If God Already Knows What I Want, Why Should I Have to Ask?

When I was in seminary, I stopped asking God for things. I got too spiritually sophisticated for that low-brow style of prayer, I suppose. It felt a little too much like rubbing a magic lamp or doing a rain dance around a campfire. So I decided to “up my prayer game” by doing less asking and more silent, meditative reflection.

This was my line of thinking: if God is all-knowing, He already knows what I want and need. He even knows whether I’m going to get it if I ask for it or not. If God is all-powerful, He’s able to do anything regardless of what I pray for. And if God is all-good, he’s going to look out for me, whether or not I’m on my knees begging for help. Otherwise, one of three things is true: God isn’t real, He doesn’t care, or He is like a playground bully who makes you say his name before letting you up off the ground. If God is God, I figured, what’s the point of praying for stuff?

I know I’m not alone in my skepticism. Many intellectual believers have decided that meditation, contemplation, and practicing mindfulness are higher forms of prayer than asking God for things. These practices may be worthwhile supplements to prayer, but they’re certainly not suitable as substitutes for prayer. Prayer is the conversation, the communication, the speaking and the listening with God. But some heady Christians are no longer asking God for things because they simply don’t think it works.

This dilemma isn’t new. In the 1940s, CS Lewis wrote, “It might be a very pretty thing if a little boy never asked for cake because he was so high-minded and spiritual that he didn’t want any cake. But there’s nothing especially pretty about a little boy who doesn’t ask because he has learned that it is no use asking.”

The skeptic’s logic often works this way: God is going to accomplish his will – with or without our prayers. If I pray for a fully restored, classic Jeep Wagoneer with exterior wood paneling (hypothetically speaking, of course), and God was already planning to give it to me in the first place, then my prayer was a waste of time. But if God wasn’t planning to give me my dream-car, then my prayer won’t change His divine mind.

But is it really that simple? What if intellectual sophisticates are the ones who have prayer all wrong? What if, as the brilliant 17th Century philosopher Blaise Pascal believed, “God instituted prayer in order to allow His creatures the dignity of causality”?

In other words, what if somehow, in ways beyond our comprehension, prayer actually changes things? Is it possible that God has given us prayer as a tool of causation to bring about the changes He has willed?

Let’s think about it like this: I’m pretty sure God’s will for me involves not dying of dehydration, but I still have to drink the water. I’m fairly certain God intends for me to feed my kids breakfast when they wake up, but He won’t be the one standing over the waffle iron an hour from now. I think God’s desire is for me to be a friend to the woman who sleeps on the sidewalk up the street from my house, but He’s not going to force me to introduce myself.

I believe God has a plan, and he has composed the outline of eternity’s script, but He has appointed us to be the actors in His story. And in His divine wisdom, He seems to leave room in His story for some measure of human improvisation. Prayer is one of the ways that God allows us to improvise. 

I don’t know how, exactly, but I just know with every fiber of my being prayer changes things. It changes me. It changes the people around me. It might even influence the Author of life to somehow alter the end of the story for a sinner like me.

The arrogant fool might say, “It’s silly and quaint for religious rubes to ask God for things,” while day after day, the “foolish” faithful get on their knees and change the world.