Prayer Makes Things Harder
P rayer is a funny thing at times. Consider two equally matched football teams. Prior to the game, they both kneel in prayer to ask for victory over their opponent. One will leave the field later believing that God answered their prayer and the other will leave the field wondering why God didn’t answer their prayer. Let’s not put any limits on God and say that he can’t answer both requests, but the reality of the situation is that he doesn’t often do that. From our perspective, it appears that God didn’t answer one of the prayers, but which one? And how does this apply when we ask God for our success? There is more than one possibility here. One is that God doesn’t actually answer prayer at all, so the only value of the two teams praying was the placebo effect. Because they felt like God was on their side, they played with more confidence. Another possibility is that when presented with two choices God picked a favorite and his favorite went on to victory while the other went on to ...