I have stood beside a man who had been diagnosed (twice by different doctors) with a hole in the heart. The doctors predicted that his life would be cut short, but shortly after our church had a prayer meeting for him, the doctors could find absolutely nothing wrong with him. It was miraculous. But once again, there is no substantive proof of a causal connection. We need not always invoke a Supreme Being to explain the falsification of diagnoses, although it does seem very unlikely that two doctors would misdiagnose something so serious. So the question then arises, what sort of evidence would provide a justifiable belief in the efficacy of prayer? Some things are proved by the fixed uniformity of our experiences. The law of gravitation is established by the fact that, in our experience, all bodies obey it, unless they have created something (like a rocket) where they may disobey it.

 

When we pray to God, the essence of petition, as distinct from coercion, is that it may or may not be granted. And of course, sometimes God will grant our requests, sometimes He will refuse them. There are certainly passages in the New Testament which may seem, at first sight, to promise an invariable granting of our prayers. But that cannot be what they really mean. For in the very heart of the story we meet an obvious instance to the contrary. In Gethsemane, Christ, the only sinless man who ever lived, prayed that the cup of suffering might be removed from Him. That prayer was refused by our Father. 

 

We are taught not to test God, but what if such a test was concocted by man? What about if an entire church picked 200 people at random and split them into two categories? The first 100 we shall call A and the second 100 we shall call B. Now what if the church prayed for one month for A and not at all for B? What if, when the month was complete, they took the trouble to research both A and B to see if A had indeed had been more blessed in that period of prayer? And what if, for the sake of consistency, the same experiment was conducted over a six-month period, with a different set of 200 people each month? I think already we are in agreement that this experiment would be futile. An experiment like this would tell us neither one way nor the other whether prayer was efficacious or not. Why? Because words without meaning attached to them are not, I presume, earnest enough to be taken seriously by God. You cannot pray for somebody if, in the end, you do not have their individual blessedness in mind when you are doing so. And of course, you would have no motive for desiring blessedness for A and not for B. The real purpose and the nominal purpose of your prayers are at variance. 

 

So it could seem to us that empirical evidence of prayers being answered is unobtainable. But, before we get too despondent with such an assertion, we should remember that most prayer is request, and that, even aside from prayer, in daily life for example, it is not always easy to prove a causal connection between asking and receiving. We may ask our neighbour to put our bins out while we are away; we may ask our boss for a pay-rise; we may ask a girl if she will go out on a date with us, and so on. 

 

Sometimes we get what we ask for and sometimes we do not. But when we do, it is not so easy as one might suppose to prove with scientific certainty a causal connection between the asking and the getting. Your neighbour might have been a kind and thoughtful person who would have put your bin out even if you had forgot to ask her. Your employer might have been ready to give you a pay rise anyway if he was worried that you might be headhunted by a better employer. The girl may have been preparing herself to ask you out on a date. Your proposition may have even been the result of her preparing to ask you out. A certain important conversation might never have taken place unless she had intended that it should. Thus the same doubts that I have been describing apply to prayer as well. 

 

Whatever we receive in prayer, we might have been going to get anyway. But notice one thing. If our neighbour, or boss, or lady friend had tried to convince us that it wasn’t our asking that yielded their actions, we would have no assurance that could be empirically tested by scientific means. Our only belief comes not from knowing things about them but from knowing them; it results from a personal relationship with them. Our assurance that God has or has not answered our prayers can only come about in the same way. There can be no question of calibrating success and failures and trying to decide whether the successes are too numerous to be accounted for by chance. Those who know a man best, know whether, when he did what they asked, he did it because they asked. I think those who are most familiar with God, through a relationship with Him, best know whether he sent me to have a drink with my friend or not. And I would like to confidently assert, without fear of contradiction, that He did.

 

Those who have spent their lives asking, ‘Does prayer work?’ are really asking on the wrong level. Prayer does not function systematically or automatically, so it cannot really work or not work. Prayer is a personal contact between a flawed human being and a perfect Supreme Being. It is supplication, penitence, adoration, confession and the presence and enjoyment of a personal relationship with God. 

 

But that raises another question - can we believe that God ever really modifies or reconstitutes His action in response to the proposal or request of flawed human beings? For, you may say, infinite wisdom does not need telling what to do or what is best, and infinite wisdom needs no urging to do something. But if you ask that question, you then imply the corollary - God does not actually need to do anything - and if that conclusion is reached, then you find yourself saying that He need not have created us at all. But He did, and He allows us the freedom to live our lives based upon our instincts. The only true conclusion that we can reach from this is that God allowed prayer in order to give us the significance of causality, or even the dignity and assurance that we are worth creating. 

 

In fact whenever we act at all, He lends us that dignity and assurance; the dignity and assurance of free will. It is no more strange that my prayers should induce worldly events than my actions should do so. In fact, if we are thinking carefully, neither my prayer nor my actions have changed God’s mind - that is, His all-over purpose. When my friend prayed that he would see me on the night the concert was cancelled, God knew he would pray that prayer, even before the world was created, so you could say that God, in creating that prayer, allowed it to happen because of that creation. 

 

That is why it is always essential to regard prayer as an important part of our growth. We would be foolish to say, ‘There is no point in praying for this to happen, because if God wants it to happen, it will happen anyway’. It is very probable that the very thing you are going to pray for, will happen simply because God had planned that you would pray for it. He commands us to do something meticulously, what He could do in a nanosecond. We are not mere recipients or spectators. We are privileged to collaborate in the work that God has created for us. This amazing process is actually creation going on before our very eyes.