In response to the recent mass shooting in the Texas church that killed 26 people, many Americans are questioning the efficacy of prayer. If praying actually worked, wouldn’t the churchgoers still be alive?
In an article at Fox News, Jeremy Hunt cites a number of tweets about the shooting that have recently appeared on his Twitter feed. Coming from a number of gun control advocates, many of these tweets imply that prayers didn’t do the victims any good. As a result, they say, our response to the shooting should not be to pray for the hurting congregation but to make stricter gun control laws.
One of these tweets reads, “If prayers were the answer [to] gun violence wouldn’t people at a church service be safe? Please make gun laws.” Another tweeter said, “The murdered victims were in a church. If prayers did anything, they’d still be alive.”
This and similar comments display a fundamentally skewed understanding of what prayer is and what it does. They speak of prayer as if it has power inherent in itself—that it functions for the sole purpose of summoning certain results, as rubbing a lamp is said to summon a genie.
Prayer, however, has nothing to do with controlling events or bending God’s will to ours. Rather, as Robert Velarde writes at Focus on the Family, it is first and foremost an act of obedience to God and a means of communicating with Him. And, rather than acting as a way to make God fulfill our wishes, prayer allows Christians to take part in “good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do” (Ephesians 2:10).
In fact, just as gun laws aren’t the ultimate answer to this sort of violence—if by “answer” we mean “solution”—prayers themselves also are not the answer. The prayers of people shocked and horrified by the news are for consolation in the face of evil, the strength to seek justice, the wisdom to know the best course of action, or even the eternal rest of the departed. God is the one and only effective “answer” or “solution” to the evil we see in the human race. He alone can turn people’s hearts from evil and erase the scars left by earthly suffering.
This particular attack in Texas highlights the fact that Christians are not immune from this kind of heartbreak. Author and evangelist Anne Graham Lotz pointed to questions that Jesus Himself faced about the usefulness of prayer if it can’t prevent death, where he stated that “one who believes in Me will live, even though they die; and whoever lives by believing in Me will never die.”
Lotz reflected: “Life is about more than temporary safety, health, happiness, prosperity. It’s about a relationship with Him that transcends those things. He never, ever has promised to protect us from suffering, pain, and death. But He has promised to be with us and bring us through … when we place our faith in Him.”
So let’s not turn to prayer as a “solution” to evil. Rather, in prayer, let us turn to Christ as the victor over evil and the comforter of the afflicted. Even though we cannot control events and are often blind to the battles raging in the spiritual realm, God our Savior sees and is sovereign over all.