But wait a minute, you might be thinking: Why does God need us to tell him what we’re struggling with and what we need? Isn’t it redundant to inform God of what he already knows? Or is he asleep at the wheel, and we need to wake him up with our prayers? But this ignores the whole purpose of prayer that the Lord taught us. Prayer is not for God’s sake as much as it is for ours. God does want, and for good reason, that we give him his due by acknowledging him as the source of everything good—anything worth praying for. But even the benefits of doing that bounce right back to us! The more the early church fathers, for example, prayed for God’s mercy, the stronger they felt the urge to pray more. Or take Elijah, who, even after God had promised Ahab to send rain to end the drought, still fell to his knees and prayed desperately, and kept sending his servant to check a rain cloud (1 Kings 18:42). This wasn’t because he was losing faith in God’s promise, but because he knew he had to lay everything out before God to keep his faith from getting sloppy or half-hearted. Granted, even when we get lazy and lose sense of how empty we are, God stays awake, and watches out for us, and sometimes even helps out when we fail to ask for something. But still, we need to pray with all our might, for a few reasons. First, we pray so that our hearts are always on fire with the desire to seek, love, and serve God, and we get used to going to him as our anchor in the bumpy seas of life. Second, we pray so that our thoughts are always on display before God; there isn’t any time or chance for dark urges to creep in, but instead we learn to lay out every want we have in full view before our heavenly Father, and pour out every ounce of our longings to God alone. For another thing, we need to prepare ourselves to receive answers to prayer with a thankful heart; praying helps us remember that what we receive comes from God’s own hand. When we receive what we pray for, and know our prayer has been answered, we are drawn into even deeper thankfulness and awe of God’s care for us—and we appreciate so much more what we have been given by God. Finally, prayer helps form in us a constant awareness of God’s providence adapted to reach us in our weakness, as we learn that God not only promises to watch over us and provide for us, and invites us to approach his throne whenever we feel the need, but beyond that, God stretches his arms over us, not just nursing us with words but actually defending our cause. This is why, although God is never really asleep at the wheel, he often seems to be! In reality, he’s just inviting us deeper into conversation with him, even when we’d just as soon settle for a more superficial relationship, but he keeps prodding us to learn to shed our self-reliance and lean even more on him. It would be ridiculous, then, to try to avoid praying by figuring that God has more important matters to take care of, like running the universe, and can’t be bothered with our petty requests. But God says just the opposite in Psalm 145:18: he is “near to all who call on him, to all who call on him in truth.” Nor can we say that there’s no point in telling God what he already knows we need, since God is so generous that even though he knows what we need, he can make it appear to us that he’s actually answering our request! This is what we read in Psalm 34:15—a verse that is echoed in other passages in the Bible: “The eyes of the Lord are on the righteous, and his ears are open to their cry.” This verse doesn’t take anything away from God’s perfect care for us, and yet it tells us to pray for things anyway, to keep our faith sharp. God’s eyes are open as he leads us blind people, and his ears are open, too, to hear our groans, in order to give us even more signs of his love for us. And so it’s true that “He who watches over Israel will not slumber or sleep,” even when it seems like God has checked out. Maybe he’s just trying to recapture our attention.