effectiveness of prayer | believers or non alike | divine intervention

when we pray, how do we know our prayer matters? Or is prayer just a means to be in communication and relationship with God? Either way, this question seems very important, because everyday people pray. If you're asked, "do my prayers matter" by either a christian or non christian, how do you answer them?

Depending on what you believe about God, prayer is an interesting concept and idea.

If I believe that God is pre-ordaining everything in the world, it seems that my prayer does not matter, because God has already planned the outcome of the event I am praying about anyways.

If I am an open theist (God knows all options but does not know which action will be chosen until it has happened) and I pray for something or someone and God intervenes and answers my prayer (ie...a friend is dying of cancer, I pray, along with many other people, they were going to die from cancer, but our prayers worked and God saved the friend from dying) then that isn't true freedom is it? Is not total freedom, those places in which God does not intervene? If God does intervene, that then relinquishes my freedom, but maybe we are never meant to have total freedom, only freedom in the moments God chooses not to act. But that seems messed up too, because with all the evil in the world, wars, disease, natural disasters, etc...God is just willing to allow those events to happen and millions of innocent people are murdered over the course of human history. You can say, we live in a ______(fallen, shitty) world, but our response is not to just throw up our hands, God is still present, right? So....what does that mean?

Now, what about the idea of "middle knowledge" which says God knows all possibilities of different scenarios AND knows which actions will be taken in those moments. This still does not make sense with those moments that God chooses to intervene.

So does God intervene? If so, why? We can never fully know, can we? How do you know when your prayer is actually effective or is it just coincidence. You can then choose to assume it was God who answered a prayer, but then what about all the prayers of the people who have no food and die because they can't get basic necessities to survive? If you believe that it is the "sin" in their life that has had God reject them, then we should all be rejected and that is not really consistent with who God appears to be in the Bible.

I don't know, just some thoughts. Maybe C.S. Lewis is right, maybe prayer is more for the person praying than for any other purpose. I'd be curious to know your thoughts. 

creation - not perfect | sin - a vandalism of shalom

I have been reading a lot on Sin and creation. Here are a few of those thoughts. 


Sin
With entering of sin into the world, I would tend to lean to explaining this as a "vandalism of shalom." Cornelius Plantinga in his book Not The Way It's Supposed To Be, he explains sin as a vandalism of shalom. I love this! I think God's intent in creating this world is shalom. God left humans, creatures, and nature responsible and even empowered each entity to keep alive shalom. Somewhere along the line, this was disrupted, ending up with shalom being vandalized. I believe we as Christians are to help in the restoration of bring God's kingdom on earth back to shalom. I do not think we can bring it to a full sense of shalom, as thought we've been given power on earth, we are still limited. Either way I don't think that means we can use that as an excuse to do nothing about this restoration process. 

So why does this sin exist? I am not sure we can ever truly know, but this is how I have come to grasp the idea. 


Creation | not perfect
A summary of Creation Untamed begins with Terrence Fretheim’s identification of creation as a “good” result from God, that is, not perfect. In this sense, God created the world not perfect intentionally. By God creating the world good, God left space for humanity, nature and creatures to exist in the world and continue the process of Gods creation. This project was left into the hands of imperfect beings, humanity, along with the other creatures of creation and eventually, sin, as we know it entered the world. Thus, the existence of the world is a continual process of creation working with God to restore the world back to Gods original intent, shalom.
God created the world good, not perfect.” It is a common belief in evangelicalism that when God created the world as we have in the Genesis story, that created order was perfectness and exactly how God intended humans to live. Nevertheless, the creation story includes God saying that the subjects created were “good.” Fretheim also says, which I agree with, “Genesis does not present the creation as a finished product…for creation to stay just as God originally created it would constitute failure of the divine design…God continues to create and uses creation in a vocation that involves the becoming of creation” (p. 15).


This is not a perfect explanation, but I think it helps in understanding sin. It is not good enough to me to say God is sovereign. I've talked to enough people to feel that that explanation does not do the amount of evil and suffering justice. I think it gets God off the hook to easily for the evil in the world. Does it mean that God is to blame for some evil that exists? Maybe. But that doesn't remove the love of God or the presence of God in those times of suffering. At least that is my belief.