Does God Need Us To Pray?

There's a question for you.  Does God need us to pray?  Yes and no.  Don't you love answers like that?  There are a lot of role playing games out there, many online, but the classics as well, like Dungeons & Dragons.  I remember reading one that defined a very interesting relationship between humanity and deity.  It went like this:

There is this divine realm beyond the human realm.  It is made up basically of compartments of all the different religions, Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, etc., etc.  The divine realm is of a finite size and the relative sizes of each religious 'zone' is relative to the number of believers the religion has.  So, back when Christianity was young, it contended with very large sections devoted to Mt. Olympus and to Asgard.

In that vision of the natural and the supernatural, God would certainly need our prayers.  If we produced our 'gods' out of collective conscious (or unconscious), prayer would be the fuel on which the divine ran.

Thank the Lord it doesn't work that way!  To assume it does actually mocks God.  As the all-powerful Sovereign Lord, there is nothing that is beyond God's knowledge and determination.  There is no request that we can put before the Lord that will come as a surprise to Him (I have trouble going gender-neutral on the All Mighty).  So, in one sense, does God need us to pray?  No, She doesn't (Fair is fair!).

But in another, more fundamental way, God indeed needs us to pray.  Not for His/Her sake, but for our own.  God is all-powerful, we are all-broken.  In the gospels, Jesus does not even include himself in what he defines as "good" when he speaks to the Rich Young Ruler.  None of us is "good".  All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.  Praise God that Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life!

Now consider this: God needs us to pray so that we stay focused on the things of God.  A prayer could be said along the lines of "Heal all the sick people everywhere" or "We pray for all the missionaries" but that is so abstract as to be meaningless as a prayer. 

When we pray for Mr. X who has cancer, we are investing ourselves into their healing process.  We are remembering him, we are giving a d**n about him, God's Spirit is working in us to connect to him as our neighbor.

When we pray for Missionary Y in deepest darkest Illinois, once again, we are investing ourselves in their ministry.  The more specific our prayers, the more time and inclination we have taken to specify our prayers, the more we will care about the ministry we are interceding for, and the more our own lives will change-perhaps along the lines of that very mission work.

People complain to me that they don't know how to pray, as if their lack of ability will be offensive to God.  My response is to remember your multiplication tables.  Remember how we had to drill those things, 1x1 through 10x10 (the 11 and 12 times tables came later).  We drilled them until they became second nature.  So it is with prayer.

Don't know how to pray?  God needs you more than anyone to pray.  Because when you pray, I mean really pray, not simply come to God with your Christmas list, but are willing to listen, willing to look for answers, willing to let Him work in you, you will change.  God needs you to pray so that you will learn that change, achieve that change, and become more like our Lord Jesus Christ.  And for our God in Heaven, that is something She would appreciate very much.