Religious people use a catchy statement to encourage people to pray: "Prayer changes things." While it is undoubtedly true that prayer plays a part in changing things, we need to modify our understanding of this because it is true only if our prayer agrees with God's will.
This quotation on prayer comes from an article, "Prayer or Fate?" that appeared in The Christian Worker:
God in His sovereignty has ordained that human destinies may be changed by the will of man. This is at the heart of the truth that prayer changes things, meaning that God changes things when men pray. Someone has strikingly expressed it this way: "There are certain things that will happen in a man's life whether he prays or not. There are other things that will happen if he prays, and will not happen if he does not pray."
Are these concepts biblical? James writes:
Come now, you who say, "Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city, spend a year there, buy and sell, and make a profit"; whereas you do not know what will happen tomorrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapor that appears for a little time and then vanishes away. Instead you ought to say, "If the Lord wills, we shall live and do this or that
