Why I Don't Believe in Prayer

So prayer doesn't really "work." It's not like a magic potion that you wave over your situation to make it instantaneously better. I don't believe in the power of prayer.

This is important to establish because of what I talked about earlier in the week from Nehemiah regarding prayer. There I said that prayer establishes a boundary around the power of something to define us. It helps us to remember that God is God and he's over the situation, which puts a limit around the opposition or situation that we're facing.

But the reality is that simply praying doesn't do this. There's some ways that we pray that actually leave us worse off than when we started.

Prayer goes bad in a couple of different ways.

Sometimes in our prayers we are spending time simply reciting or re-hashing how right we are and how wrong the other person is. This is part of Jesus' point when he tells the story of two pray-ers: the religious guy who stands proud before God and declares aloud how glad he is that God did not make him like a common sinner and the tax-collector who humbles himself before and asks for mercy and forgiveness.

When we pray simply as an excuse to self-justify before God and to rehearse our own righteousness to ourselves, we sin. We would be better off in some cases to not have prayed at all--except that God who is rich in power and mercy can sometimes cut through even our praying in arrogance.

Another way that prayer goes wrong is when we pray as functional atheists. We sort of feel compelled to pray about a situation but we don't genuinely believe that God is the third-party active who can or who would do anything about the situation.

Prayer in this case is simply worrying out loud, to borrow Dallas Willard's wonderful phrase. Not much power or freedom or release there, either. In fact, it's just making things worse.

It seems to me that the key to prayer is in the word "submission." We submit our requests to God.

Not in the same way that we submit an order at the drive-thru with the expectation that we'll get what we ordered. But in a way that recognizes a couple of realities: God is God, he is active and alive; we might be wrong or at the very least in need of some level of correction ourselves; and what God's up to in any given situation might not be what we expect or desire at this point in time.

And we do this boldly. Submitting our requests to God means neither the drive-thru experience NOR the "let me try to give God the right answer" experience. We speak our minds and our hearts with an earnest outpouring of what's truly there. And then we recognize that God is God, and we give it over to him--we submit those minds and hearts and desires and dreams and all that we would will to happen to the God who is Lord over us. This is what Jesus does in the Garden, before his execution.

When we genuinely come before God as we are and then submit ourselves and the situations that we're facing to the God of the universe, then we're finally praying.

And then, my friends, we have established the boundary around the circumstances of our lives to define us. God defines us. We have given our circumstances over to the higher power so that I might see me and my situation in light of a larger story that re-casts what appears to be true in light of the larger realities of what we know to be true.

"I don't believe in prayer," my systematic theology prof once said, "I believe in the God who is Lord over prayer."

Yep, that's it.