03.02. What God Thinks About Prayer
What God Thinks About Prayer The thoughts of God are not as man’s thoughts, neither are His ways man’s ways. "As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts" (Isaiah 55:9). God has made known His thoughts and His ways, in the revelation of His Word and in the Person of His Son. The medium of the revelation is experience, and the occasion is in the events of life in individuals and in history.
God has never put his thoughts into a thesis of philosophy or metaphysics. He has interpreted in life and set forth His way in precepts, principles, and example.
There is one incident which tells us what God thinks of prayer. His mind concerning prayer is seen in every command to pray, in every law of prayer, in every promise concerning prayer, and in every example of answered prayer. Every part is part of the whole, but every subject of Scripture has its final and complete expression, and in the conversion of Saul of Tarsus there is a unique revelation of the mind of God concerning prayer. There are three persons in that incident of prayer. There are the man who prayed, the God who heard, and the man through whom the answer came. God is central. It is to Him prayer is made, through Him prayer is interpreted, and by Him prayer is answered. God speaks of prayer in terms of wonder: "Behold, he prayeth." (Acts 9:11) The language is that of humanity, but it is the only speech man knows, and however inadequate it may be, it stands for corresponding reality in God. Can God wonder? Can there be in Him elements of surprise and amazement? Can it be that there are things that to God are wonderful? That is how God speaks, and to Him there is nothing more gloriously wonderful than prayer. It would seem as if the biggest thing in God’s universe is a man who prays. There is only one thing more amazing, and that is, that man, knowing this, should not pray. Behold! In that word there is wonder, rapture, exultation. In the estimate of God prayer is more wonderful than all the wonders of the heavens, more glorious than all the mysteries of the earth, more mighty than all the forces of creation.
God interprets prayer as a sign of all that happened to Saul of Tarsus on the Damascus road The event is variously expressed To the church of Judaea it was a conversion that turned their archpersecutor into a preacher. This is how Paul the apostle states it in writing to the Galatians: "Afterwards I came into the regions of Syria and Cilicia; and was unknown by face unto the churches of Judaea which were in Christ; but they had heard only, that he which persecuted us in times past now preacheth the faith which once he destroyed. And they glorified God in me." (Galatians 1:21-23) That is a conversion that was the result of an experience. What was the experience? Paul says that in the experience it pleased God to reveal His Son in him. That is what the Damascus road experience meant to him. When God speaks of it, He sums it all up in the words, "Behold, he prayeth." (Acts 9:11) That is what it meant to God, and that is what it always means to Him. Prayer is the symbol and proof and gauge of grace. All that happens in the converting work of grace whereby we receive the adoption of sons is that, being sons, we begin to pray. Saul of Tarsus had been a praying man all his life, but it was not until then that he began to pray as God interprets prayer. The children’s hymn is equally applicable to grown-up people:
I often say my prayers, But do I ever pray?
Prayer is the privilege of sons, and the test of sonship. It would seem as if God divided all men into the simple classification of those who pray and those who do not. It is a very simple test, but it is decisive, and divisive.