Hello,

Here’s the last segment from the letter I wrote to a friend about a year and some ago on sovereignty. This bit is on sovereignty and prayer.

How does my belief in God’s sovereignty aid me in prayer? Because the God who decrees ends uses means to accomplish those ends. When God decrees rain, he decrees weather systems. When he decrees growth, he decrees industry. When he decrees healing, he decrees prayer (James 5:16).

God hears prayer (Psalm 65:2). He responds to it. He will give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him (Luke 11:13). The prayer of a righteous man has great power (James 5:16), because there is none like God, “declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times things not yet done” (Isaiah 46:10). If God, who governs, ordains, and rules all things, has decided that to accomplish his purposes, he will use prayer, then those ends will not be accomplished without prayer. Our prayers matter because God wrote this play, and he waits for his cues like the rest of us.

You and I, then, having been commanded to always pray and never lose heart (Luke 18:1), can do so in faith and boldness, knowing that many will be blessed through our prayers (2 Corinthians 1:11). Prayer is working in the fields with the Father as a little child who says “look Dad, there’s a weed” to watch his Father rip the offending plant out of the ground with everlasting arms. We have been given “dignity of causality” and we have the unimaginable privilege of pointing and watching God work.

What’s more, God is able “to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us” (Ephesians 3:20). Let’s put that glorious claim to the test. Start asking big. Start imagining big. And watch the power of the prayer-answering God dwarf the edifices of your imagination with a deliverance that calls to mind Egyptian armor in the middle of the Red Sea.