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Hello, my name is Chris Elkins, and I'm with the Denison Forum,

and we have Dr. Denison with us today.

Jim, you know that the Bible teaches us to pray

and says much about the whole practice of prayer.

But I have a question for you. Why should we pray to an all-knowing,

all-loving, all-powerful God? If he knows what we need and he's all-loving and all-powerful,

why do we need to ask him? Yeah, it's a question I've been asked a lot over the years. It's a question

I've asked over the years as well, because the question really is, I think, absolutely logical, right? I mean, the Bible says that God is all knowing. He knows the past, the present, and the future. So he knows what you're going to ask before you ask him. Jesus says, he certainly knows your need before you ask him. And so you're not praying to inform God about anything. You're not telling him something he doesn't know. He's all loving, and so you're

certainly not praying to inform God about anything. You're not telling him something he doesn't know. He's all loving. And so you're certainly not praying to convince him to do some right thing that he wouldn't have done otherwise. It's not like you're having to persuade God to do the right thing, even so you could. And he's all powerful. And so it's not like your prayer is going to compel him to do something. you're not going to be able to make him do what you want him to do just because you pray, just because you ask. So if that's the case, then why pray at all? If God already knows your needs, if he's loving and powerful enough to do the right thing always, then why is it that we in fact need to pray? So some years ago, I was working on a book entitled

Wrestling with God, where I was dealing with some of the most difficult intellectual questions that I

knew anyway. I wanted to spend some time on this one. So I was speaking at a conference center in

Tennessee, a beautiful place, beautiful setting. I was out there for the week. I was kind of their

campus pastor for the week. On Monday of that week, I was playing tennis and pulled a hamstring.

Only time I've ever done that. It was such a poll that I could barely get around the rest of the week.

And so spent a lot of the week on the porch, the kind of screened in porch they had there at the

minister's cottage and gave me a chance to think about some really tough questions, the kind of screened in porch they had there at the minister's cottage and gave me a

chance to think about some really tough questions, a lot of which I moved into this book,

as I mentioned that I was writing, and as I was focusing on that specific question, sitting in that

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