Why Prayer Is a Precursor to God’s Action
by Dr. Peter A. Kerr
Many Christians quietly struggle with prayer. We are told it is essential, yet we are often unsure why. If God already knows what we need, why ask (Matt 6:8)? If God is loving and powerful, why does He sometimes seem to wait? When prayers appear unanswered, prayer can begin to feel confusing or even discouraging.
Scripture, however, presents prayer in a very different light. Prayer is not a technique for getting God to do what we want, nor is it merely a spiritual exercise meant only to shape our inner life. Prayer matters because God has chosen to make it matter. He has freely ordered the world to work relationally rather than automatically, and prayer is the primary way His children participate in that relationship.
Prayer as partnership, not persuasion
Jesus’ teaching on prayer is consistently conditional. “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened” (Matt 7:7–8). These words are not poetic filler. They describe how God has chosen to work. Scripture does not say that finding happens apart from seeking or that receiving is unrelated to asking.
James makes this even more explicit: “You do not have because you do not ask” (Jas 4:2). The statement assumes real loss resulting from prayerlessness. Prayer, biblically, is not merely expressive. It is participatory.
Yet prayer is never about persuading a reluctant God. Scripture is equally clear that prayer does not begin with us. The Holy Spirit intercedes for us “with groanings too deep for words” (Rom 8:26–27), and Christ “always lives to make intercession” for His people (Heb 7:25). Human prayer does not initiate mercy. It joins an already-moving divine love.
Why God does not always act automatically
Scripture also speaks honestly about the world as it is. Human sin has real consequences. Much suffering arises not because God directly sends it, but because the world has been bent by misused freedom—personally, socially, and historically.
The New Testament even describes evil as having an “atmospheric” quality. Paul speaks of “the prince of the power of the air” (Eph 2:2), and creation itself is said to be in “bondage to corruption,” groaning for redemption (Rom 8:20–22). This means that suffering is often the result of a world distorted by sin rather than a direct act of God.
God’s restraint in such a world is not indifference. Scripture repeatedly shows that God allows people to experience the consequences of their choices (Rom 1:24–28). This handing over is a form of judgment that honors moral reality. Automatic intervention would collapse responsibility and undermine the freedom love requires.
Prayer does not erase this reality. It opens space within it.
Prayer and the gift of shared responsibility
From the beginning, Scripture teaches humanity was given real responsibility in the world. God entrusted creation to human stewardship, granting dominion under His authority (Gen 1:26–28). Psalm 115:16 states this plainly: “The heavens are the LORD’s heavens, but the earth He has given to the children of men.”
God governs the world covenantally, not competitively. He does not routinely override human agency, because doing so would negate the role He Himself bestowed. Prayer is how that entrusted responsibility rightly turns back toward God.
When Jesus taught His disciples to pray, “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” (Matt 6:10), He assumed that God’s will is not automatically enacted on earth. It is welcomed. Prayer is the act of inviting God’s good purposes into a world that has wandered from them.
Asking as an act of trust
Prayer gives God a just reason to act where love already desires to move. This does not mean prayer changes God’s character. “I the LORD do not change” (Mal 3:6). Rather, prayer changes the relational situation.
Even among human parents, a child’s asking matters—not because the parent lacked love beforehand, but because relationship itself carries moral weight. Scripture repeatedly portrays God responding to intercession without suggesting manipulation (Gen 18:22–33; Exod 32:11–14).
Apart from prayer, humanity often receives exactly what it insists upon—its own way, and therefore the consequences that follow (Hos 4:17). Prayer reopens the door to grace without denying justice or freedom.
Prayer forms us as it helps the world
Scripture never separates the effectiveness of prayer from its formative power. As we pray, we are changed. We learn to see as God sees, to desire what He desires, and to think with the mind of Christ. “We have the mind of Christ” (1 Cor 2:16).
Prayer matures discernment rather than bypassing it. Over time, we learn not only what God says, but how God thinks. Through prayer, the children learn the Father’s business—how love governs, how wisdom waits, and how authority serves. This is essential because the purpose of creation is to form sons and daughters who will reign with God for eternity.
This is why Scripture treats prayer as both holy and weighty. God has chosen to allow human prayer to matter. As C. S. Lewis observed, this is no stranger than allowing human actions to cause real events in any other domain. Love that is real must be free, and freedom always carries risk.
The quiet strength of prayer
Prayer is not preparation for something more important. It is already participation in what God is doing. God does not step aside so prayer can act. God acts through prayer.
Prayer does not “work” like a mechanism. God works—because He has chosen to honor the prayers of His children.
He waits, not because He is distant, but because He is faithful (Ps 27:14).
He listens, not because He is persuaded, but because He is relational (Ps 34:15).
He responds, not because justice is ignored, but because love fulfills it (Rom 3:25–26).
Prayer is not weakness. It is holy love governing the world through freedom—and inviting us to take part.
Supporting Scripture (in NASB)
Matthew 6:8 “So do not be like them; for your Father knows what you need before you ask Him.”
Matthew 7:7–8 “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened.”
James 4:2 “You lust and do not have; so you commit murder. And you are envious and cannot obtain; so you fight and quarrel. You do not have because you do not ask.”
Romans 8:26–27 “Now in the same way the Spirit also helps our weakness; for we do not know what to pray for as we should, but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words; and He who searches the hearts knows what the mind of the Spirit is, because He intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.”
Hebrews 7:25 “Therefore He is also able to save forever those who come to God through Him, since He always lives to make intercession for them.”
Ephesians 2:2 “in which you previously walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience.”
Romans 8:20–22 “For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself also will be set free from its slavery to corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groans and suffers the pains of childbirth together until now.”
Romans 1:24–28 “Therefore God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, so that their bodies would be dishonored among them. For they exchanged the truth of God for falsehood, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen. For this reason God gave them over to dishonorable passions; for their females exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural, and in the same way also the males abandoned the natural function of the female and burned in their desire toward one another, males with males committing indecent acts and receiving in their own persons the due penalty of their error. And just as they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them over to a depraved mind, to do those things that are not proper.”
Genesis 1:26–28 “Then God said, ‘Let Us make mankind in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the livestock and over all the earth, and over every crawling thing that crawls on the earth.’ So God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. God blessed them; and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth.’”
Psalm 115:16 “The heavens are the heavens of the LORD, But the earth He has given to the sons of mankind.”
Matthew 6:10 “Your kingdom come. Your will be done, On earth as it is in heaven.”
Malachi 3:6 “For I, the LORD, do not change; therefore you, the sons of Jacob, have not come to an end.”
Genesis 18:22–33 (Abraham’s intercession for Sodom; key verses include v. 23–33, where Abraham pleads for the city to be spared if righteous people are found)
Exodus 32:11–14 “But Moses pleaded with the LORD his God, and said, ‘LORD, why does Your anger burn against Your people whom You have brought out of the land of Egypt with great power and with a mighty hand? Why should the Egyptians talk, saying, “With evil intent He brought them out to kill them on the mountains and to destroy them from the face of the earth”? Turn from Your burning anger and change Your mind about doing harm to Your people. Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, Your servants to whom You swore by Yourself, and said to them, “I will multiply your descendants as the stars of the heavens, and all this land of which I have spoken I will give to your descendants, and they shall inherit it forever.”’ So the LORD changed His mind about the harm which He said He would do to His people.”
Hosea 4:17 “Ephraim is joined to idols; Let him alone.”
1 Corinthians 2:16 “For who has known the mind of the Lord, that he will instruct Him? But we have the mind of Christ.”
Psalm 27:14 “Wait for the LORD; Be strong and let your heart take courage; Yes, wait for the LORD.”
Psalm 34:15 “The eyes of the LORD are toward the righteous, And His ears are inclined to their cry.”
Romans 3:25–26 “whom God displayed publicly as a propitiation in His blood through faith. This was to demonstrate His righteousness, because in the forbearance of God He passed over the sins previously committed; for the demonstration, I say, of His righteousness at the present time, so that He would be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.”