Prayer is an important aspect of the Christian life, and no Christian contests this.  How important is it, and what role does it play?

More than any thing else recorded in the New Testament, Jesus prayed.  He prayed more than He healed, more than He preached, more than He taught, more than He baptized.  He was God the Son, and yet He constantly talked with God.  The One who we would think could pray the least may have prayed the most.

Prayer is one of four rituals given to Christians in the New Testament along with communion, baptism, and fasting.  Of these, prayer is the one practiced most frequently.  Whenever there was any decision to be made and whenever they faced troubles and whenever they celebrated and even whenever they simply gathered together, the disciples, apostles, and church fathers prayed.  Indeed, we are commanded to “pray without ceasing” and “through prayer and petition to present our requests to God.”  From the many accounts of Biblical figures, it appears that the closer to God a person was, the more he or she prayed.

Prayer is one of the central themes of the Bible, and its importance cannot be overstated.  We, as Christians, must pray.  We cannot claim to be Christians and not pray.  Whether we like it or not, whether we have time or not, whether we know how to or not, we must pray, both communally and individually, on a regular basis.

Beyond the examples, exhortations, and commands to pray, there are other reasons to do so.  Prayer is direct communication with God.  When we pray we are communing with God.  The more we have contact with Him, the more we shall become like Him, and the more He can speak to us and teach us.  Just as we change to become like those with whom we spend time, the more time we spend with God, the more we change, and the more the Holy Spirit can change us, to become like Him.  The closer we get to God, the more in line with His will we become, the easier it is to hear His voice.  The more we are with Him and the more He talks to us, the closer to Him we become and so on.  I believe this is the primary reason for prayer.

The secondary reason for prayer is to thank Him for His blessings.  The action of thanking God helps bring us perspective.  We see that He was at work and that His efforts rather than ours are responsible for good in the world and that He is taking care of us.  This perspective brings us humility.  To sincerely praise and acknowledge Him, we must humble ourselves.  Few virtues are more highly valued in the Bible than humility, and prayer is one of the most important ways in which we cultivate it.
 
The third reason we pray is to present our requests and petitions before God.  He already knows what we need and what we are going to say.  However, the act of asking Him is important (mostly for the two foregoing reasons).  CS Lewis wrote in the Chronicles of Narnia, “Aslan already knows, but I think He likes to asked, all the same.”  He wants us to ask because in the asking we commune with Him and humble ourselves.

Now it is going to get tricky, and these are my thoughts, not to be taken as orthodox Christian theology.  We have free will.  This allows us to obey and disobey God.  This also prevents God from interfering with natural consequences of our free will.  However, if we freely pray, asking God to be relieved of those consequences, then He is able to act without disturbing our free will.  God cannot violate His laws, and thus He cannot abrogate our free will without our permission.  We grant Him that permission when we pray.

This is not to say that He is ignoring us because we have failed to pray.  There are many reasons why He may not answer our prayers as we would want Him to.  However, one of the reasons we pray and one of the reasons that He does answer prayer is because of our free will, because we freely pray.  It is said that prayer moves the hand of God or that prayer changes God’s mind.  God is certainly not a candy machine, and it is not so much that we change God.  Rather, our prayers move us, and our pride and free will, out of His way.

For these reasons we pray: to commune with God and grow closer to Him; to praise Him and develop humility; to petition Him and free Him to act without violating His laws.  We have the examples of every godly man and woman in history to encourage us to pray.  We have the command of God Himself to pray.  As with so many things in the Christian life, it is not easy.  It requires discipline, focus, and a real desire to obey God, and these do not come naturally to anyone.  To assist us, we have all that we need:  we have the Holy Spirit, and we have each other.  A Christian must obey God; a Christian must pray.