Communing with God in Prayer

If God knows and controls everything, why pray? Does prayer really change anything? What’s the underlying assumed definition of prayer in the question? It’s really only talking about one kind of prayer: the prayer of supplication, or the prayer of intercession. How does God’s sovereignty in any way cast a shadow over a prayer of adoration? How would God’s knowledge or His determinate counsel affect in any way the prayer of adoration? The only thing it should do is incite us to a greater vocabulary and a greater capacity for expressing our affection and adoration for who He is.

So even if God knows what I’m going to say before I say it, how does that affect the beauty of my adoration? Or sometimes you know that I’ll be in a conversation with my wife, and my wife and I know each other, I’m convinced, as well as two people could know each other. And she knows what I think before I think it. She knows what I’m going to say before I say it. I know what she’s going to say before she says it. And I know that I can do that with Dr. Gerstner. Before he opens his mouth, I know what he’s going to say. And I still ask him what he thinks. I say, “Dr. Gerstner, what do you think about this?” And I know very well before he even here says, I can just take his place and say, “Here’s what he’s going to say, guys.” But I still want to hear him say it.

And we can understand that on a human level. How much more do we get the privilege of articulating with our voices, our innermost thoughts, when we enter into the communion of God? We could, of course, go into our closets and shut the door and just sit there, and then come out and say, “I had a great season of prayer. God read my mind, and I went to sleep.” But that’s not communion. We are creatures who commune and communicate not exclusively, but primarily, through speech. And prayer is a form of speech, of communication, and that’s how we commune and communicate with God.