Does asking God for favours work?

Prayer of petition is often misunderstood by devout Christians. Wrong expectations abound. To fully explain why this is so and how we can avoid making mistakes in this area, I will discuss the following points:

• How some people think prayer of petition works
• Such primitive beliefs belittle God
• The right approach to prayer of petition
• Why we ask God for favours
• A model for prayer of petition

My reflections may seem long-winded here or there. I beg your patience. A full grasp of all the factors involved and a gentle pastoral approach require setting out various aspects at length.

 How some people think prayer of petition works

John and Teresa are devout Christians. Their eldest son has just completed qualification as a technical engineer and is desperately looking for a job. One day an opportunity arises. A good company offers first-class employment, but the applicants for the job will be accepted on a competitive basis. They will have to write and pass an entrance examination. John and Teresa pray to God: “Please, Almighty God, help Peter pass this exam”. In the days preceding the examination they fervently pray in those and similar words.

This is a typical example of a popular Christian prayer of petition. It is quite likely that John and Theresa have a rather crude idea of how their prayer can make Peter pass the exam. They may imagine that their prayers ascend to heaven and reach the throne of almighty God. Originally, they may think, God had not yet decided to make Peter pass the exam. If they do not pray, God may allow him to fail. But their prayers ascend day after day. If God sees the anxiety in their hearts and if some saints keep interceding on their behalf, God may finally decide to make Peter pass the exam. Almighty God may do this by arranging the course of events in favour of Peter. God may give Peter grace so that he answers correctly. God may soften the heart of the person who marks the papers. God may see to it that, by a stroke of good luck, Peter gets the questions he is able to answer. Moved by the prayers of the parents, God somehow makes Peter pass the exam which otherwise he might have failed.
This is the “making-God-do-a-miracle” kind of prayer. My grandfather may die but if I pray for him God may give him an extra ten years. During a journey I might have an accident, but if I pray God will somehow keep me safe. We might not get enough rain during this season, but if we pray with sufficient faith God may send some showers which otherwise we would not have received. The underlying idea is always the same. Our human petitions persuade God to interfere in the normal course of events by giving us a special favour.

Such primitive beliefs belittle God

If prayer of petition is accompanied by the crude ideas we just described, it is clearly mythological. There may be a genuine religious element in mythological thinking. This is the ‘intuitive grasp’ of our dependence on God which all petitions contain. But, being mythological, this popular concept of petition is at the same time full of anthropomorphisms [= speaking about God in human terms] and heresies. Let us analyse a few of them.

Theologically it is not correct to say that something we do would make God change his/her mind. By what we do we can effect a change in ourselves, but never in God. By saying that God changes his/her mind on account of our prayer, we also imply that God is very small. It implies that we know better than God what is good for other people. Or at least it seems to imply that we love other people more than God does. God might have let Peter fail the exam, but, fortunately for Peter one could say, John and Theresa loved him more. So they persuaded God to give a favour which God would otherwise not have given.

By this popular notion of ‘petition’ we also reduce God to being some kind of ‘super-manager’ who has made a bad job of the world. Our petition helps God to ‘patch up’ some of his/her mistakes.

• In this world of ours many people fail exams. By reminding God at the right time of Peter’s special case, we give God a chance to patch up by making Peter pass.
• Many people fall ill and all of us will die sooner or later. But by putting in a word on behalf of some of our friends, we give God a chance to give some extra life to them.
• Many regions of this complex globe on which we live do not receive sufficient rains. But by timely prayer now and again, we help God to prevent some disasters that would otherwise have occurred.

In other words: by our prayer of petition, we hope that God will do some minor miracles that will take the sharpest edges off our human suffering. Whenever God does the minor miracle, it seems to us that God shows special love to us.

What is left of God in such a conception? How inefficient is God to have made such a rickety world to begin with? How cruel is God since hard-hearted humans are more easily moved to compassion than God is! How partial since God only helps those for whom his/her friends pray; and not the many millions about whom no one cares!

Atheists and agnostics are quite right in rejecting a God of this nature. Moreover, if this was the true idea of God, we Christians would have no answer concerning human suffering. Woe to our Christian faith if it rests on confidence in this repair-style miracle working anthropomorphic God.

The right approach to prayer of petition

The first religious act of us human beings when encountering our God, should be to accept what we are: just creatures. We should accept ourselves with all our possibilities and limitations. If God has given us two hands, we should not demand to have four. And suffering is part of our human nature. Because we depend on food, because we age and grow older, because our bodies are frail and weak, we necessarily decay and suffer. Our fundamental disposition as Christians should be to accept this condition and all its consequences as the will of God. Of course, using our human intelligence we should overcome weaknesses and fight diseases, but we will never be able to wipe out suffering itself. When God became human in Jesus Christ, God did not eradicate our human limitations. Rather God lifted up suffering and gave it a new meaning.

Scripture teaches us that God loves every person equally, whether they are rich or poor, young or old, Jew or Gentile. It is a theological blunder to see the special love of God in things we possess: in riches, comfort, fame and health. Jesus teaches just the opposite: “Woe to you rich . . . Blessed are you poor”. God shows his/her fundamental love for each person by giving us life, by granting us a free will and so making us an image of God, by calling us to adopted childhood in Christ.

Of course, it is right that we do our utmost to secure our own well-being and that of others. But the accidentals of health or sickness, riches or poverty, success or failure, do not bring us nearer to God. Christ wants us not to be anxious about these things and, therefore, not to pray for these accidental things as if they are of primary importance. “Seek rather the Kingdom of heaven and these ‘accidental’ things will be given you in addition” (read the whole passage of Matthew 6,24-34).

Jesus recommended prayer of petition. But it was not for accidental things God wanted us to pray. When saying that we should ask with great faith, that we should importune God as the unhappy widow did, or as the friend who needed loaves for his/her guest, Christ is thinking of the graces of the Kingdom which we should pray for. For God is anxious to give us these gifts. Yes, Jesus says, fathers on earth give what is good to their children. They will not give a stone when they ask for bread, or a snake when they ask for fish, or a scorpion if they ask for an egg. But notice the lesson Jesus draws from this example. “If you then, who are evil, know how to give your children what is good, how much more will your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him” (Luke 11,9-13).

When Jesus says that the Father will grant ‘whatever we ask in his/her name’, God does not expect us to ask for relatively trifling things, such as food, or clothes or health, in his/her name. God expects us to pray for the gift of “living in him and God in us” and the other petitions expressed on our behalf in his/her highpriestly prayer (John 15,16; 17,1-26).

If we pray for conversion, for grace, for the Holy Spirit, our prayer will certainly be heard. Because through our prayer we predispose ourselves to receive these gifts. We take away the obstacles in ourselves that impede the divine light from entering our inner selves. We provide the psychological soil in which the seed of divine action can bear fruit. In this way, through our prayer of petition, we do not change God, but change ourselves.

Being persons with a free will, we have to open the windows: but the light comes from God, the Sun. On account of our human solidarity also, prayers for religious gifts for others partake to some degree of this inner psychological preparation.

Why we ask God for favours

Being the creatures we are, we experience the presence of God in every event that happens to us. When things go well, we grasp God’s generosity in them. When we suffer, we feel our dependence on God. If such is our fundamental disposition, will there still be room for petitioning God for material favours? Not in a mythological and magical sense, as I have explained. But there will be in other ways.

First, we should not exclude God’s freedom. We are free and responsible. So is God. We can achieve many of our objectives in spite of the limitations put on us. So, humanly speaking, can God. There is no reason to exclude God being able to make use of our prayer in ways beyond our immediate understanding, in order to guide a course of events in a particular direction without a crude magical interference with nature. Employing the image of a laser beam that brings photons to oscillate in phase, God’s interaction can be understood as the tuning of the divine and human wills to mutual resonance through the collaboration of prayer.[1]

The accidentals of sickness, drought, failure and death are upsetting, that it is natural for us to raise spontaneous prayers to God asking him/her to safeguard us from these evils. We do not expect God to do a minor miracle on our behalf. But accepting our human condition and realising God’s love whatever may happen, we express our dependence on God in the form of such a petition.

In this case the petition is unconditional as it has the function of expressing our dependence. The utter need we feel becomes a disclosure situation in which we spontaneously reach out to God. God from his/her side opens the way for us to deal with the situation constructively, and perhaps, prepares un unexpected resolution.

A model for prayer of petition

The best example of such prayer is given by Jesus himself. Although Jesus knew he would have to undergo suffering and death, and although he had already accepted this sacrifice, his/her human nature made him spontaneously pray: “Father, let this chalice pass me by”. By praying in this way to his/her Father, Jesus disposed his/her human nature to receive the strength it needed for the passion.

As could be expected, Jesus’ petition was not granted in the literal sense of the word. He himself did not want it to be granted on his/her own terms. Jesus  said: “But not my will but your will be done” (see: Matthew 26,39; Luke 22,43-44.).

Is this not the pattern for prayer of petition which Jesus wanted to teach us? “May your will be done on earth as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6,10.).

The remarkable outcome of Jesus’ prayer only became apparent in Christ’s resurrection. his/her new life in God was totally unexpected from a human point of view. It made Christ’s suffering meaningful. It fulfilled both what God wanted and what Jesus, as a human individual, really wanted in terms of bringing wholeness to the world.

John Wijngaards

Note. In the text above I inserted some paragraphs already found in my books Thinking about God and How to Make Sense of God.

See also: Anything you ask for?

[1] I highly recommend in this context the sensitive discussion of this issue by the scientist-theologian JOHN POLKINGHORNE in Science and Providence, London 1989, esp. pp. 45-68 and 69-76. See also the classical treatment of it in C.S.LEWIS, Miracles, London 1947; Letters to Malcolm, London 1966.).