How God Hears All Our Prayers

“God has infinite attention, infinite leisure to spare for each one of us... You’re as much alone with Him as if you were the only one created.”

— C.S. Lewis (1898–1963)

God does not exist in the constant of time; a realm measured. God transcends time, and it would be more accurate, but not thoroughly true, to suggest that for God every moment, eternally, is like the present.

The Lord holds every portion of eternity as if it were the present moment.

We cannot understand this, for anything beyond the constant of time is a mystery to us. So, it’s no wonder that atheists and others scoff at the whole idea of God managing an infinite number of prayers every given moment.

But the fact is God is so ‘other’ to our understanding, we must accept we cannot understand everything of what we call, more broadly, existence.

What God Thinks of, and How He Values, Our Prayers

As if we were the only one’s created—that is how significant each one of us, and each one of our prayers is, to the Lord.

There is no way that God can be overloaded by our concerns, given that God already knows our concerns much before we bring them to him. The sceptic might say, “Why pray, then?” On the surface it’s a very good question.

God knows we need prayer more for our own faith than for his intercession—which is in play in any event. Having vocalised the words—whether in struggle, torment, or praise, or even imprecation—we vouch for our belief in God by our prayer.

God works in and through us, through his Holy Spirit, by our prayers. Having committed ourselves to pray about something, we have decided a course of spiritual action or divine trust. Commitment is the important product of and from prayer.

God thinks of our prayers as perfect for our need; in our given moments. We can therefore surmise that God values our prayers, probably more abundantly than we could ever understand.

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Being unconstrained by such a thing as time, God hears all our prayers, and all the prayers of everyone, perfectly.

Whatever we think as impossible for humankind we can think as possible for God. None of our human preclusions apply to God at all.

The more we can distance God from human limitation, the more we may know him; him who intercedes for us. Such knowledge of God inspires awestruck wonder.

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God, whose ‘time’ is eternal, and, in fact, who is completely beyond time, has no human limitation. The Lord hears all our prayers, and the prayers of all, without fail, because eternity operates in such a way that God has all the time in the world to listen. And that is exactly what God does; he listens attentively to all our prayers.

© 2013 S. J. Wickham.