I Samuel 12:23 A Sin Against the Lord

I don’t know about you, but I have things that I have prayed about for years, decades, with no seeming answer to my prayers.  The thing they all have in common is that they are prayers for other people. 

Sometimes I have asked God if it makes any difference whether I pray for them. 

It seems it does, though not in the way I was thinking.

1 Samuel 12:23 (NASB95)  ²³ “Moreover, as for me, far be it from me that I should sin against the Lord by ceasing to pray for you; but I will instruct you in the good and right way.

These are the words of Samuel, a prophet and judge of Israel.  They didn’t have kings in those days, so you could say that he was the leader for the whole nation.

And that was not a particularly bright time in the history of the nation. 

At this moment, Samuel was about to anoint a king over Israel, their first one.

It wasn’t God’s idea or Samuel’s.  The people wanted their nation to be like all the other nations, and so they wanted a king too.  Samuel had told them that they were rejecting God when they did that, but they didn’t care.

How do you pray for people who openly just reject God? 

It seems that the need is what determines whether we should pray for things, not the likelihood that the prayers will be answered.   Just like how God wants us to stop and help a person in need, like the Good Samaritan, so God wants us to offer prayers for everything that is a need, because 1) we don’t know whether our prayer will make the difference, and 2) the possibility that it might means that that is the right thing to do. 

Frankly, I am learning to pray about and for more and more things, even the simple things that we take for granted.  And for more and more people, even strangers I see on the street or pass in the car.  Not only do I think this pleases God, I think it also changes and affects things far more than we know.