Persevering prayer

According to Marshall Brain:

What is going to happen? Jesus clearly says that if you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer. He does not say it once — he says it many times in many ways in the Bible...And yet, even with millions of people praying, nothing will happen…

This confuses very different issues:

i) I don’t object to a Christian praying more than once for the same thing. For one thing, if you pray only once for something, that can be a pretty perfunctory prayer. Like checking boxes on a list, then moving on to something new. Something you do out of duty, to put if behind you.

ii) By contrast, if you pray for the same thing regularly, that’s a test of sincerity. How much you really care about it. How invested you are.

Supposed you pray for salvation of a guy you knew in high school. Suppose you commit to pray for him every day until you die or he coverts–whichever comes first.

It’s tiresome to pray for the same thing every day. Gets to be boring, discouraging. No end in sight.

So that’s a test of how much it really means to you. Persevering prayer is, itself, a testing experience. A test of stamina. To see something through to the end.

The point is not that you’re trying to prove something to God. And the point is not that you think racking up mileage on the prayer odometer magically or mechanically gets you to the destination. This is not an attempt to manipulate God. It just means you care enough about the person to keep at it until the answer comes–or you die trying. It fosters trust, patience, follow-through.

If you miss a day or two, it’s not like that zeros out the effort. Not like you have to start over from scratch.

iii) And that also requires you to prioritize your prayer life. You have to decide what’s important. Make choices.

In the nature of the case, many prayer requests are topical, short-term petitions.

iv) The classic example of “vain repetitions” are prayer wheels. And in the computer age, there are even digital prayer wheels.

It’s not that perserving prayer has a cumulative effect. It’s not as though, if 500 people pray for the same thing, this makes it 500 times more likely that God will answer the prayer. That’s a completely misguided philosophy of prayer. That reduces prayer to gambling. Playing the odds. 

v) Likewise, that’s a cynical, hypocritical prayer. You don’t really care about the amputee (to use Brain’s example). Rather, that’s just a pretext to verify or falsify the efficacy of prayer, and ultimately–to verify or falsify the existence of God. C. S. Lewis put it well:

Some things are proved by the unbroken uniformity of our experiences. The law of gravitation is established by the fact that, in our experience, all bodies without exception obey it. Now even if all the things that people prayed for happened, which they do not, this would not prove what Christians mean by the efficacy of prayer. For prayer is request. The essence of request, as distinct from compulsion, is that it may or may not be granted. And if an infinitely wise Being listens to the requests of finite and foolish creatures, of course He will sometimes grant and sometimes refuse them. Invariable “success” in prayer would not prove the Christian doctrine at all. It would prove something much more like magic—a power in certain human beings to control, or compel, the course of nature.

I have seen it suggested that a team of people—the more the better—should agree to pray as hard as they knew how, over a period of six weeks, for all the patients in Hospital A and none of those in Hospital B. Then you would tot up the results and see if A had more cures and fewer deaths. And I suppose you would repeat the experiment at various times and places so as to eliminate the influence of irrelevant factors.

The trouble is that I do not see how any real prayer could go on under such conditions. “Words without thoughts never to heaven go,” says the King in Hamlet. Simply to say prayers is not to pray; otherwise a team of properly trained parrots would serve as well as men for our experiment. You cannot pray for the recovery of the sick unless the end you have in view is their recovery. But you can have no motive for desiring the recovery of all the patients in one hospital and none of those in another. You are not doing it in order that suffering should be relieved; you are doing it to find out what happens. The real purpose and the nominal purpose of your prayers are at variance. In other words, whatever your tongue and teeth and knees may do, you are not praying. The experiment demands an impossibility.