to argue our way or to give God the needed facts so He can make a better decision, one more to our liking.

One of the first books I ever read on prayer was a classic written by a man named O. Hallesby entitled Prayer. My pastor gave it to me as a young Christian, and though it has now been close to fifty years since I first read it, I have returned over and over to two images of prayer Hallesby uses. The first has to do with asking – it is based on John 2 when the wedding at Cana was about to become a disaster because they ran out of celebratory wine. Hallesby calls upon us to notice what Mary did and did not do. She did inform Jesus of the need, “They have no wine.” I think that is human nature for us – when we come to God when something is wrong, we just blurt it out, “They have no wine,” or “he just had a heart attack,” or “I just lost my job.” Mary informed, yes – but she did not prescribe. She did not tell Jesus what to do or how to do it. Why? Because she trusted him. She didn’t know what He might do, but her relationship was such that she was at peace with whatever He chose to do. That image has helped me tremendously through the years. Yes, I do inform God about things, and there are times I come really close to prescribing what I think is a good course of action – but then I say, “I trust you Lord. Into your hands I give this problem, this need, this decision, this whatever.”

Do you understand? Prayer as making petitions, yes, but especially prayer as trust. Prayer as recognizing that God has a lot more understanding of what is going on than we do. But Hallesby says there is more, and for that I go to the second image he gives, this one based on the well-known words in Revelation 3:20, “Behold I stand at the door and knock; if anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him.” Hallesby says this is a splendid picture of prayer as relationship, as conversation, as communion. We go through life involved in all the activities of life and we become aware of a number of needs. And where is Jesus? He is standing at our hearts door and knocking. He knows all our needs better than we do, and He knows how silly we can be in trying to meet those needs in our own power, and how we often miss the more ultimate needs. So what is prayer? Hallesby says it is opening the door and inviting Jesus who is already knocking into our prayers, our needs. To pray is to surrender, to open your heart to God, to (as C. S. Lewis puts it in his book Letters to Malcolm Chiefly on Prayer), “unveil” our inner self to God, offering ourselves to His full view.

I think all of this deepens what prayer is and offers a different kind of answer to the question, “Why pray if God already knows.” In the end we pray because God “unveiled” Himself through our Lord Jesus. He revealed the depth of His love for us, the vastness of His grace, the great desire He has to be in communion with us. That means that more than anything else we pray for this simple reason, to grow more deeply in love and in relationship with this God who knows and loves us beyond our comprehension. In that sense we pray so that we might know far more the greatness of God than we did before.

I hesitate to use something as simple as marriage to get at all of this, but I do think this may help us imagine what is far greater. If our greatest reason to pray is because we want to grow deeper in love with God, think about a couple on their wedding day. Two people who join their lives together, who pledge to love, cherish, and honor each other all the days of their lives. For the most part, in that moment, they mean what they say, but it isn’t going to happen unless something else takes place. They have to spend their lives, day to day, in relationship. They talk, bask in their love, plan for the future, share their desires, even fuss a bit. But they do more in the long run if the marriage is to last – they live out their vows day by day. They may ask questions, inquire about dreams, do the work of melding two lives into one. There may be the tug and pull of two different individuals, but somehow they have to learn how to pull together, how to be enriched by the other, experiencing a deeper sense of “I can’t picture life without you.” Day by day, week after week, returning, knocking on the door of their mate’s heart, and growing in the process.

My wife and I have just passed our 50^th wedding anniversary, and I have thought back to that one promise in our vows that I probably needed more than any other. I promised I would listen to her inmost thoughts. Sounds romantic, but I never realized the challenge it would be! I have been doing that for 50 years, trying to understand what my wife is thinking, how she sees things, and I still get it wrong. But I want to say, just the quest to know her better has strengthened our relationship and deepened our love. Think of prayer and the reason why we pray in this way. The ongoing daily conversation with God, the asking of questions, the daily effort of listening to His inmost thoughts (Scripture helps here), and the expressions of love, gratitude, hopes, fears, and dreams. C. S. Lewis says that, in doing this, we show, we tell, and we offer ourselves to God’s view in an ever growing relationship of love and dedication. This, my dear reader, is why we pray, even if God knows it all.

Do you hear a knock? Perhaps the thought of praying has suddenly crossed your mind? Jesus is waiting – why not open the door?