What's the Point of Prayer If God Knows Everything?

Does prayer make a difference? After all, if God knows everything about us, then why should we bother praying? Kaitlyn helps us understand how prayer is more than listing our requests, but an opportunity to experience relationship with a Father who delights to hear from His kids, reshaping our desires, and drawing us into dependence on Him.

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2:50 - What’s the Point of Prayer If God Knows Everything?

7:00 - God and Relationship

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16:33 - God Likes Us

21:25 - Prayers Aren’t Magic

26:00 - Wanting the Right Things

29:05 - Being With God Daily

34:37 - End Credits

Kaitlyn: Even though God knows what we need before you ask him, Jesus says, pray this way:“ Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us today our daily bread, and forgive us our debts as we have also forgiven our debtors. Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one. For yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.”

I think it’s really beautiful to very regularly pray the exact words of the Lord’s Prayer. I also think there’s something to be said for this as a model of a posture, the way that you speak to God. I think it is still really instructive that this prayer starts with a personal address. Our Father.

Which is both, as many of you have probably heard as many sermons as I have about this, a really intimate name for God, but it’s also plural. It’s not individual. It’s not just my Father, it’s our Father.

But it’s both really personal and intimate and sovereign and transcendental — in heaven. “Our Father in heaven.” The whole span of intimate and personal and beyond me and sovereign over all things.

And then the next few lines are all about orienting our desires to be what God desires. Like, I am beginning this prayer with both relationship with God and then saying, by praying, I want my desires to be shaped and formed and oriented toward the things that God wants, which is already, right off the bat, really different than the “Why am I not getting what I want? Why should I have to tell God what I want when he already knows?”

It starts with the assumption that my desires are not properly ordered. I desire the wrong things, or I desire the right things in the wrong ways. What I am saying, which no one who’s ever prayed this besides Jesus fully meant, we are all praying this in the kind of mentality of: Help me. Help me desire this. Help me want your kingdom more than my own. Help me want your will more than mine. Help me actually want things to be on earth as it is in heaven rather than the many ways that things on earth that are broken tend to benefit me, or I have in a wayward way desired them.

But it starts with: this is true about my relationship with God. I want God’s name to be honored. I want solidarity with what God desires. And then ultimately, the very end of the prayer: “Yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever.” So it even ends with: this is who you are.

And it’s not even just — and it’s not bad to do this — but some of us, because we've learned a certain model of prayer, have learned to just kind of list truths about God, which is a beautiful way to pray. The Psalms often do that. That’s great. But I think it’s important that in this prayer it’s not just, “God, you’re all-powerful.” You are. But it’s saying: Yours is all of these things — like the kingdom and the power and the glory — that we are fighting over, that we are tempted to believe is ours or other people’s, that we’re tempted to give to someone else who, you know, exerts enough control over us or promises us enough things.

All of that is rightfully yours. And in a world where none of that seems to be true — that the kingdom and the power and the glory is God’s — it seems to be lots of other people’s who are misusing it. There is a really powerful thing about ending the prayer with: it’s actually yours. And in spite of the evidence around me, I am trying through this prayer to learn and be shaped and formed to believe that that is ultimately true, even when I don’t see it here and now.

Mike: Yeah. We have talked a lot recently about remembering. And these rhythms that God has set up for us to pause and to remember, to pray. And it’s so funny: when you read the Old Testament, despite all these rhythms, the Israelites continued to mess up and fail over and over — over and over and over again.

And whenever, like, I don’t know, the Lord’s Prayer or communion comes up, I think of my time when I was a pastor, and I would often hear the argument, “Well, we shouldn’t do communion too often. We shouldn’t say the Lord’s Prayer too often, because it will lose its meaning. It will lose its significance. It will become boring.”

And of course my response to that was always:“You know what? You are right. I think I’m gonna leave here and go tell my wife, ‘Yes, we should only see each other once a year.’”Right.“Keep it special. It’ll keep it special — and even better — and think about how amazing that one day will be.” And of course, like, it’s ridiculous. But it’s equally ridiculous when we take that to our relationship with God.

Like, it’s true that if I had an incredible steak dinner every night, eventually the steak would become terrible to me. I would grow sick of it. God is not something we consume. He’s someone we commune with. And so, like, yes, you can have too much of a good thing, but God is not just a good thing. He is the ultimate thing.

And prayer — daily prayer, even over the boring and the mundane things — it’s this reminder that we are… it's a special opportunity to commune with the ultimate thing.

Our Creator. Our Father — the one who loves us more than we will ever be able to understand or comprehend. And why do we need to do this so often? It’s because we are a forgetful people in desperate need of a faithful and consistent Savior.

I’m someone who naturally struggles with prayer. It is hard for me to quiet my heart and my mind enough. And I am one who probably looks more to the significant than to the mundane. And yet prayer is this reminder that God — yeah, it’s so special that God does not retire or get bored of us, but actively wants us to engageYes.in this kind of communion with him.

KAITLYN: I love that. And I think — going back to what I said before — one of the most important things I think for us to learn about this question is: it makes perfect sense that a kid would say, “Why do I need to? God already knows everything.”

But that’s a good opportunity — even just as prayer is refashioning our desires and our orientation and our posture toward God — questions like that are a great opportunity to ask: Why do I ask? Why do I need to do this?

We ask that a lot. “Why do I need to go to church? Why do I need to pray? Why do I need to read my Bible?” And I think it can be really helpful in those moments to go: Do I really think I get to do this?

Because it’s not a checklist of things to make God happy with us. It’s not a way to prove to other people that I’m a good Christian. It’s not a get-out-of-hell-free card.

It’s: the God of the universe desires to be in communion, community with us. And I think it can be helpful sometimes to get back into the mindset of many of the people who were original hearers of Scripture and go: you live in a world that is chaotic, that you have very little control over. You probably don’t have the money or the resources or the power to really shape much of anything about your life.

And you’re surrounded by stories about gods that are fickle and easily angered and can be flattered if given the right things, and maybe they'll, you know, seek your favor as you try and pacify them. But the world is chaotic and messy, and even the really powerful gods are impersonal. Right? They might be able to give you the thing that you have asked for, but they don’t care about you. They only care about the sacrifices you’re willing to give them.

And then enter into that mindset and imagine someone is telling you: actually the God who created everything — who not only loves you and protects you and provides for you — wants to just spend time with you. Like, wants to just be close to you. You would be so excited, right? If you thought that kind of relationship was open to you, that you got to talk to God like that.

And it’s similar to how we’ve often talked about the Bible: we live in a world where there’s tons of Bibles. We have all of the access in the world, we have all the commentaries. But imagine a world where you didn’t have that and you were so excited because God has spoken to you and you get to receive God’s word.

Similarly, I think this question is a good opportunity for us then to ask: Have I lost any sense of what an absolute gift it is that the God of the universe wants to be my friend? Jesus says, right?

Like, not just a servant but a friend. And because God is a friend, even though he is so much Creator and knows everything and there is nothing we are saying to him that he does not already know — he could easily be bored with us — he wants to be our friend and wants to spend time with us and talk to us and hear the things we want, even when he probably is grieved that we want things we shouldn’t want.

He still wants to talk to us. I think the next time we go like, “Oh, what’s even the point?” we might want to just remember what a gift it is that we get to do this.