Tony Jones posted a poll on his blog a couple of weeks ago. “Why do we pray?” it asked, and provided just two possible answers: “Because prayer changes God,” and “Because prayer changes me.”
Fred Clark took up the discussion in a couple of posts, and I’d like to add a little bit to it as well.
To answer the question, I find myself pulling Stanley Hauerwas and Will Willimon’s book on the Lord’s Prayer off my bookshelf. In the introuction, the authors have this comment:
“It is the Lord’s Prayer. We, who are accustomed to thinking of prayer as a good strategy for getting what we want and an appropriate opening for football games and important civic meetings, may be surprised that we must be taught to pray. This prayer is not for getting what we want but rather for bending our will toward what God wants… The Lord’s Prayer is a lifelong act of bending our will toward God in the way that God has offered- “thy will be done, thy kingdom come.” We have quite enough teaching in the various modes of achieving our will in this world.” (Lord, Teach Us: pg. 19 and 22)
