ChristianityToday.com writers Gregory Fung and Christopher Fung explore results from a prayer study released a couple of years ago and their implications as it deals with faith and prayer. The study, along with others like them, attempt to measure differing results from a group of heart patients who receive prayer and a control group which doesn’t.
The study found that the prayed-for group actually fared worse than the control group. The CT article, “What Do Prayer Studies Prove?,” draws some positive analysis from the study’s findings, including:
• The study actually supports the Christian worldview, the writers say. “The real scandal of the study is not that the prayed-for group did worse, but that the not-prayed-for group received just as much, if not more, of God’s blessings. In other words, God seems to have granted favor without regard to either the quantity or even the quality of the prayers.”
• God appears inclined to heal and bless as many as possible and supernaturally intervenes and disrupts the nature of the universe to do it, whether they acknowledge it or not.
• Our obsession with whether prayer works is the wrong question. “We know prayer works,” the writers say. “The real question is, are we prepared for God’s answer?”
• God is eager to answer our prayers, and it has little to do with how correctly we say them or how fine-tuned our orthodoxy is. “This ought to give us confidence to act, believe, and work alongside the good and generous King, who calls us to advance his kingdom, bring healing to the world, and pray.”
Read the article here.
