If God Knows, What’s the Point?
By Dan Crawford

1. The Bible teaches prayer.
The first verbal interaction between God and mankind is recorded in Genesis 3:1–19, when God seeks out Adam and Eve and asks why they are hiding from Him. The first reference to prayer in the Bible is Genesis 4:26, “Seth also had a son, and he named him Enosh. At that time people began to call on the name of the Lord.” The Bible’s first use of the word pray is in Genesis 20:7: “Now return the man’s wife, for he is a prophet, and he will pray for you and you will live.” The last use of the word prayer in the Bible is in Revelation 8:4: “The smoke of the incense, together with the prayers of God’s people, went up before God from the angel’s hand.” The next to the last verse in the Bible, Revelation 22:20, contains the last prayer in the Bible: “Amen. Come, Lord Jesus.” All the way between Genesis and Revelation, the Bible teaches prayer. According to Herbert Lockyer in All the Prayers of the Bible, Scripture records no fewer than 650 definite prayers, of which 450 have recorded answers. (This is exclusive of the Psalms, which is itself a book of prayer.) So, from cover to cover, the Bible is about prayer.2. Jesus modeled prayer.
Jesus was known for His great intercession, praying early in the morning and late into the night, seeking His Father in solitude, and modeling prayer for His followers.- The Gospels contain 24 references to Jesus praying, and Hebrews adds two more.
- The most used verb in the ministry of Jesus was not to preach, to teach, to heal, or to counsel. It was the verb to pray.
- The disciples discovered prayer’s priority for Jesus. After observing Him heal the sick, restore the fallen, multiply the food, raise the dead, teach in parables, still the storm, and silence the critics, the disciples’ ultimate request of Him was, “Lord, teach us to pray” (Luke 11:1).
3. Christian history records prayer.
Ever since the disciples spent ten days praying before the Day of Pentecost, Christian history has been dotted with great examples of prayer. Time and space permit the sharing of only two examples: Moravian revival of 1727. When Pastor Rothe finished his morning sermon one August Sunday at Herrnhut, Germany, he fell to his knees and began praying. Various members of the small Moravian Brethren church quickly followed. When they finished, much to their amazement, it was midnight. Thus began what history records as the “Hourly Intercession,” wherein 24 teams of at least two men and two women were assigned to pray for one hour each, covering the clock with hourly prayer. History records that the prayer effort lasted for 100 years without interruption. In 1732, as they were praying, a young man named Conrad stood to announce that he had felt God’s call to take the gospel to the Virgin Islands. Another young man admitted to the same call, and thus began a movement of church planting that exceeded the total of all churches started in the previous 200 years. So committed were these new missionaries that, reportedly, they packed all their belongings in their caskets, assuming they would not return alive. During the 100 years that the Moravians were praying for “the heathen of the world,” numerous significant events took place. Although there is no way of proving their connection, it is easy to think of God responding to the prayers of this small denomination of believers with global results such as these:- the First Great Awakening (1734)
- the conversion of John Wesley, incidentally at a Moravian prayer meeting (1738)
- the Methodist Revivals in England (1739)
- the Seven-year Concert of Prayer in Boston (1747)
- the Baptist First Monday Prayer Meetings (1783)
- the Second Great Awakening (1792)
- the sailing of William Carey to India, citing the example of Moravian missions to his resistant Baptist Missionary Society (1792)
- the Haystack Prayer Meeting, resulting in the Student Volunteer Missions Movement, which was the beginning of the modern missionary movement from within the U.S. (1806).