We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.

How Does God Hear All Our Prayers?

Q: At any given moment there are millions of people praying to God. How is it possible for God to pay attention to my little, silent prayer amidst all the chatter?

The reason you or I can only effectively listen to one person at a time is because we only have a limited amount of attention to spread around, due to our limited brain power. If two people are talking to us at the same time, we have to divide our limited attention between the two, which means we can’t attend to either person very effectively. But God does not have limited brain power or limited attention. In fact, he has infinite (unlimited) brain power and attention. Since you can’t fraction infinity (a third of infinity is still infinite), this means that God can listen to each and every one of a trillion people talking to him as though EACH ONE were the ONLY one. He doesn’t have to spread his attention thin to cover all the individual prayers.

So, when you talk to God you rest assured that ALL his attention is on you, as though you were the only person he created. It’s just that, being the great God that he is, the same is true for each of the other million people talking to him at that very same moment.

Category:
Tags: , , ,
Topics:

Related Reading

Jessica Kelley: Triumph by Testimony

Jessica Kelley is a good friend of ReKnew, and she preached this last weekend at Woodland Hills Church. Normally we only post clips of sermons, but we wanted to post the full sermon on this occasion. We feel like Jessica’s testimony about how her picture of God helped her through the death of her son…

Changing Beliefs

Stephen Mattson is a follower of ReKnew and a member of Woodland Hills Church who posted a piece on Sojourners titled Christians: It’s NOT a Sin to Change Your Beliefs. He points out that doubt and questions are a natural and needed part of any Christian’s life, and our community needs to change the ways we…

What Hinders Answers to Prayer

Prayer is powerful and effective, but it’s not magic. There is no automatic guarantee that what we’re praying for is going to come to pass, even when we’re praying with faith and in accordance with God’s will. Prayer is a form of co-laboring with God to change the world in a Kingdom direction. Yet, it’s…

Does your “dispositional” ontology avoid substantival categories?

Question: In Trinity and Process you argue against a “substantival” ontology and instead advocate a “relational,” “process” and/or “dispositional” ontology in which being, being-in-relation and being-in-process are one and the same. In your view, entity x is its relation to entity y (and all other relations) and is the disposition to interact with y (and…

Was Jesus Fully God and Fully Human?

In the previous post I argued for the logical possibility of the Incarnation, so today I’d like to establish its biblical foundation. This will be review for some readers, but it’s important review because this doctrine is the absolute bedrock of the Christian faith. For example, this doctrine alone is what allows us to claim…

A Brief Theology of Hearing God

It is sometimes assumed by modern readers that when believers in the Bible heard a message or saw a vision while praying, it was something people perceived with their physical eyes and heard with their physical ears. If anyone else had been present with these believers when they heard God speak or received their vision,…