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"By our praying, therefore, we are instructing ourselves more than we are \[God\].... \[P\]raying teaches us to recognize who we are and who God is, and to learn what we need and where we are to look for it and find it." Or, as John Wesley puts it, H"\[T\]he end of your praying is not to inform God, as though he knew not your wants already; but rather to inform yourselves. . . . It is not so much to move God, who is always more ready to give than you to ask, as to move yourselves, that you may be willing and ready to receive the good things he has prepared for you."

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But here I would remind you that the primary emphasis in the classical Protestant doctrine of the priesthood of all believers is not that we are each our own priest before God, but that we are each to be priests of God to and for one another. Therefore, '!\Then when I say – following Luther and Wesley – that we pray to instruct ourselves, I mean also, and primarily: we pray to instruct one anotherwhereinanother – wherein, incidentally, the reason is to be sought for le~.Ining learning how to pray in the church's school of prayer, through her treasury of prayers and her prayer book. In this sense, we pray to bear witness – to re-present to one another and to all the truth decisively disclosed to us through God's word in Jesus, so that, again and again, we can each make tpjs this truth our own through faith. We pray for ourselves

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and our neighbors to bear witness – to re-present to one another the truth about our existence disclosed to us through Jesus Christ. God gives us both ourselves and our neighbors to love in and through God's love, and, in God's decisive word to us through Jesus, God discloses both ourselves and our neighbors in the light of God's all-encompasing love, under its gift and demand. By means of our prayers of petition and intercession, we re-present our reception of God's gift of ourselves and our neighbors, so as to make it really ours, so as to take full responsibility for it, so as also to obey God's demand.

But if prayer is rightly understood, not as an ineffective means of lobbying with God for special favors, but as, in this sense, a means of salvation, how effective a means is it? Otherwise put: Does prayer used as such a means work? Does something happen, after all? I deeply believe it does; for when we learn to pray as we ought, making use of prayer as the means of salvation it properly is, it is bound to be effective for us as the pray-ers, and we have every reason to hope and pray that our prayers may also become an effective witness, and so an effective means of salvation, for others.

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