I received a good question regarding my sermon on October 26 on prayer.  The series of questions on prayer included, “Can prayer change God’s mind?” and “If we pray for someone’s salvation or a revival of the nation, don’t people still have free will?”   The questions concluded with the statement, “In the Lord’s prayer, Jesus only prayed for (1) His basic needs, (2) help forgiving others, and (3) help with temptation.”

These are good questions, and Bible students have argued about these for years without coming to conclusions.  Nevertheless, I will give my understanding of these issues in a straightforward way.

Let’s first acknowledge that several things are completely true and Biblical, even if at first these things seem to be contradictory.  First of all, God is sovereign and His nature and His will do not change.  Part of that will is that all men come to faith in Jesus, but, clearly, not all do.  (So there is also some aspect of free will at work.) And yet, the Bible is clear that prayer does accomplish much.  How can these things all be true?

The incredible thing is that God has the ability to take all things and weave them together into His will.  And part of that plan is to use the prayers of His people.  He doesn’t just arbitrarily and independently “do” what He wants.  He uses people and empowers people as part of the “doing.”  So our prayers, our preaching, our witnessing, our ministry, and our love are all part of His plan and part of what He uses to work out His plan.

I don’t believe that He changes His mind, nor do I believe that He overpowers the free will of people.  But He does use people like you and me (through our prayers or our preaching or whatever) to bring about His will.  The prayers, then, do result in real change, but it is God who led me to pray and then used my prayer as part of the plan. God gets all the credit, but He uses us as part of the process.

God is in complete control, but He uses his people as part of the process.

How God can be completely sovereign and still allow free will is a challenge to our minds and our logic.  I wish I could explain it better.  All I can say is that both are taught in the Bible and so both are true . . . but I have a hard time wrapping my mind around exactly how it works.

NOTE:  Actually, the Lord’s prayer does include more than the three requests you mention.  Part of the prayer is “your kingdom come, your will be done on Earth as it is in heaven.”  We are praying for God’s will to be done, which includes praying for the salvation of people He loves.