What? No Way! :) When you pray "Our Father who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done", are you making a request as if it might not happen but for your prayer and others??? Of course not. The point of that is for you to ACKNOWLEDGE your UNDERSTANDING of His power. PRAISE and thanksgiving is an instrumental part of prayer, at least to me. Do you think God's Kingdom might not come unless we pray for it? Do you think that God's will might not be done but for our prayers? Come on! :) That is not supplication. That is worship.
My point was based on the flawed Reformed theology of double predestination which makes any prayer a useless repetition, because prayers in a doubly predestined world cannot change the outcome God predestined.
Prayers do NOT change God's will according to us Reformed, that is true. That has nothing to do with whether prayer is worthy or not. IF you think the main point of prayer is to "get stuff", then we pray for very different reasons. :)
You are such a lawyer, FK! :) Do you really think I am going to "forget" the rest of the Lord's Prayer? But you seem to have selectively done just that!
Well, let me remind you: "Give us this day...and Forgive us...because we have forgiven...And do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from the Evil One.
What we see in the first part of the Lord's Prayer are the usual platitudes given to those in power. We also recognize that His will is universal. He is the absolute Sovereign of all that exists (in heaven and on earth).
But, once the platitudes are made, supplications follow. We ask God to give us, to forgive us conditionally (because we have forgiven), we implore Him not to lead us into temptation (why would God do that?), and to deliver, that is, to rescue us from the evil one.
The "meat" of the Lord's Prayer is not telling Him how great God is (the platitudes are considered a required introduction when addressing someone superior even though that someone knows he is superior), but to supplicate Him to feed/sustain us, to forgive us, to lead us in the right direction and to save us.
FK, people pray because, one way or another, they ask for mercy. They pray in hopes and desires that God would hear their prayers and grant them their hopes. People don't pray to God to tell Him what happened at work.
I will never forget that song of old "Oh Lord, won't you give me a Mercedes Benz..."
Even if you pray for no other reason but for God to hear you, you still want to get His attention, FK. You don't pray to a wall. You pray so that you may be heard. You want God to acknowledge your prayer. To say otherwise is to make your prayer meaningless repetitions. So, the motive and the purpose of your prayer is to get something, even if it is no more than His ear.
You are such a lawyer, FK! :) Do you really think I am going to "forget" the rest of the Lord's Prayer? But you seem to have selectively done just that!
Well, let me remind you: "Give us this day...and Forgive us...because we have forgiven...And do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from the Evil One.
What we see in the first part of the Lord's Prayer are the usual platitudes given to those in power. We also recognize that His will is universal. He is the absolute Sovereign of all that exists (in heaven and on earth).
But, once the platitudes are made, supplications follow. We ask God to give us, to forgive us conditionally (because we have forgiven), we implore Him not to lead us into temptation (why would God do that?), and to deliver, that is, to rescue us from the evil one.
The "meat" of the Lord's Prayer is not telling Him how great God is (the platitudes are considered a required introduction when addressing someone superior even though that someone knows he is superior), but to supplicate Him to feed/sustain us, to forgive us, to lead us in the right direction and to save us.
FK, people pray because, one way or another, they ask for mercy. They pray in hopes and desires that God would hear their prayers and grant them their hopes. People don't pray to God to tell Him what happened at work.
I will never forget that song of old "Oh Lord, won't you give me a Mercedes Benz..."
Even if you pray for no other reason but for God to hear you, you still want to get His attention, FK. You don't pray to a wall. You pray so that you may be heard. You want God to acknowledge your prayer. To say otherwise is to make your prayer meaningless repetitions. So, the motive and the purpose of your prayer is to get something, even if it is no more than His ear.
Then consider how many people would be in church for no other reason but to express their platitudes to God, just to praise His greatness and omnipotence.
I would say about as many as there are fallen angels doing the same thing.