Jesus said, “…if you ask anything of the Father in my name, he will give it to you” (NRSV, John 16:23)

There are few people who do not pray in time of great trouble or danger, but how many are really convinced that this promise of Our Lord is true and that whatever they ask of God in his Name, they will actually be given it?  Indeed, many believe that they have already proved for themselves that his promise was false.

After having given God no more than an occasional passing thought for years, they are faced by some threatened calamity which drives them to their knees and, as a last desperate resort, they demand that God should do this or that for them and waste no time in doing it.  Then, when the blow falls, they conclude that prayer does not work and that it is a delusion to imagine that God, if he exists at all, pays any attention to their hopes and fears and pleadings.

And even in the hearts of loyal, believing Christians there arise from time to time doubts about the value and efficacy of prayer.

But first we should notice that the prayer to which Our Lord refers is “in his Name”.  That does not mean that by concluding the prayer with the words “through Jesus Christ Our Lord”, it is thereby automatically bound to be accepted and answered by God, irrespective of what is actually prayed for.  To pray in the Name of Christ means to identify oneself with the mind of Christ and actually to pray as his representative.  So a prayer made in his Name is nothing other than the prayer which Christ himself desires to make to his Father through us.  What matters therefore is not its form, but its content.

Nevertheless, there are times when we ask sincerely and to the best of our belief in the Name of Christ for something that seems obviously good and right, such as a relative’s recovery from illness, only to find that things turn out quite otherwise.  And the effect may be to weaken one’s faith not merely in prayer, but also in God as well.

Before turning to this difficulty of unanswered prayer, we need to remember that prayer itself is something much wider and deeper than a request for some real or fancied benefit, however earnest the request may be.

For prayer itself is one’s whole conscious relationship with God: it is the awareness of his presence and the lifting up of one’s heart and mind to him.  That means that adoration and thanksgiving and penitence are in fact more important than mere asking which in itself might be no more than selfish begging.  The Lord’s Prayer sets us right.  The honour of God comes first; the extension of his Sovereign rule over human hearts comes second; and only after that do we ask for our daily bread.

It is, however, prayer in the sense of asking which causes the most perplexity, so let us consider that and, for the sake of convenience, call it by the general word ‘prayer’.

Since God knows our needs much better than we do, we might wonder why prayer in this sense is necessary at all, were it not that Our Lord has actually told us to pester God with our prayers (Luke 11:5ff).  Just as we are commanded to confess our sins to God although he is fully aware of them, so are we bidden to pray, although, as Our Lord has said, our heavenly Father knows what we need before we ask him (Matthew 6:8).

The true purpose of prayer is twofold: to obtain from God what he knows we need (which may be quite different from what we want); and then, having obtained it to be enabled to use it in the doing of his will.

We must always remember that when we approach God we are approaching the high and holy One who inhabits eternity, and it is his will which we must seek and our own will only in so far as it coincides with his.  Indeed, if we really trust him, we shall truly desire that his will should be done because in that way our own real needs will be met.  For God’s will is always for our highest good and the highest good of our fellowmen and women.  And prayer is essentially the act of co-operating with God in order to set his will in motion.

But clearly the first thing we have to do in that partnership with him is to learn what his will actually is, and it is through prayer that we gain that knowledge.  For when we pray we become receptive to God’s influence and guidance, and as a result are able to see more clearly what his purpose is and also what he requires of us if that purpose of his is to be carried out effectively.  And once we see that, then, but only then, can God begin to set his will in motion.

And so, even if in ignorance or self-centredness, we start by asking for something which is not God’s purpose to do – if we ask, for example, for a wrong solution to our difficulty – nevertheless our sincere and persevering attempt to co-operate with him will enable us to see the situation through his eyes and will eventually lead to the right solution and to the performance of his purpose for us.

And when we pray for others, for a relative or a friend in sickness or misfortune, even if our prayers are not answered as we would wish by the removal or alleviation of their troubles, nevertheless our prayers do release a stream of God’s grace and power to enable them to rise above their adversity with patience and fortitude, and free them from any feelings of bitterness.

Our second purpose in praying is that we may be fitted by God to carry out his will effectively.  And that is a process which may take time.  We see that very clearly from Our Lord’s teaching of his Apostles.  It took him two years to transform them into the sort of men whom he could effectively use; and it was only then that he dispatched them on that worldwide mission for which he had chosen them, and for which he needed them.

And at a lesser level exactly the same is true of his relationship with us.  So we must not be in the least surprised if we have to wait some time before we see an answer to our prayers.  An apt illustration of this is provided by the case of Hannah in the Old Testament.

For years Hannah had longed for a child, until at last that longing drove her to pray as she had never prayed before.  She and her husband were making their annual pilgrimage to the Shrine of God at Shiloh and, as we read in the First Book of Samuel, “she was deeply distressed and prayed to the Lord and wept bitterly.  And she vowed a vow and said, ‘O Lord, if thou wilt indeed look on the affliction of thy maidservant, and remember me, and not forget thy maidservant, but will give to thy maidservant a son, then I will give him to the Lord all the days of his life’ “ (1:11).

And in due time her prayer was answered and she called the child Samuel, which means, ‘Asked of God’.  And as soon as he was old enough she took him, as she had vowed, to God’s Shrine at Shiloh, and there he was brought up by the old priest who ministered at the shrine.  In that way he was trained and fitted for his vocation as the first of a long line of prophets and as the religious leader of the people in the critical years that lay immediately ahead.

But if Samuel had been given to Hannah without her having to wait so long and pray so desperately for him, then he would have been brought up at home in the ordinary way like the other children she had after him, and so he would never have been trained for the part which God had designed for him to play in the nation’s history.

Thus prayer enables us to perceive God’s purpose for us so that in the end when his answer comes, however different it may be from what we once hoped or expected, we can make the best use of it for him.

For what it comes to is this: in prayer we are really asking, first that we ourselves may become the sort of people that God needs for the doing of his will; secondly, that our circumstances may be those in which we can best do it; and lastly, that we should then effectively carry it out as his agents.