by Graham Phillips | The horrific Texas church massacre in which Devin Patrick Kelley murdered 26 worshippers during their Sunday service including children as young as 5 caused a stir in the twittersphere for a number of reasons. Firstly that the shooter was known to be an atheist and vehemently anti-Christian, a fact almost entirely glossed over by mainstream media, secondly that it provided yet more ammunition for the already raging debate over gun control in the U.S and furthermore a significant number took it as an opportunity to deride the offering of ‘thoughts and prayers’ for victims. This particular protest was not only untimely and based on clear prejudice but also served to dance upon the graves of those murdered by Kelley arguably because they believed in the power of prayer.
I want to draw your attention to one clear delineation to begin with; thoughts are not the same as prayers. My thoughts, though they may be charitable, kind and even extraordinarily hopeful towards another, they have no power in and of themselves to accomplish anything. There is only one free, moral agent engaged in the process of thinking; the thinker. The object of one’s thinking is impervious to these thoughts, untouched, unmoved by them no matter how powerful the thoughts may seem to the subject. Thoughts can only exhibit real power upon an object or an external environment when they are articulated and given form or when they are acted upon. Thoughts and prayers are not analogous and they are unequally yoked in this common turn of phrase.
Prayer is an entirely different animal. By definition it is ‘a reverent petition made to God’. Though this dictionary description is woefully inadequate in summarising the practice of prayer it makes one clear distinction, prayer involves two parties; the person praying and God. Now, if we assume for the sake of argument that the recipient of prayer is the Christian God; the omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent creator of the cosmos and He who came to earth in the person of Jesus Christ then there are some potent inferences to draw. The Christian God would be able to act upon prayers and on numerous occasions through the person of Jesus Christ affirms that He does in fact act upon the prayers of the faithful (John 14:13, Luke 11:5-13; 12:31). Jesus himself was a man of prayer, rather than court fame and fortune He consistently withdrew to wild places to seek His Father in prayer. To pray is to solicit the help of Almighty God, to invoke His divine power to manifest in time and space. Prayer is not positive thinking, far from it. Prayer has power precisely because it is a petition to an all-powerful, all-knowing, loving being, a free moral agent, a rational mind who can and does act upon our prayers. Thoughts not acted upon or articulated have no power to move anything, only the thinker of these thoughts is able to furnish them with any sort of ‘power’, and even then the power belongs to the thinker not the thoughts themselves. So me ‘sending you my thoughts’ is not in any way the same as me actually praying for you.
Those stating that prayer is a useless cop-out and an inadequate response to tragedy are nearly always presupposing the non-existence of God. Assuming that their presuppositions are correct and God does not exist then it follows that prayer is most certainly futile and powerless. People who deride prayer never offer us any good reasons to believe that prayer doesn’t work, they just make the claim. Even if they are honest about their presuppositions (that they believe God does not exist) they rarely offer any arguments or evidence to support their claims, we are just supposed to agree with them. As so often is the case in our culture it has become acceptable to mock Christianity and hide behind rhetoric and witticisms without actually presenting a coherent argument. It’s lazy and intellectually dishonest.
The church shooting itself is being touted as evidence to show that prayer doesn’t work. There are, however several problems with this position. The main one being that it presupposes to know how God ought to have responded to a particular prayer. For example, ‘the people in the church would have prayed that their lives would be spared and God ought to have spared their lives. They died, therefore God is either not real or isn’t able to or doesn’t answer prayer.’ In order to make this claim one would need to know the mind of God, to know every conceivable outcome contingent upon the event in question, extrapolate that over all of time and then be able to weight each outcome and determine what God’s course of action ought to have been. An impossible task for a finite mind to accomplish. Also, those who perished in the shooting are now with the author of Life Himself, Jesus according to scripture, a pleasure that is beyond all else.
Prayer is a perfectly reasonable and practical response to a tragic turn of events. One is making an appeal to a power much higher than themselves. In the case of the Christian God, it is an appeal to a God who has shown that He hears and acts upon the prayers of the faithful. Throughout scripture and in the person of Jesus Christ prayer is shown to be effective and of huge practical benefit to humanity. Speaking personally, I can attest to the power of prayer in my life. God has answered many prayers of mine, often so profoundly that I’m startled. It’s also true to say that some of my prayers have not been answered, though this has been difficult to process on occasion it hasn’t provided me with any serious reason to doubt God’s existence or willingness or power to answer my prayers. My experience isn’t the sole arbiter of truth, it may inform my conception of God but it cannot supplant the revelation of Christ and holy scripture.
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