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Excerpt from

Call Him, He'll Help: A Regular Person's Guide to Praying for People

How Does My Prayer Help?

This is a fair question. Because God doesn’t need your prayer to help someone else.

God is all-knowing, all-seeing, and all-powerful. He knows everything about you, but He also knows about everyone and everything else. What appears chaotic and unfathomably complicated is clear and easy to understand for God because He created it.

And because He is not constrained by time and space, as we are, He can be everywhere He needs to handle everything. And His timing is 100 percent perfect every time.

So, in that context, you aren’t telling Him anything He doesn’t already know. Whoever you are praying about, God already knows who they are, what their challenges may be, and how and when He will resolve them. So why bother praying for another person when God already has their needs covered?

The answer is primarily about you. When you pray on behalf of another person, yourself, or some other thing, you are demonstrating your faith in God. He loves it when we depend on Him. He knows He has whatever you are asking for under His perfect control, and His desire in all instances will be done. But unlike an addled driver getting irritated by a backseat driver, God loves to hear from you, on behalf of someone else, or yourself, or anything at all. Repeatedly, if you wish, because He loves you.

By praying for people you care about, you are adding your voice to others who love the people involved. God loves this—a chorus of prayer for anyone is an act of love and faith. And trusting God is faith in action.

God is also interested in your response to His solution. We are hopefully grateful when God answers our prayers in ways that make us happy—a sick person recovers, a couple conceives a child, a student graduates, or a soldier comes back from war safely. All happy outcomes, thank God.

But what is your response when God doesn’t answer in the positive, happy way you wanted?

Recall He is not a vending machine or Amazon.com. The Lord is the King of the universe and everything in it. He has a plan beyond our ability to comprehend. It takes precedence. Always.

Because of the simplistic way we look at things, we may think God failed if the outcome isn’t what we had asked for. We may decide He has ignored our prayer for some reason. Or maybe He didn’t get our message.

God doesn’t miss messages or ignore prayers. God never fails, and He never lies.