Prayer for the Lost: What Are You Asking For?¶

A mother kneels at night and prays for her son by name. She is not praying for the spread of the gospel in general; she is asking God to save him. She does it for twenty years. What is she asking for, and what is happening when she asks?

This is the ordinary devotional life of the church, and one of the places where a theology is tested by whether it can be prayed.

The Reformed position¶

The Reformed answer is not "prayer is pointless." It is more careful, and it has real strength. God has decreed not only ends but means, and prayer is one of the means he appointed (WCF III.1: God ordains "whatsoever comes to pass"). Prayer is therefore genuinely causal within providence: God has ordained that certain things happen in answer to prayer, and so prayer is not a decoration on a finished outcome but a link in the chain by which the outcome arrives.

On this account prayer for the lost is at once obedience to a command (1 Tim 2:1), an expression of love, an alignment of the heart with God's revealed will, and a means by which God brings the elect to conversion — Augustine, Calvin, and the Puritans all treated conversion as something God accomplishes through the prayers of the church. It is also, the Reformed say, a school of dependence.

The 1948 OPC report adds the crucial premise: God "not only delights in the penitent but is also moved by the riches of his goodness and mercy to desire the repentance and salvation of the impenitent and reprobate." If God desires the salvation of the lost, then prayer for them is not asking God to do something against his will. It is asking him to do what he already desires. Murray and Packer draw the line explicitly, and Frame makes the same connection: the free offer and prayer for the lost stand or fall together.

A Reformed reader will recognize this as their own practice. It is a robust theology of prayer, and it has produced generations of praying people.

The tension¶

1. 1 Timothy 2 grounds the command in God's desire¶

Paul writes: "First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people, for kings and all who are in high positions... This is good, and it is pleasing in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth" (1 Tim 2:1–4). The command to pray for "all people" is grounded in God's desire that "all people" be saved. The two "alls" are the same word in the same argument.

The standard Reformed reading takes "all people" to mean "all kinds of people," since Paul immediately mentions kings and those in authority. James White's version of the argument is representative: "all men" means "kinds of men, classes of men" (The Potter's Freedom, 140). The context does support a concern for classes — the Ephesian church was apparently not praying for the emperor. But the reason clause will not bear the restriction. Paul does not say "God desires the salvation of all kinds of people"; he says God desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth, and that this is why the church should pray for all. If "all" meant "all kinds," the ground of the command would be weaker than the command.

2. If the outcome is fixed, what does intercession do?¶

Here is the difficulty the means/end reply does not remove. Suppose the decree fixes that this son will be saved. Then the mother's prayer does not obtain his salvation; it is one of the means by which a salvation already secured in eternity is brought about in time. Prayer is real, but it is not persuasive; it is a mechanism. Suppose instead the decree fixes that he will not be saved. Then her prayer asks God to do what he has eternally decided not to do, and the only honest answer is no.

The Reformed reply — "we do not know the decree, so we pray as though it were open" — is a point about our knowledge, not about God. It tells the pray-er how to feel; it does not tell her what her prayer is doing. And the church does not pray "as though"; it prays. "Save him" is not a hypothesis.

3. "Prayer changes us" answers a different question¶

That prayer changes the one who prays is true, and the Reformed are right to say so. But no one in Scripture prays in order to be changed. Abraham bargains for Sodom (Gen 18:23–32). Moses stands in the breach and God relents (Exod 32:9–14). Hezekiah turns his face to the wall and receives fifteen more years (2 Kgs 20:1–6). Jonah is angry because God relented (Jonah 4:2). James says "the prayer of a righteous person has great power" (Jas 5:16). Paul says his "heart's desire and prayer to God" for Israel is "that they may be saved" (Rom 10:1), and he is willing to be accursed for them (Rom 9:3).

These are not portraits of people being sanctified by talking to themselves. They are portraits of creatures appealing to a God who hears, considers, and answers differently because they spoke. If that picture is accommodation to human analogy, the accommodation is so thorough that it becomes the doctrine.

4. The pastoral cost is exacted at the deathbed¶

The structural problem becomes visible in specific rooms. A father prays for a son who dies without faith. If the decree was fixed, the father's prayers did not bear on the outcome, and the comfort available is that God's ways are mysterious and that the father was faithful. If the outcome was genuinely open, the grief is still grief, but his prayers were real appeals to a God grieved with him. The first account can be preached; the second can be prayed.

5. Jesus' own prayer is a test case¶

In John 17 Jesus says, "I am not praying for the world but for those whom you have given me" (17:9), which the Reformed cite as proof that prayer is particular. But the same Gospel shows him weeping over Jerusalem: "How often would I have gathered your children... and you were not willing" (Matt 23:37). The Son's prayer life is not organized around the premise that prayer merely executes a fixed saving will.

How Reformed theologians have tried to resolve it¶

Calvin treats prayer as the exercise of faith and the ordinary means of God's fatherly care; God is not changed, but he is pleased to hear. Turretin places prayer among the means, not the causes, of the decree. Owen grounds intercession in Christ's priestly work. Hodge and Warfield stress the duty of prayer as a commanded means. Murray ties prayer to the free offer: because God desires the salvation of the lost, the church may ask for it. Packer presents prayer as dependence, not leverage. Piper argues that prayer is the means God ordained for accomplishing his purposes. Frame treats prayer as genuine creaturely causality within God's plan. Helm situates prayer within a meticulous providence and denies that it changes God's decrees.

These answers are not stupid, and they produce real devotion. They do not answer the question the mother is asking.

Why the tension remains¶

The means/end distinction makes prayer effective but not persuasive, and the difference matters. Scripture consistently presents intercession as an appeal that God hears and answers because it was made — not merely as a channel through which a pre-fixed result arrives. The Reformed account can say that prayer is commanded and that it is a means. It cannot say that the pray-er's plea is a reason in God for the outcome, because on that account the outcome has no reasons outside the decree.

What this does and does not prove¶

This does not prove that God changes his mind in the way open theism says, nor that prayer coerces God. It proves that the ordinary practice of praying for named unbelievers is incoherent with a fixed, exhaustive decree, and coherent with a God who genuinely desires their salvation and genuinely responds to appeal.

If someone can show that Scripture's intercession narratives are consistently given as accommodation rather than as revelation of how God acts, the argument weakens. The narratives do not read that way.