Prayer -- Participating with God

Continuing the posts on prayer, I want to now suggest that prayers of petition are important in our lives for a second reason. In the previous post, it was argued that prayers of petition are crucial as reminders to us of our ongoing dependence upon God's personal providence. Furthermore, I tried to make the case that expressing our needs to God (even though God may know them) is critical because communing (from which we get the idea of communication) is the essence of the being made in God's image. But you can read that presentation for yourself.

Here I want to make another point about why we pray prayers of petition unto God.

We pray in this supplicative fashion because we are participating in God's own activity. Recall the words of St. Paul in Romans 8:

26In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express. 27And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints in accordance with God's will.

Here's an intriguing question, then (at least in my mind). Why in the world would the Spirit himself intercede for us, if God's will is going to be done in our lives anyway. Perhaps the Spirit's intercession for us, "with groans that words cannot express" is God's own crying out to God. One has to wonder whose "groans" the Spirit expresses -- our human groanings or God's own.Of course, Paul could merely be speaking in some poetic fashion, but then these words would have no revelatory or theological significance.

Whatever else it means, when we pray we are actually joining with God's own activity for us and in us. So, perhaps one of the reasons we practice intercessory petitionary prayer is that we might learn how to pray as the Holy Spirit prays.