Why Pray if God Is Sovereign?

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This is an old question, one that God’s people have wrestled with for centuries: Why should I pray if God is sovereign, if He’s going to do what He’s going to do regardless of whether and what I pray?

It was a question that came to me in an email. I had thought about the question, but I had never really formulated an answer. So now, with an unanswered email in my inbox, I had to say something.

Here’s how I answered the question:

If I think of prayer in a purely transactional sense, my praying to a sovereign God makes no sense.

A transactional approach envisions prayer the way we might think of negotiations in the business world, except that there is a vast difference in the power and intelligence of the two parties. I enter the transaction with a request. God considers my request, but since He is so much wiser than I am, my request is childish and shallow, and He’s already decided what is best.
 
In this approach to prayer, my prayers cannot make one whit of difference in the grand scheme of things, so I am wasting my breath to ask God to do something or withhold something. And He has no reason to listen to me, either. After all, God is far wiser than I am, and He knows what I need, not just what I think I need. He loves me so much that He sometimes graciously withholds from me what I ask for, and He often gives me what I don’t even know to ask for.

So why should I bother Him with my requests? The whole enterprise is an exercise in futility, so why waste my breath? Why bother Him with my feeble-minded, self-absorbed requests when He’s going to do what is wise and best, regardless of what I want?

But if I think of prayer in a covenantal sense, it makes sense for me to pray.
 
Thinking of prayer in a covenantal sense means that I am not merely a humble supplicant, I am the child of the King bringing my concerns – petty though they are from His perspective – to a wise and generous Father.

I know my Father well enough to know that He will listen to me when I come to Him. Although He has a great many things to worry about – the progress of the Gospel in all the kingdoms of the world, the geopolitical situation in the world, the welfare of His people all over the globe, the plight of the marginalized and oppressed in every place – even with all of that on His mind, when He sees me come into His throne-room, He turns from everyone else clamoring for His attention, and He looks at me kindly, attentively.

I know that He knows best, and I know that He may or may not give me what I ask for. But I also know that He told me to come to Him with my anxieties, to cast them all on Him, because He cares for me. He has told me that He cares for creatures as insignificant as the birds and He takes time to clothe the grass of the field in splendor that would make Solomon blush, so He surely has time to attend to me and my needs. It would even appear that He takes pleasure in the time we spend together as I tell Him about my needs and the needs of those I love.

So why do I pray when God already knows what He will do?
 
Because He told me to.

Because I am confident in His wisdom, power, and goodness to deal graciously with my concerns.

Because He is my Father, and He loves to spend time with me.

Persevere,
Paul Pyle
Pastor of Discipleship