Why Pray?

Why pray?

We pray because we long for something better. We recognize that evil is in our world, and we long for the day of restoration. Death, disease, hurt, discouragement, betrayal, hardship, we pray for strength to make it through the difficult times in life, and we long for a day when God will answer our prayers.

Prayers is our connection to God, it is our way of asking God to intercede in our lives. We long for the day of redemption when God will be all in all, when he will restore all things and we live forever with him. Prayer is our longing to God for that day. N.T. Wright said it well:

“Christian prayer is simply in the sense that a small child can pray the prayer Jesus taught. But it is hard in the demands it makes as we go on with it. We are called to live at the overlap both of heaven and earth – the earth that has yet to be fully redeemed as one day it will be – and of God’s future and this world’s present. We are caught in a small island near the point where these tectonic plates, heaven and earth, future and present, are scrunching themselves together.

God’s whole creation is groaning in labor-pains, waiting for the new world to be born from its womb. The church, God’s people in the Messiah, find themselves caught up in this, as we, too, groan in longing for redemption. Christian prayer is at its most characteristic when we find ourselves caught in the overlap of the ages, part of the creation that aches for new birth.” [Wright, 146]