Most people would not consider prayer to be a moral or ethical responsibility. In fact, whenever there is a tragedy, and Christians say they are praying about it, there is inevitably an angry backlash of people telling them not to pray but to do something! (By which they mean increase the power of the nation state so that it can use its violent power in a (probably failed) attempt to prevent such things from happening.) Apparently, many Americans see prayer not as an ethical responsibility but as something positively unethical.
But even many Christians who have a positive view of prayer would not think to categorize it as a moral matter, instead thinking of it as a “spiritual” or “religious” practice. From a proper, biblical understanding of theological ethics, however, prayer is indeed a moral responsibility. God repeatedly commands us to pray, and we have a moral responsibility to obey Him. Prayer is ethically significant, both because of the good things we can accomplish in the world with the power of prayer, and because of how the practice of prayer shapes our own moral characters.
The Effectiveness of Prayer
It has become very common for people to say that prayer does not change God; it only changes us. After all, if God is omniscient, then He already knows everything, so our prayers cannot tell Him anything He does not already know. And if God is perfectly Good, then, it seems, He must already be doing whatever is for the best, so our prayers cannot possibly influence Him to change His mind and to do something better than He would have done otherwise. Thus, many people conclude, our prayer cannot possibly actually convince God to do anything. Its only purpose, then, can be that it has some benefit for us. On this view, prayer is valuable not for bringing about Divine intervention, but only for the “spiritual,” meditative, therapeutic benefits the act of prayer gives to the one who is praying.
When we look at what Scripture has to say about prayer, however, we see a very different view indeed. “The prayer of a righteous person,” writes James, “is powerful and effective. Elijah was a human being, even as we are. He prayed earnestly that it would not rain, and it did not rain on the land for three and a half years. Again he prayed, and the heavens gave rain, and the earth produced its crops” (James 5:16-18). Of course, there are many other examples of powerful and effective prayer in the Old Testament that James could have pointed to. For example, God told King Hezekiah he was about to die, but after Hezekiah prayed to live, God changed His mind and gave Hezekiah fifteen more years of life (Isa 38:1-5).
Earlier in his epistle, James tells his readers that “You do not have because you do not ask God” (4:2). James thus makes it very clear that there are good things which God withholds from us if we do not pray for them, and that prayer does indeed influence God to do good things which He otherwise would not do. But if God loves us, why would He withhold good things from us because we do not ask for them? Because God, our Heavenly Father, does not want us to simply take the good things we receive from Him for granted. He wants us to be in relationship with Him, learn to rely on Him, and recognize the good things we have as gifts from Him.
James makes it clear, though, that if we want God to hear our prayers, we must pray with the right attitude. “When you ask, you do not receive,” he writes, “because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures” (James 4:3). If we want our prayers to be effective, we must pray in an ethical manner, not out of self-serving motives, but out of a pure desire to be equipped to carry out the mission He has given us as His covenant people.
Of course, as we all know, God does not answer “yes” to all the prayers His faithful people bring before Him. There are many times when we wonder why God seems to answer “no” to a good prayer. Yet, Jesus exhorts us to keep praying and to never give up, even when it seems like God is not responding to our prayers, and He assures us that God will intervene and bring about justice (Luke 18:1-8). Prayer is powerful and effective, but God does not answer “yes” to every request, and sometimes, when He does answer “yes,” it takes a long time for us to see it arrive.
So if, as Jesus and His apostles teach, prayer is powerful and effective, then this has significant ethical implications. If we neglect prayer, then we are failing to leverage one of our most powerful tools for accomplishing good in the world. In doing so, we are acting unethically, since we are neglecting to do good that we can and should do. Prayer, then, is not just a “spiritual,” meditative, or therapeutic practice. It is a moral responsibility.
When Christians pray today, they close their eyes, bow their heads, and fold their hands. In depictions of prayer in early Christian art, however, we see Christians praying with the opposite posture: eyes open, looking up, with hands raised. We see this same posture for prayer depicted in the New Testament; Jesus looks up to heaven when He prays (John 11:41, 17:1), and Paul refers to people “lifting up holy hands” while praying (1 Tim 2:8).
Now, God never tells us that we have to adopt a certain particular posture while praying. But I do wonder if our shift in prayer posture signals a problematic shift in our attitude towards prayer, from a bold confidence that our prayers brought before the sovereign Lord who is reigning in heaven are powerful and effective, to an attitude that God only lives in our hearts and that our prayers only have “spiritual” benefits. Perhaps if we would pray looking up to heaven with our hands raised, as the early Christians did, it would help change our attitude towards prayer.
Prayer and Christian Character
Christian ethics is centered around loving God. In order to have a relationship of love with someone, you must communicate with them. Thus, the practice of prayer is a vital part of Christian ethics.
Some people pray only when they are desperate or really need something from God. Such people are not Christians. A marriage relationship will not work if you only talk to your spouse when you really need to ask a favor from them; it requires regular communication. Similarly, the covenant relationship between God and His people requires regular communication, regular prayer. The Bride of Christ must be a praying people.
Prayer is a spiritual discipline. If we only pray when we feel like it, then we can easily find ourselves praying less and less, drifting away from knowing and loving God. The temptations, worries, and lies of this world so easily turn us away from being focused on God. Through disciplined, regular, daily practice of prayer, we keep our lives and thoughts centered on God and His Kingdom.
The regular practice of prayer profoundly shapes (or at least should profoundly shape) our attitude towards life and our moral vision. As we bring our requests about the problems in our lives, our Church, and our world and humbly lay them before God, we give up the dangerous and destructive idea that it is up to us to fix the world’s problems by any means necessary. As Jacques Ellul puts it, “Apart from prayer, action is necessarily violence and falsehood. Even technological action, in spite of its appearance of neutrality and objectivity, is nevertheless in that category. Prayer is the only substitute for violence in human relations. Henceforth it is from prayer that one expects action to take its value. Action is no longer looked to for the immediate, visible, and expected result at any cost. Prayer guarantees the objective (perhaps unexpected) of action, but by that very fact it cannot tolerate every action. . . It is impossible to engage in the combat of prayer for the brother whom one loves in Christ, and still to employ physical and psychological violence against him.” [1]Jacques Ellul, Prayer and Modern Man, translated by C. Edward Hopkin (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2007), page 173.
When we are tempted to hate unrepentant evildoers, we can pray for them. And we will find that it is impossible to pray for someone, and at the same time to hate them. Through prayer, we will find our attitude towards other human beings shift from an attitude grounded in our natural, Fallen human instincts to an attitude grounded in the nature of God and His love for lost, sinful human beings.
As we commune regularly with God in prayer, we not only accomplish good in the world through our requests; we also bring about change in ourselves. Over time, the practice of prayer keeps us grounded in God and His Kingdom. It keeps us rooted in God’s love. And it shapes us to be more humble, faithful followers of Jesus Christ. If we wish to develop Christian virtue, it is vitally important that we regularly engage in the practice of prayer.
Notes
| ↑1 | Jacques Ellul, Prayer and Modern Man, translated by C. Edward Hopkin (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2007), page 173. |
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