As the writer James put it, “The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective.”35 Now, there’s a lot of mystery here, plenty of unanswered questions. How exactly does God’s will interact with our will? The classic “sovereignty versus free will” debate. Honestly? I don’t know. But I’m sure of this: prayer is not just going through the motions. It does something. Our prayers have the potential to alter the course of history. And God’s action in history is, in some strange way, contingent on our prayers.
