WHAT DOES PRAYER ACCOMPLISH?

With all the talk about the alleged benefits of Eastern meditation, I was surprised to find an article in Psychology Today about the many studies pointing to the benefits of prayer:

·       Prayer appears to help boost people’s will power, making it easier for them to exercise self-control.

·       Across multiple experiments, researchers found that having participants pray for someone reduced aggressive responses to being angered or provoked. This research suggests that prayer may be a good anger management tactic.

·       Prayer similarly makes it easier for people to forgive. Researchers found that having participants pray for romantic partners and friends made those individuals more likely to forgive their partners and friends. This work can be found here (link is external) and is consistent with other research suggesting that prayer improves romantic relationships.

·       Researchers found that having couples pray together increased both feelings of unity and trust and did so more than having couples talk about positive experiences. This work suggests that prayer is more than just an emotionally positive experience. It helps bring couples together. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/more-mortal/201603/science-reveals-the-benefits-prayer

Although I would assume that the majority of participants are Christians, the article makes no explicit claims about Christian prayer. However, in an interview on Pat Robertson’s 700 Club (3/27/2018), Lee Strobel discussed his new book, “The Case for Miracles: A Journalist Investigates Evidence for the Supernatural,” and the many findings that Christian prayer brings positive results.

However, the skeptics often cite an extensive study funded by the Templeton Foundation, which found that prayer didn’t make a difference. For a long time this study had silenced me about the benefits of prayer. However, Strobel revealed a key factor that the skeptics had not disclosed. The participants were not chosen among Bible-believing Christians, and this makes all the difference in the world.

James had written, “You do not have, because you do not ask” (James 4:2). The studies inform us that we can bank on this truth.