The Effectual Fervent Prayer

Last night as my nine-year-old daughter struggled to get to sleep as usual, she asked my wife and me, “Does prayer really work?”  In essence she was saying, “I pray at night that I can fall asleep, but I’m still scared and can’t.”  My wife responded by teaching her the principle from James that “faith without works is dead” (James 2:26).  Her point was that when our daughter prays to be able to sleep and then almost immediately jumps up out of bed and runs into the living room telling us she can’t sleep, there are no “works” to accompany the faith of a prayer.  When we pray for something we should also be working to make that thing come to pass in whatever way is in our power; our faith is most efficacious when there are actions behind it.  As James put it, we show our faith by our works (James 2:18).  We can exhibit our faith and trust in the Lord by earnestly praying for His help and then going forth to make that thing happen; or as I’ve heard it said, “Pray as if everything depended upon the Lord, and then work as if everything depended upon you.”  As President Nelson simply put it, “I learned that the Lord likes effort.… He blesses our best efforts.”  When Oliver Cowdery failed to put forth the effort the Lord required for him to translate the record, the Lord said to him, “You have supposed that I would give it unto you, when you took no thought save it was to ask me” (Doctrine and Covenants 9:7).  Sometime we have to take more thought than simply asking.  The story of the brother of Jared and the 16 stones teaches us that when we bring forth our best solution, meager as that may be, the Lord provides the miracle and will illuminate our meager rocks with His light.  I do believe that prayer really does work—and we need to as well. 

               The story of the brother of Jared also teaches, though, that sometimes the work required by the Lord is simply the fervent prayer itself.  The brother of Jared went to the Lord with two questions: how to have air to breathe and how to have light.  To the second question the brother of Jared did a lot of physical work to determine a solution, molten out stones, and take them to the Lord.  But to the first question the Lord simply answered it after the prophet “cried unto the Lord,” telling the brother of Jared what to do: “Behold, thou shalt make a hole in the top, and also in the bottom; and when thou shalt suffer for air thou shalt unstop the hole and receive air” (Ether 2:18,20).  In this case the Lord answered his prayer without any requirement for the brother of Jared to do physical work.  Rather in this case, prayer was the work required.  Often there is indeed nothing we can do as we pray for a change in some circumstance for us or for someone else over which we simply have no control.  In that case, the work the Lord may desire from us is the humble pleading in prayer itself.  As the Bible Dictionary states, “Prayer is a form of work and is an appointed means for obtaining the highest of all blessings.”  For Enos who sought forgiveness that meant a petition that lasted all day and into the night.  For the people of Limhi in bondage “all the day long did they cry unto their God that he would deliver them out of their afflictions (Mosiah 21:14).  For President Kimball seeking a revelation on the Priesthood, receiving the answer took “[pleading] long and earnestly in behalf of these, our faithful brethren, spending many hours in the Upper Room of the Temple supplicating the Lord for divine guidance” (OD 2).  In all of these cases the Lord did answer their prayers in a significant way leading to great things, but He first required serious pleading and humbling before Him.  To my daughter I promise that God does indeed answer our sincere prayers, and what He said to Sidney Gilbert He says to all of us, “I have heard your prayers” (Doctrine and Covenants 53:1).  What James taught in the meridian of time is still true today: “The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much” (James 5:16).