What's in a prayer?

Our pastor has been preaching on the topic of prayer this month. This week he quoted celebrities like Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber, who Twittered their prayers for Japan as it grapples with the aftermath of the catastrophic earthquakes and tsunami over the past weekend.

I am not a Justin Bieber fan, but out of curiosity I looked online and found that he actually wrote a song entitled 'Pray'. When I read the lyrics I became impressed; this 17 year-old got something right about prayer that most religious people miss. He sings repeatedly in the song "...tell me how I can make a change". He didn't write "do something God" or "why is this happening God?". No, he wrote something God would be pleased to hear: "How can I do something about this?"

I have heard--and prayed myself--so many pie-in-the-sky prayers treating God like a magical Sugar-Daddy that it's hard to believe a wise God would answer those prayers. I'm not saying we shouldn't make requests to God--the Bible tells us to do so(!)--but when we pray we often stop right after we've off-loaded our burdens onto God and fail to listen to him for answers, for direction--for his heart. 

Prayer is two-way communication where we should expect God to speak. His most powerful answers come in the form of internal changes that transform our attitude and behaviour towards the situation or  person that we are troubled by, thereby affecting an outcome to our situation. Changes like these are so profound that when we experience them we know God's Spirit is at work inside us, answering prayer. Of course, God can answer prayer outside of our influence entirely. But we need to be mindful that he is apparently more interested in changing us (and others) than he is in changing our circumstances. 

We often mistake prayer to be the means through which we solicit divine help to fulfill our agenda, quite the contrary, it is more appropriately the means through which God fulfills his agenda through us.