Of course, God knows what we need even before we ask for it. Yet it delights God when we humble ourselves and pray to him. It demonstrates that we need him, it stirs us to love and worship him and know him as our true source of life. Our affections and zeal for the Lord grow as we pray to him.

If we believe that God is sovereign, all-knowing, all-powerful and that he is a good Father who knows all our needs, then why bother to pray? Isn’t praying to God then a waste of time?

As we shall see, prayer is certainly no waste of time. Why pray then? The short answer is that God commands us to pray. Jesus instructs us to pray and even details exactly how we should pray in Matthew 6:9-13, in what we know as the Lord’s Prayer. We can see that in this prayer, we are to ask God for things. We are to ask for his kingdom to come, for his will to be done as in heaven, for him to give us daily bread, for the forgiveness of our sins, that we would be kept from temptation and be delivered from evil.

Yet the question still remains—surely God desires to grant us all these things anyway as his children, so why pray for them?

John Calvin’s insights into prayer are valuable at this point. He believed that prayer is not so much for God’s benefit, but rather for our own (see Institutes3.20.3). Of course, God knows what we need even before we ask for it. Yet it delights God when we humble ourselves and pray to him. It demonstrates that we need him, it stirs us to love and worship him and know him as our true source of life. Our affections and zeal for the Lord grow as we pray to him.

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