Silverton Evangelical Church

Question 3: "Does prayer actually work? Can you prove it?"

What if I pray and God doesn't answer? Does he ever answer really? What about all those people who prayed they wouldn't catch COVID-19, then got it? How do I know it's worth while praying?

Here are three important things to bear in mind.

(1) It's clearly promised in the Bible.

Here are just some of the promises the Bible makes.

 Ask yourself: would people still be believing in the Bible's message, thousands of years on, if these clear promises didn't come true for them again and again?

(2) You can prove it in your own experience - but not in a laboratory!  

What does that mean? Well, over the last decade there have been some very silly "scientific" experiments conducted to find out whether prayer "works". Typically, experimenters study a group of people who are undergoing serious medical treatment; some of them are prayed for, and others are not. After a period of time, the experimenters try to work out whether the prayed-for people did better than the others.

This is just silly - as if prayer was a neutral force that "works" whenever enough people decide to stir it up. But it isn't like that! Prayer is making  a request to a person - God - not manipulating a blind force which always works in exactly the same way. And God knows what is best for an individual human; he isn't bound to give them healing just because a certain number of scientists are praying for it!

In any case, in the "not prayed for" group there may be some patients whose friends or family are praying very hard for them all the time, unknown to the scientists. So is God supposed to ignore those heartfelt prayers from the wives and children of sufferers, just because they aren't in the "prayed for" group? The whole thing is quite ridiculous and can't possibly prove anything.

So you can't put God into a test tube and force him to produce the results you want. But you can test his faithfulness personally, by living in dependence on him, trusting him to meet your needs, basing your hopes on his provision. If you do that, you'll soon find out whether he keeps his promises or not. And millions of Christians would assure you that, yes, he does.

(3) God doesn't always say Yes. Other answers are available.

 As we've noticed above, God knows what is best for us, more than we do ourselves. And so (just like a wise father who won't let his kids have things that would be harmful to them) he sometimes says Yes, but at other times says No. Many people will tell you that the "No" answer can be pretty hard to take at the time, but usually, a little further down the track,  you start to understand why God said No, and you start to feel very grateful that he did!

Sometimes, too, God says, "Wait" - he does want us to have what we ask for, but not yet, because we're not ready for it just at this moment.  We always tend to be in more of a hurry than he is - just like small children who can't understand why their Mum won't let them stay up late and do all the things their big brothers do... It isn't that Mum doesn't want them to have all the things their big brother does too; just that they aren't ready for it yet.

• Learn a bit more about prayer by investigating another of the questions?

• Go off in another direction?

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