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: Q&A
Tags: Christian Life, God, Prayer, Q&A
Topics: Hearing God, Prayer
Related Reading
How does an Open Theist explain all the prophecies fulfilled in the life of Jesus?
Question: Throughout the Gospels it says that Jesus “fulfilled that which was written.” Some of these prophecies are very specific and involve free decisions of people. For example, a guard freely chose to give Jesus vinegar instead of water (Jn 19:28), yet John says this was prophesied in the Old Testament, hundred of years before…
Podcast: Why Does Prayer Feel So Fake?
Greg talks about practicing a prayer discipline and battling against feelings of superficiality in prayer. http://traffic.libsyn.com/askgregboyd/Episode_0335.mp3
Prayer Matters
Martin Sharman via Compfight Jesus taught us to pray in a way that recognizes that God’s will isn’t manifested in evil; it’s manifested when he and his people revolt against it. Jesus tells us that the cry of our heart is to be for God’s kingdom to come and his will to be done “on…
How do you respond to 2 Samuel 17:14–15?
“Absalom and all the men of Israel said, ‘The counsel of Hushai the Archite is better than the counsel of Ahithophel.’ For the Lord had ordained to defeat the good counsel of Ahithophel, so that the Lord might bring ruin on Absalom.” This passage is sometimes cited to support the view that God ordains all…
Revelation 17:8 refers to people whose names haven’t been written in “the book of life from the creation of the world.” Doesn’t this conflict with open theism?
As in Revelation 13:8, the clause “from the foundation” (apo kataboleis) need not mean “from before the foundation” but simply “from the foundation” (= since the foundation). It’s not that names either were or were not written in the “book of life” before they were ever born. Rather, throughout history, in response to the choices…
What is the significance of Isaiah 5:3–7?
The Lord describes Israel as his vineyard. Referring to himself, he says that the owner of the vineyard loved his vineyard and did all he could to care for it. “[H]e expected it to yield grapes, but it yielded wild grapes” (vs. 2). Then the Lord asks, “What more was there to do for my…