Why pray if God will do everything in His will anyway?

Behind this question sits an assumption: that if God has already settled what He will do, then asking Him for anything cannot change it, and so prayer is wasted breath. The verse usually raised to press the point is this:

Psalm 115:3 (NKJV)

But our God is in heaven; He does whatever He pleases.

If God does whatever He pleases, why ask Him for anything at all? A farmer answers that objection every spring without ever thinking about it. He believes God gives the harvest — the rain, the soil, the life inside the seed are all God's doing, and nothing he does with his own hands can manufacture a single ear of grain. Believing that, he goes out and sows his field. He does not stay indoors and reason that since God gives the harvest, sowing makes no difference. He sows because sowing is how God gives it. Seed in the ground is the means God has appointed for grain to come up, and the farmer's certainty about the harvest is exactly what sends him out to the field rather than keeping him home.

This is how Scripture presents prayer everywhere — not as a lever that moves God from outside His plan, but as an instrument God has built into His plan. James makes the point with a man his readers knew well:

James 5:16-18 (NKJV)

Confess your trespasses to one another, and pray for one another, that you may be healed. The effective, fervent prayer of a righteous man avails much. Elijah was a man with a nature like ours, and he prayed earnestly that it would not rain; and it did not rain on the land for three years and six months. And he prayed again, and the heaven gave rain, and the earth produced its fruit.

Notice what James actually claims: prayer avails much. It gets things done. Elijah asked God to hold back the rain, and God held it back. Three and a half years later he asked for it to return, and God sent it. James does not say that praying merely prepared Elijah to accept whatever weather came. He says the man prayed, and God acted.

Now set that alongside God's sovereignty, because both are true at the same time. God had determined that Israel would go without rain, and He had determined the day it would come back. He had also determined that Elijah would kneel and ask for each. The prayers were not added on top of a decision God would have carried out anyway. They were how He carried it out. Remove Elijah's praying from the story and you have not left God's plan intact minus one detail — you have removed the very thing through which the plan came to pass.

The same pattern holds in the life of the Lord Jesus. No one has ever submitted to the Father's will as completely as He did, and no one has ever prayed more. He prayed through whole nights, and He taught His disciples to bring God real requests:

Matthew 6:9-11 (NKJV)

In this manner, therefore, pray: Our Father in heaven, hallowed be Your name. Your kingdom come. Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread.

Both halves belong in the one prayer. “Your will be done” keeps us from treating prayer as a way to bend God to our wishes. “Give us this day our daily bread” keeps us from treating asking as though it were beside the point. We bring God real requests — bread, help, mercy, the salvation of people we love — and we bring them within the will of a Father who already knows what we need before we speak. Prayer is not us informing God or talking Him round; it is us carrying our needs to the One who has commanded us to ask, and trusting Him to answer as a good Father answers.

There is a second answer, and it is true as far as it reaches: prayer changes the one who prays. In bringing our desires to God, we find them slowly reshaped to match His — the more often we say “your will be done,” the more we come to want what He wants — and communion with the Father in prayer is one of the great gifts of the Christian life in its own right. But this is not the whole answer, and it must not be left to carry the weight alone, as though prayer only ever altered the pray-er and never anything else. Scripture asks us to believe more than that. God genuinely gives in answer to prayer — not because He needs our counsel or can be moved from outside His purpose, but because it pleased Him to make the asking of His people part of how those purposes come to pass.

So we pray — not to change the mind of God, but to take up the place He has given us in bringing His will to pass. He has decided what He will do. He has also decided that, for much of it, He will be asked first.