Do Our Prayers Change God’s Mind?
August 14th, 2023 • by Daniel J. Brendsel
“After you have said, ‘thy will be done,’ what more can be said?”
The question greatly troubled a young Jayber Crow in Wendell Berry’s novel of the same name. A couple years into seminary with thoughts of becoming a pastor, Jayber began to realize that he could hardly lead others in prayer if he himself couldn’t come to terms with the praying life. What good is praying to a God whose will is sovereign? “Does prayer,” Jayber asks, “change God’s mind?”
Or maybe God isn’t as sovereign as at least some traditions would make him out to be. Maybe he alters his plans if we offer him compelling enough prayers. But then, “If God’s mind can be changed by the wants and wishes of us mere humans, as if deferring to our better judgment, what is the point of praying to him at all?” The theoretical conundrum was enough to drive Jayber from seminary, and from supplication (at least for a season).
“In real life,” we do not need to be preparing for a pastorate to suffer Jayber Crow’s perplexity. His are precisely the kinds of questions that are almost inevitably stirred up for any of us who want to take God seriously, and who also desire to seriously pray. Most answers available seem to result either in a diminishment of God’s sovereignty, or a gutting of the power and relational meaning of prayer. We need not rest satisfied with such answers. Indeed, we need not accept without critique the questions in the first place, for they reflect a few common and critical missteps in approaching the relation between God’s sovereignty and our prayer.
““Whose will wins?” Does God stick to his sovereign game-plan, or do we by prayer “change his mind”?”
The Way of Competition
Let’s consider the terms and structuring of Jayber’s questions. There is “God’s mind,” and there is our mind (our “wants and wishes”), and the basic way these two realities relate is in conflict and competition. So, the question essentially becomes, for Jayber and many others, “Whose will wins?” Does God stick to his sovereign game-plan, or do we by prayer “change his mind”?
In the popular imagination, God’s sovereignty and our prayer are typically pitted against each other in a zero-sum game. If reality were a pie, we imagine the two as slices of the pie: the bigger the slice of God’s sovereign will and “mind,” the smaller the slice must be which is the need for prayer; or vice versa. But this reflects, among other things, an anemic theology of creation. God is not a piece of the pie of reality, but the maker of the pie.
God as Creator is wholly other. He is holy. His purposes and will are not just quantitatively bigger than ours, so to speak, but qualitatively different (see Isa. 55:9). So, God relates to us, and engages our prayers, not in the manner of one limited slice engaging another limited slice, competing for limited space. He relates to us more in the way a baker relates to a pie; or to use a better analogy, in the way an author relates to characters in his drama. The sovereign God truly relates and engages and responds to our prayers in the way of the Creator of us all.
This includes, among other things, ordaining that prayer has a real and proper power. God’s sovereign decree doesn’t render prayer pointless but establishes its importance and effectiveness (see Westminster Confession 3.1). God’s “mind” is to bring about his sovereign purposes in history and creation through our petitions prayed to him in Jesus’s name.
Thus, for example, God worked because of and through Hezekiah’s prayer to deliver Jerusalem (Isa. 37:21), a deliverance God had sovereignly determined to do from of old (Isa. 37:26; see also 31:8–9). If the eighth century BC deliverance of Jerusalem is any indication, prayer and God’s sovereignty need not only relate in terms of competition.
The Way of Resignation
Does prayer change God’s mind? What stands behind the question seems to be the assumption that if prayer does not, then our motivation for praying takes a hit. How does this compare with the operating assumptions of biblical characters when they pray?
“God’s sovereign decree doesn’t render prayer pointless but establishes its importance and effectiveness”
In 2 Samuel 7, God reveals to King David his sovereign purpose to establish David’s house and throne forever. What does David pray in response? He prays, “O Lord God, confirm forever the word that you have spoken” (v. 25). God reveals his sovereign intention, and it emboldens David to pray that God would do it: “For you, O Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, have made this revelation to your servant, saying, ‘I will build you a house.’ Therefore your servant has found courage to pray this prayer to you” (v. 27).
In Daniel 9, Daniel reads the prophecy of Jeremiah, in which God sovereignly promises first to judge Israel with seventy years of exile, then to restore them from exile (v. 2; see Jer. 25:8–14; 29:10–14). Daniel is in Babylon, nearing the seventieth year of exile, so what does he do? He prays for God to restore Israel, which is what God already sovereignly promised to do (vv. 3–19).
In Philippians 1, Paul prays that the Philippian church’s love would “abound more and more” (v. 9). Paul has already seen the God of grace cause love for Christ’s gospel, and love for Paul, to abound in Philippian lives (vv. 5, 7). Paul knows God is unswerving in his sovereign purposes: if he began a good work in the Philippians, then he will assuredly complete it (v. 6). And Paul prays in accord with this conviction.
For Paul, Daniel, and David (to name a few), conviction concerning God’s sovereign purpose and power doesn’t lead to resignation in prayer: “What’s the point? God’s gonna do what God’s gonna do.” Quite the opposite. It leads them to pray even more fervently, boldly, and perseveringly: “God, do according to your word!” They ask not, “Why pray if God’s sovereign mind doesn’t change?” The operative question is rather, “How could we pray with anything like boldness and perseverance without assurance of God’s sovereignty and his unswerving commitment to his good purposes revealed in his Word?”
The Way of Self-Starting
It’s crucial to realize that the biblical pray-ers are praying in response to God’s sovereign promises and holy purposes already revealed to them in his Word and redemptive work in the world. David finds courage to pray after hearing God’s initiating word to him. Daniel prays after and in response to reading the God-breathed prophecy of Jeremiah. Paul prays after, in response to, and in accord with what he has already witnessed of God’s redemptive work in Christ and its application to the lives of the Philippian Christians.
Too often prayer is treated as a mere tool for the accomplishing of our wants and wishes. It seems God is not doing what’s needed, so we by prayer must try to twist God’s arm to finally speak up, show up, and fix our supposed problems. This is a wrong way, which can only end in futility. The chief problem is in thinking that we ourselves by our prayers get things going.
In everything, God is the initiator. His Word always gets things going: “Let there be light” (Gen. 1:3). Any newness we need is a newness he has already promised and is accomplishing: “Behold, I am making all things new” (Rev. 21:5). God has already spoken, in his Word and supremely in his Son (Heb. 1:1–2). Our part, including our part in prayer, is not to initiate but to respond fittingly to the Word which has preceded us in grace and glory and mercy and might.
“Prayer is fundamentally a relationally loving responsiveness, having listened to God who first speaks to us in love, and having given our attention to what he’s already doing for our good in Christ.”
The Way of Love
Decades after his withdrawal from seminary and from supplication, Jayber Crow reflected on his pilgrimage in a chapter entitled “The Way of Love.” He had suffered joy and disappointment, loss and loneliness and membership in a community, love received in ways he wanted and in ways he didn’t want but learned to accept with gratitude. His had become the way not of figuring out how to pull the right levers to produce a love he thought he needed, but of paying humble attention to the love that is always already there. That love, he came to know, was outside of his control, not to be conformed to the images of his mind, but to be responded to for what it is. He had learned, we might say, to listen first, for only then would he find the proper words to speak.
It is, therefore, no coincidence that this was when, Jayber tells us, “I began to pray again.” For prayer, too, is part of the way of love—it is, indeed, at the center of the way. It is no technique, no mechanical lever for accomplishing our will. Prayer is fundamentally a relationally loving responsiveness, having listened to God who first speaks to us in love, and having given our attention to what he’s already doing for our good in Christ. To the degree that we grow in this way, to that degree we may find we are freed for healthy, humble, hope-filled, and persevering prayer to the sovereign God of love.
Daniel J. Brendsel (PhD, Wheaton College) is the pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Hinckley, Minnesota. He is the author of Answering Speech: The Life of Prayer as Response to God (Crossway, 2023) and several articles appearing in books and journals. He and his wife Jen have four children.
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