How To Pray Part Three: Why We Pray

Evan D Garner

Jul 20

July 20, 2025 – The 6th Sunday after Pentecost: Proper 11C
Amos 8:1-12; Psalm 52; Colossians 1:15-28; Luke 10:38-42

Today is the third and final sermon in our short series on how to pray. Each week, I’ve focused on the psalm appointed for the day and used it as a model for our prayers. Today’s psalm is Psalm 52: “Oh, that God would demolish you utterly, topple you, and snatch you from your dwelling, and root you out of the land of the living!” Given those words, you might be wondering whether I thought this through before I committed to a three-week series, but I can’t think of a better psalm to help us explore the topic of why we pray.

A few years ago at St. Paul’s, we invited the congregation to participate in the Bible Challenge—a program of reading the whole Bible in a year. We were still isolated because of the pandemic, and we wanted to find ways for small groups to continue to grow in their faith and stay connected with each other. We offered a reading plan, which included lessons from the Old Testament, the New Testament, and the Psalms every day. I can’t remember how many people took part, but it was something like thirty or forty. One thing I can remember, however, is how many people complained about the psalms.

Psalms like this one can be hard to read. They’re the messy, real, honest prayers of God’s people, and reading them out of context sometimes feels disruptive or distracting. At the end of last week’s sermon, I invited you to include a passage from the psalms in your prayers every day. Our focus last week was on what we are supposed to pray—the words we should say to God. I suggested that prayer isn’t actually about what we say to God but what God says within us, and I proposed that praying the psalms was one way for us to be sure that, when we pray, our words are God’s Word.

But what if the psalms appointed for the day aren’t really the prayers of our hearts? What if our situation is considerably different from that of the psalmist? What if we aren’t in the mood for God to topple the wicked and demolish them utterly? Can a psalm like Psalm 52, with its petition for violence and destruction, really be a prayer we offer to God?

This week, our focus is on the why of prayer, and I think Psalm 52—even if it doesn’t fit our circumstance exactly—is a great model for honest prayer. It reminds us that the reason we pray in the first place is so that we might become true to the God who is true to us. Prayer isn’t about getting what we want. It’s about becoming more like God, and this psalm—even with all its anger and hurt—reminds us of that.

First, let’s notice how messy and raw Psalm 52 is. At the beginning, we can’t even tell to whom the psalmist is praying: “You tyrant, why do you boast of wickedness against the godly all day long?” We don’t know who the psalmist has in mind, but we can tell that it isn’t God. Someone or something has come against God’s people, and the psalmist dares to address them directly. The psalmist then lists a series of moral failures on the part of his enemy, repeatedly lambasting their dishonest speech. At one point, the psalmist even addresses the enemy’s tongue itself: “You love all words that hurt, O you deceitful tongue.” Although we do not know what sort of treachery inspired these words, we can feel the psalmist’s anger and woundedness spewing forth in them.

I find comfort in knowing that emotions like these can have a place in prayer. It’s in those moments of broken, wounded, battered desperation that I feel like I need God the most. Imagine being told that God will only hear you when you calm down and get your act together. We’d all be sunk! Sometimes we’re angry. Sometimes we’re hurt. Sometimes we’re frustrated. And we need God in those moments, too, and the psalmist seems to know that. But there’s more to this psalm than anger.

Notice how, after the psalmist utters a curse upon his enemies, the psalm turns inward: “The righteous shall see and tremble, and they shall laugh at you, saying, ‘This is the one who did not take God for a refuge, but trusted in great wealth and relied upon wickedness.’” This prayer is more than an imprecatory incantation. It is a petition for the psalmist’s own faithfulness—a way for the one who says these words to be shaped by them into a faithful child of God. And that is how prayer works—by forming us into the image of God—the image which was lost by our first parents and restored by Jesus Christ, the one in whom all our prayers are offered. Prayer is how we hold the messiness of our lives and of the world up to God in order that God might sort it all out by first sorting us out. And that starts by being honest with God in prayer.

What if I told you that God knows you better than you know yourself? The Bible uses the metaphor of God knowing how many hairs are on our heads in order to teach us that there is no detail about our lives—inside or out—that God does not know completely. As Jesus taught his disciples, God knows what we need even before we ask, and, as the psalmist wrote, “Before a word is on my tongue, O Lord, you know it completely.” If God knows us even better than we know ourselves and if God knows what we need even better than we do, the purpose of prayer is not to make our requests known to God but to make God’s ways known to us.

Our prayers very well might be the channel through which God works a miraculous healing in the life of someone we love, so we are right to pray earnestly for that healing, but prayer is more than a request for a miracle. It is how we offer ourselves to be recipients and instruments of God’s love. Prayer is how God shapes us into a people who can recognize and trust that no matter what happens God’s love is always bigger than any situation and that God’s love will always triumph. But that only works if we give God our whole selves and not just the polite, well-dressed part of us that shows up in church on Sunday mornings.

So what does that mean for our daily prayers? How do we get honest with God in prayer without getting lost in our emotion? By setting aside time for real, deep, true communication with God.

Sometimes, when I ask people about their prayer life, they tell me that they pray to God all throughout the day. If, by that, they mean that they set aside 15 minutes to be in the presence of God every morning, noon, and night, they’re on the right track. But I suspect what they really mean is that they offer up a quick prayer whenever the thought crosses their mind. I’m stuck in traffic, so I should pray. I have an important meeting, so I should pray. I don’t want to cook dinner tonight, so I should pray. But that’s not a real prayer life. That’s like telling a marriage counselor that you communicate with your spouse all the time by sending her text messages or Instagram reels. That doesn’t count, and you know it.

Prayer is our love language for God. It is the means by which we seek intimacy with the one who knows us best. It is the vehicle through which our relationship with God—our dependence upon God, our flourishing in God, our participation in God’s love—grows and deepens. We can’t nurture our relationship with God if we’re only sending God a text message every few hours.

Prayer is how we bring to God our true selves—our anger, our jealousy, our frustration, our failure, our longing, our hopefulness, our insecurity, our desire—in order that God might transform the whole us into the image of God’s Son. God already knows what you want. Prayer is how what you want becomes what God wants.

So, this week, I want you to try something new. I still want you to start every morning with prayer—even if it’s short and simple. It is important that we begin each day by giving everything that that day will bring back to God. And I still want you to find time to pray the psalms every day. Even if the psalms you read aren’t the specific prayers of your heart, by praying the psalms you are learning how to let your words be God’s Word until God’s Word becomes your words. But, this week, I want you to take one more step and make time for silence.

Silence is how we make space for God to speak back to us. Silence is how we listen for what God will say after we bring all our baggage and drop it at the foot of God’s throne. Silence is how we allow God to teach us and surprise us and guide us into the life that God desires for us.

At some point during the day each day, I want you to set a five-minute timer and use those five minutes to listen for God with your whole body, mind, and spirit. Before you do, though, I want you to sit comfortably in a place where you likely won’t be disturbed, and I want you to take a few deep, cleansing breaths as a way of letting go of your distractions, being present in the moment, and opening yourself up to God. I want you to invite God to sit with you by lighting a candle or placing something like a flower, a Bible, an icon, or a cross in front of you. And then I want you to set the timer and see if you can lose yourself in the presence of your beloved.

It will take practice, but good things always do. In time, you might grow from five minutes to ten minutes to thirty minutes, but five minutes every day is enough to make a big difference in your life. As Lowell Grisham says, “Pray as you can, not as you can’t!” In the end, the purpose of prayer is to become like Christ, and we can’t do that unless we spend real time with him. United with him, his faith becomes our faith, his trust becomes our trust, his love becomes our love. Desire alone is not enough to form us into the image of Christ. It takes time and effort and intention, which, after all, is prayer.