Prayer Does More Than Work

When I first started learning about prayer, only one thing really mattered: does it work?

My entire life up to that point had been filled with prayer– prayer at meal times, prayer in the morning, prayer meetings at church, prayer when we got into the car, prayer through song, and prayer in nature. And yet, there was this strange, nagging feeling that refused to leave my chest. I heard enough stories to know that prayer seemed to work for some people like George Muller. But that didn’t seem to be most people’s experience. To be honest, I don’t remember ever seeing a direct answer to a prayer I prayed. 

Because of that, getting to know people who could explain not only that it did indeed work in their lives but that it could also work in mine, got me hooked. I mean, the concept itself was wild enough to attract me out of sheer curiosity: God actually bent the universe around the prayers of ordinary people like me. They showed me verse after verse that challenged my practical determinism. Stories of Abraham whittling down God’s judgment on Sodom, Jacob literally wrestling with him and demanding a blessing, Moses almost rebuking God and somehow staying alive– these stories were and still are some of the greatest provocateurs of prayer.

I was crazy enough to believe them. And it didn’t take long before I started seeing several dramatic answers to prayer right in front of my eyes. Healings from physical pain were the first eye catchers for me. Deliverance from evil spirits was another one. Financial provision that seemed to appear out of thin air was still another. I learned that prayer not only worked for the immediate situation right in front of me but it also worked for people halfway across the world.  

One night I distinctly remember “doing battle”. I’m not sure what came over us, but two of my friends and I started praying before an evening community night. We were praying for our families and things started to heat up. In those days, I liked to pace and I must have thought that volume was a pretty important part of effective prayer. So I asked my friends to go outside with me to pray– even though it was dark and rain was starting to fall. They agreed and I’ll never forget standing on a picnic table in the pouring rain praying fervently for God to move in our families. To this day, I’m seeing answers to those prayers.

When you really believe prayer works, you do wild things. 

God is gracious and people are too. In those early days, no one asked me to calm down and I’m grateful for it. But to tell you the truth, I hadn’t quite understood that praying emotionally was not the same thing as praying effectively. Or that, in the kind of prayer Jesus talked about, persistence was more important in his teachings than passion. Instead of patiently waiting on God for revelation or searching the Scriptures to understand his will, I bull rushed any spiritual stronghold I could think of. 

There was a verse that made me scratch my head a bit. You’ve probably heard it a few times if you’ve grown up in the Church. It’s the kind of verse that looks wonderful painted next to red apples hanging in a country kitchen or cross-stitched beside pine trees and a cabin. It’s the great and mysterious words of Psalm 46:10: 

“Be still and know that I am God, I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth.” (NIV) 

The idea of being still was hard enough to grasp let alone accomplish at first. My brain didn’t cooperate well when I tried to “be still and know”, especially during prayer. This may sound odd to you but it was actually easier to learn to recognize God speaking to me in my thoughts or to pray in faith over someone else than it was to learn to be still. I’ve met a couple people who can easily come into a place of stillness but it’s not the norm. For most, a space of complete silence is awkward and can even produce anxiety.

Perhaps the culprit is the amount of visual and auditory stimulation we experience through recent inventions of technology. Whatever the case, stillness wasn’t a walk in the park for me. What the psalmist wrote was incredibly alluring but also annoyingly difficult and here’s why: it got to the heart of my security.

All of us have at some point in our lives wondered about our purpose as individuals. No matter what background we come from, how healthy our family is, or what religion we are raised in, we wonder: what am I supposed to do with my life? Now, the path to a conclusion is clearly different for each person. Some rush to pleasure or happiness: do what makes you feel good. Others rush to integrate in communities: do what your community needs you to do. Still others find a quick answer in Christianity: glorify God. But what does “glorify God” mean?

Initially, I assumed it simply meant to do everything he commanded us to do. Fulfill our destinies. But maybe glorifying God is about more than that

Adam and Eve were created from the dust on the sixth day. Their lungs filled with the breath of God and the answer to any existential ponderings came quickly: “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it.” (Gen 1:28 NIV) But what comes next must have been confusing. Instead of walking out their God-given destiny the next day, God decides to “sabbath”. 

This word has a rich, rich tradition and my feeble attempt to define it or the practice of it will not do it justice. To simplify it, however, this word means something along the lines of “to stop, to cease.” In other words, God decided to stop and Adam and Eve had to as well. Clearly it had nothing to do with exhaustion or even with preparation. I mean, God just breathed creation into existence. So why did he do it? And why did resting on the seventh day become a key part of his chosen people’s liturgy?

I think he wanted to make one thing crystal clear from the get-go: even though he gave humanity a task to accomplish, their primary purpose was never a practical one. Instead, it was and still is a relational one: God created humanity to be with Him. Or as the psalmist would echo, to know Him. There’s a kind of knowing that can only happen when there’s nothing to do. If a relationship cannot exist without an external purpose, is it true, intimate friendship or really just a practical arrangement? 

Leaning into this revelation changed my life. Several years ago, my wife and I decided to start practicing a sabbath day. It’s become a treasure hard to imagine living without. Every week I am reminded that I am not the sum of all my successes and failures, that I am not just a student, a leader, a writer, a husband, a father, etc., but that I am a friend of God. What’s fascinating is that, though it’s taken a while for it all to sink in, I find that I am much more comfortable with stillness and silence now. Being still in God’s Presence isn’t a chore I have to do but a gift of fresh air in my desperate lungs. 

Here’s the hard truth I’ve been wrestling with: my anxious, impassioned prayer life that I thought so highly of didn’t actually take me deeper into the knowledge of God. How could it? It was filled with noise and ideas I wanted God to sign off on. It was work; it was something I did in order to gain something else. It actually led me closer and closer to burn out and despair. The burden of changing the world was too heavy for my shoulders and prayer wasn’t often producing the “peace that surpasses all understanding” that the Apostle Paul talked about. (Philippians 4:7)

I think the second piece of Psalm 46:10 directly speaks to this: “I will be exalted in the nations.” This is nothing short of a grand, eschatological promise. And it’s important to note that it is not conditioned on human participation. God’s exaltation is God’s prerogative. Of course, we are invited to be a part of it but it is clear that God will accomplish it on His own terms and timing.

This is significant because we can take Psalm 46:10 and interpret it in our pragmatic, Americanised lens, completely missing its poignancy. Here’s how I did the mental backflips that made me miss the call to stillness: I want God to be exalted in the earth, therefore I need to know him, and knowing him means that I should learn to somehow be still. In this view, he end is exaltation in all the earth and the means is being still and knowing him. It sounds good but it misses the point: the reason you and I can be still and know God is because He will be exalted in the nations. The reason we can practice the sabbath is because God is not limited to our good endeavors or passionate prayers. It’s by leaning into a deep faith in God’s ability to bring His kingdom into the earth and exalting His name that we can actually begin to embrace stillness and silence in His Presence. 

I know some of us were raised in traditions that emphasized God’s sovereignty to the point of neglecting intercession and even things like social justice. Though it can be tempting to run as far in the opposite direction as possible, there’s a ditch on that side of the road, too. Stressed out, burned out, and disillusioned intercessors and social justice warriors are not the ticket to the new creation. 

Sometimes things even as calm and meditative as prayer can be done without a grid for stillness and become part of our work. It’s easy to mask insecurities and even unbelief by hammering down on the fact that prayer works and we should all be doing more of it. Yes, it does. And yet it doesn’t always have to be work. Prayer can be restful, enjoyable, even fun! 

If you are like me in any way, there’s only one road to that kind of life with God: at times, you need to make peace with your insignificance. Maybe it’s trying to set aside one day a week to rest with God and your family; maybe you can start with even just a morning or afternoon or evening. Maybe it’s starting a daily rhythm like sitting in stillness for a few minutes before you start your day.

Yes, there is work to be done in prayer. Glorious work that only you can do. But because we live at the mercy and by the grace of a benevolent and all-powerful God, there is also rest to be done.

Written by Tim Ornelas