By Schubert Ogden
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The reason \[God\] commands it is, of course, not in order to have us make our prayers an instruction to him as to what he ought to give us, but in order to have us acknowledge and confess that he is already bestowing many blessings upon us and that he can and will give us still more. By our praying, therefore, we are instructing ourselves more than we are him. It makes me turn around so that I do not proceed as do the ungodly, neither acknowledging this nor thanking \[God\] for it. When my heart is turned to \[God\] and awakened this way, then I praise him, thank him, take refuge with him in my need, and expect help from him. As a consequence of all this, I learn more and more to acknowledge what kind of God he is. |
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You see, a prayer that acknowledges this truly pleases God. It is the truest, highest, and most precious worship which we can render to him; for it gives him the glory that is due him.... rA\] Christian heart is one that learns from the word of God that everything we have is from God and nothing is from ourselves. Such a heart accepts all this in faith and practices it, learning to look to \[God\] for everything and to expect it from him. In this way praying teaches us to recognize who we are aTld who God is, and to learn what we need and where we are to look for it and find it. The result of this is an excellent, perfect, and sensible \[woman or\] man, one who can maintain the right relationship to all things. |
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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." |
In sum: we pray because we are human beings who, as Paul says (Rom 8:26), do not know how to pray as we ought. We pray because in this way, through the means of salvation that prayer is, we may be saved from the unbelief -- or, if you will, the unfaith, the lack of obedient trust in God and loyalty to God and to all to whom God is loyal -- to which we are continually tempted by our life in this world.
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 I say-folloV\ri..ng Luther and Wesley-that we pray to instruct ourselves, I mean also, and primarily: we pray to instruct one anotherwherein, incidentally, the reason is to be sought for le~.Ining how to pray in the church's school of prayer, through her treasury of prayers and her prayer book. In tpis sense, zoe 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 truth our own through faith. We pray for ourselves
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