Does your prayer change God’s mind?

I’ve been a Christian for a long time, and I’ll confess to you there are aspects of prayer that I still haven’t quite figured out. But I’m in good company because C.S. Lewis admitted the same thing.

In his essay, The Efficacy of Prayer, Lewis talks about feeling a compulsion to go get his hair cut, and upon arriving at the shop, his barber exclaimed, “Oh, I was praying you might come today.” Lewis underscores the important timing of his arrival by adding, “And in fact if I had come a day or so later I should have been of no use to him.”

Though awed by the event, Lewis goes on to say the whole thing “might be by accident … The question then arises, ‘What sort of evidence would prove the efficacy of prayer?’ The thing we pray for may happen, but how can you ever know it was not going to happen anyway? Even if the thing were indisputably miraculous it would not follow that the miracle had occurred because of your prayers.”

It can be a somewhat bitter pill to swallow, but Lewis is right. You’ve no doubt seen it happen many times and in many different ways.

Good people are fervently prayed for, and sometimes those prayers are positively answered, but other times not. Others in bad situations receive no prayers whatsoever, and yet good arises. Such things can cause confusion and frustration on the part of those prayed for and their petitioners.  

It can feel hollow sometimes to fall back to the sovereignty of God position in such situations, but Scripture shows us countless times that it’s where such angst needs to rest. And with that comes the understanding that things may not turn out as we hope.

Lewis says, “There are, no doubt, passages in the New Testament which may seem at first sight to promise an invariable granting of our prayers. But that cannot be what they really mean. For in the very heart of the story we meet a glaring instance to the contrary. In Gethsemane the holiest of all petitioners prayed three times that a certain cup might pass from Him. It did not. After that the idea that prayer is recommended to us as a sort of infallible gimmick may be dismissed.”

Such acceptance, though, almost always leads to the question of why pray in the first place? If God is sovereign and has declared “the end from the beginning” (Is. 46:10), does our will for a situation and prayer actually do anything to move God’s hand?

Or, taking it one step further, if God has already decided something, can our prayer change His mind so that a different outcome results?

‘Because you have prayed to me’

The first step towards getting an answer to these questions is understanding one of God’s attributes called His immutability. God’s immutability simply means He does not change.

There are many Scripture verses attesting to God’s immutability including: “God is not man, that he should lie, or a son of man, that he should change his mind” (Num. 23:19); “For I the LORD do not change” (Mal. 3:6); and “Do not be deceived, my beloved brothers. Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change” (James 1:16–17).

But, if God is not “a son of man, that he should change his mind,” how do we square that with “The effective prayer of a righteous man can accomplish much” (James 5:16) if God has decided differently?

Let me give you a couple of examples of this playing out in the Old Testament that deal with the same person — Hezekiah, one of the kings of Israel.

In the first case, Jerusalem is about to be overtaken by the king of Assyria, who tells Hezekiah in a letter that he’s doomed. Hezekiah takes the letter into the temple, spreads it out before God, and prays for deliverance. What happens next is: “Then Isaiah the son of Amoz sent to Hezekiah saying, Thus says the LORD, the God of Israel, ‘Because you have prayed to Me about Sennacherib king of Assyria, I have heard you’” (2 Kings 19:20, my emphasis). God goes on to tell Hezekiah He’s answering his prayer, underscoring what He had told him previously about the Assyrian king’s downfall (2 Kings 19:7). It’s interesting to see how Hezekiah’s prayer played a role in that.

In the second case, the Bible says:

In those days Hezekiah became mortally ill. And Isaiah the prophet the son of Amoz came to him and said to him, “Thus says the LORD, ‘Set your house in order, for you shall die and not live.’’ Then he turned his face to the wall and prayed to the LORD, saying, ‘Remember now, O LORD, I beseech You, how I have walked before You in truth and with a whole heart and have done what is good in Your sight.’ And Hezekiah wept bitterly. Before Isaiah had gone out of the middle court, the word of the LORD came to him, saying, “return and say to Hezekiah the leader of My people, ‘Thus says the LORD, the God of your father David, I have heard your prayer, I have seen your tears; behold, I will heal you. On the third day you shall go up to the house of the LORD. I will add fifteen years to your life, and I will deliver you and this city from the hand of the king of Assyria; and I will defend this city for My own sake and for My servant David’s sake’” (2 Kings 20:1–6, my emphasis).

God tells Hezekiah he’s going to die, but Hezekiah prays to God for deliverance, and in another I-have-heard-you case, is immediately given a reprieve. How is this not a case of God changing His mind on the spot?

One of my seminary professors, Dr. Thomas Howe, explained it as God presenting situations to His people that allow them to line their hearts up with His and not the reverse. In other words, God does such things to produce a response of faith on the part of His people.

Howe went on to say it’s much like our salvation experience with God. Before we call out to God to receive Christ, God has set His mind that we are destined to an eternity without Him and that “he who does not obey the Son will not see life, but the wrath of God abides on him” (John 3:36). And there is no changing God’s mind on that.

However, when we respond in faith to Him and receive Christ, everything changes for us —  the Bible says: “Having now been justified by His blood, we shall be saved from the wrath of God through Him” (Rom. 5:9). In our first state, God’s wrath was fixed on us; in our saved state, God’s wrath is removed and His love and grace are now applied to us. And God’s mind will not change there either.

Did God change? No, we changed.

When it comes to our prayer interactions with God, R. C. Sproul puts it like this: “Does prayer make any difference? Does it really change anything? Someone once asked me that question, only in a slightly different manner: ‘Does prayer change God’s mind?’ My answer brought storms of protest. I said simply, ‘No.’ Now, if the person had asked me, ‘Does prayer change things?’ I would have answered, ‘Of course!’”

Is there still some opaqueness to all this? Sure.

But what is clear is that God has told us to pray to Him and that He uses our prayers as an instrumental cause in bringing about His fixed plans for our good. Beyond that, I’m still doing more math to understand it better and likely will always be.