Does Our Praying Do Any Good?

I've urged prayer about the Darfur situation repeatedly. Does such praying do any good? I believe that it does. In one of the posts from my Power of Encouragement series, I talked about a fantastic book on prayer, written by the late Frank Laubach, whose launching of the worldwide Laubach Literacy Movement began as a practical result of prayer.

In his book, Prayer: The Mightiest Force in the World, first published in 1946, Laubach shared some of his passion for praying for world leaders:

We do not "persuade God to try harder" when we pray [for world leaders]; it is our world leaders, our statesmen and church men [sic] whom we persuade to try harder [through our praying]. We help God when we pray. When great numbers of us pray for leaders, a mighty invisible spiritual force lifts our minds and eyes toward God. His Spirit flows through our prayer to them, and He can speak to them directly [italics mine].

We can do more for the world with prayer than if we were to walk into Whitehall, London, or the Kremlin in Moscow, and tell those men what to do---far more! If they listened to our suggestions, we would probably be more or less wrong. But what God tells them, when they listen to Him, must be right. It is infinitely better for world leaders to listen to God than for them to listen to us.

Most of us will never enter the White House and offer advice to the President. Probably he will never have time to read our letters. But we can give him what is far more important than advice. We can give him a lift into the presence of God, make him hungry for divine wisdom, which is the grandest thing one man ever does for another. We can visit the White House with prayer as many times a day as we think of it, and every such visit makes us a channel between God and the president.

Laubach is right, I'm sure. Just as I feel that the prayers of people both inside and outside of the Eastern Bloc finally brought an end to the evil of Soviet Communism, I believe also that prayer, which calls down the power and grace of the God we know in Jesus Christ is our most potent weapon in seeking that God's will is done "on earth as it is in heaven"!