Prayer Doesn’t Make Sense Except In Light of a Reformed Understanding of Sovereignty

I would like to piggy-back off some of my earlier comments to clarify what I mean about how Arminians become Calvinists during times of crisis. In reality, it is more often than that: it occurs almost every time prayers are offered.

In order to demonstrate this, it is necessary for me to first go through a quick overview of the purpose and design of prayer so as to keep the atheist detractors at bay. Prayer is not a cosmic wish-list of wants. God is not Santa Claus, nor is He a genie in the bottle who will grant us our three wishes so long as we use the magic phrase “In Jesus’ Name” at the end. Prayer is first and foremost an act of worship.

Jesus gives us some instructions on prayer. We know from the Lord’s Prayer, found in Matthew 6 and Luke 11, that before we pray for “our daily bread” we first pray “thy will be done.” Indeed, the focus on the will of God being done is exemplified when Christ prayed in the garden before His death, saying: “My Father, if this cannot pass unless I drink it, your will be done” (Matthew 26:42).

Proper prayer, therefore, must begin with its roots in the sovereign will of God. Indeed, no matter what we plan, it is God’s will that shall prevail:

Come now, you who say, "Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit"— yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, "If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that" (James 4:13-15).

Prayer does not inform God of new information. In fact, immediately before presenting us with the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus tells us: “your Father knows what you need before you ask him” (Matthew 6:8). Indeed, this is repeated in verse 32 of the same chapter, when Christ tells us not to worry over our basic needs: “your heavenly Father knows that you need them all.”

What is the purpose of prayer then? Again, it is primarily our act of worship whereby we acknowledge the source of all that we have and are. We acknowledge the sovereignty of God by admitting our dependence upon Him.

But prayer is also a means that God uses to enact His will. For instance, James informs us: “You do not have, because you do not ask” (James 4:2). However, he also cautions: “You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions” (James 4:3). God uses prayers to bless His people, but He will not do so with wrongly motivated prayers. Again, prayer is not a magic formula to get rich quick. It is worship first, and asking for things out of wrongful passion will not gain you anything.

When we ask God for anything, we must always temper it with “thy will be done.” That God uses prayer as a means to His ordained ends does not mean He will grant you everything you wish willy-nilly. In the end, His will is done, and we, as godly Christians, must submit to His plans and purposes.

The sovereignty of God is absolute, and this is where we find the inconsistency in Arminianism. While virtually all Arminians will gladly say they believe in a sovereign God, they likewise maintain that God cannot do certain things unless we do things first. For instance, God cannot save someone unless that person, of his own volition, desires to be saved first. And while many Arminians temper this by saying it is not that God can not, it is that He will not, the fact remains that if the Arminian argument is right, then if God wills to save despite man's heart then God violates man’s freedom and God becomes the author of evil while man becomes a robot. In other words, the argument that Arminians use only makes sense if God literally cannot save people He desires to save, and therefore it is a case that God cannot save those whom He desires to save.

Yet despite this stated argument, Arminians (in general) have no problem at all praying that God save lost people. I work with many Arminians, as I’ve mentioned before, and none of them have a problem praying: “Lord, open the hearts of those who are ministering to that they may turn toward you.”

They do not realize that this prayer only makes sense in a Calvinist framework. God cannot “open the hearts” of anyone without violating their libertarian free will, if the Arminian position is correct. And He certainly cannot do it if the prayer comes from someone else.

In short, the above prayer (so common even in the most stringent of Arminian churches) is a prayer that God violate free will. It is a Calvinistic prayer, one that acknowledges that God is sovereign and “The heart of man plans his way, but the LORD establishes his steps” (Proverbs 16:9).