THE ROLE OF FAITH IN PRAYER

 

Faith is a complete conviction that He [God] can do what He has promised. Even if you fear that your faith is weak, when you call upon God, you exercise and strengthen it. God seeks to turn your doubts into strong faith. He will help your faith grow. Realizing your great need and trusting in the fullness of God will open your heart to receive Him. Moreover, if you hide anger, selfishness, greed, etc. in your heart, you are limiting God's ability to work with you. If you choose to trust yourself and cherish things like pride, you are pushing God away. You are told that it is sin that separates you from your loving, merciful God who is ready to forgive and save. When all known sins are confessed and corrected, you can pray to God and trust that He will answer.

Prayer is much more than reciting a wish list. You don't want to limit God to a cosmic vending machine when He wants to be so much more in your life. He wants to be your character builder, refining you as you grow and mature. When life is good and easy, or when life is hard and difficult, He invites you to seek His will in the midst of it all. You are invited to live in awareness of His presence and to be at peace. Moreover, He calls you not only to seek Him in prayer, but also to have faith, believing that He will answer.

No matter what hardship or pain you may go through, you can cling to God through prayer. God is not the one who brings problems and pain into your life. Sometimes it is the result of your own choice, and sometimes it is simply the result of sin created by the devil. But God promises that when you come to Him for help, He will be there for you. You may claim His promises and trust that when you pass through the waters of doubt and trial, He will be with you. You will not be overtaken. God's presence will guide you.

It is important to remember that God's time is not always the same as your time. He knows the beginning from the end. He knows how everything will work together for your good. Part of faith is knowing that your point of view is very limited and trusting God who knows what is best for you, even when things don't feel right. God's plan may not be what you expect, but His plan is always better!

Prayer is good for you. The medical impact of faith on health is not a matter of faith, but of science. No one argues that the prayer of those who believe in the healing power of prayer might really calm the soul, relieve stress and lead to reduced hypertension, controlled headaches and strengthened immunity. But the sugar pill, offered as if it were a real therapy, can do the same as real medicine. Such is the power of positive faith.

God is at the core of all creation. God is not some small spiritual factor that occasionally diverts the course of nature from time to time, but the foundation of all that exists. God does not work in the spaces of what you do not yet understand, but in and through nature. Thus, although your Lord's model prayer teaches you to recognize your dependence on God for your basic needs, it does not see God as a heavenly vending machine whose levers you pull in your prayers. Historical evidence suggests that the prayers of finite humans do not manipulate the infinite God.

Even for those who believe that God intervenes in answer to prayer, there is a practical reason to expect zero effect. Some people believe that prayers spoken in faith have power. But are there any or many people of faith who also believe that prayers called forth by a doubting scientist will be similarly effective? Scientific testing involves doubt. The scientific attitude involves being sceptical but not cynical, open but not gullible. In this doubting but curious spirit, scientists put contending theories and claims to the test.

You easily misperceive your behaviour as correlated to later events and thus easily delude yourself into thinking that you can predict or influence uncontrollable events. Moreover, you are predisposed to find order in random events, interpret results according to your preconceptions, to look for and recall cases that confirm your beliefs, and are more convinced by vivid anecdotes than by statistical reality.

•   You readily perceive relationships where none exist, especially where you expect to see them,

•   You readily perceive causal relationships among events that are correlated only by chance, and

•   You readily believe that you have control over events that are actually beyond your control.

A perceived correlation that doesn't actually exist is an illusory correlation. When you believe that there is a connection between two things, you are likely to notice and recall instances that support your belief. A frequent result is an illusory correlation. Illusory correlations help explain many superstitions, such as the presumption that more children are born on a full moon, or that infertile couples who adopt a child are more likely to become pregnant. Those who conceive after adoption attract your attention. You are less likely to notice those who adopt and never conceive, or those who conceive without adopting.

Superstitious magic is act that is only a means to a definite end expected later on. On the other hand, religious acts are in themselves the fulfilment of their purpose. Magic is a manipulative technique; worship is an end in itself, something really worth doing. When religion is sold as magic, using exaggerated evidence that falsely portrays faith as the path to unproblematic health, wealth, and success, the follower is disappointed. Exaggeration breeds doubt in those who do not achieve the expected results, and provokes feelings of inferiority in listeners who compare their lives with the glamorous successes of their fellow believers. If you repeatedly hear testimonies saying, “God has healed all my woes,” but find that your woes remain, you may either feel guilty about your perceived lack of faith or begin to wonder if religion is a farce.

But surely God cares for you more than you can imagine. Although religion does not promise that you will be spared from grief, humiliation, misfortune, sickness, and death, yet it does offer a perspective from which to look at such events and the promise that God is beside you in your suffering. Through defeat, suffering and even death, you will never be abandoned.

Prayer does not contain attempts to manipulate God. It does not try to persuade a miserly god to do something for which he would not have the goodwill and good sense anyway. It has the quality of a confessional statement asserting God's nature and man's dependence on God's grace. Therefore, it prepares a person to receive what God already provides.

Prayer is not magical, but mystical. In silent meditation and prayer you experience the reality of the living God. When God speaks to you and you speak to God, you change. Falling to your knees or bowing your head reminds you of your humble dependence. Praying for others makes you more aware of their needs. Prayer can also be seen as an answer, as an effect rather than as a cause.

If your Creator loves you as an all-loving parent loves a child, then you, as children, can communicate with God unceasingly. You can share even the little concerns of daily existence —everything worth worrying about—just like a child does with its parents, or like two close friends with each other. You can give every corner of your life to prayer, not with the superstitious intent of manipulating magical solutions to life's problems, but with the assurance that prayer is the means of grace through whereby you grow and become sensitive to God's presence.