Prayer is about many things.

It’s about communication. It’s about thanksgiving. It’s about fellowship. It’s about confession. But for most of us, the vast majority of our time spent in prayer is about change.

We look at the world around us and recognize the evil that is there, and so we pray. Someone in our lives has a physical, emotional, or spiritual need, and so we pray. We are in relationship with someone who does not yet believe the gospel, and so we pray. That’s exactly what we should do – we should be a praying people. And we should be praying for change because God has the power to bring about that change, and the wisdom to know when and how to do so:

Is anyone among you in trouble? Let them pray. Is anyone happy? Let them sing songs of praise. Is anyone among you sick? Let them call the elders of the church to pray over them and anoint them with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well; the Lord will raise them up. If they have sinned, they will be forgiven. Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective (James 5:13-16).

So we find ourselves, on a daily basis, praying for some kind of change to happen. And much of the time, that change is about the circumstances we find ourselves in – circumstances at work, or at home, or at church, or wherever. 

But here is an important – but very difficult – thing to remember as we are pray for all that change to happen, most especially when the change is about our personal circumstances: we must be open to the idea that the thing that most needs to change is … us. This is difficult because our default posture is to assume the circumstances are what needs to change. But sometimes they don’t. Sometimes the thing that needs to change is us.

Think about it like this: When we assume that our circumstances are the primary things that need to change, we are also assuming that God’s design for our lives is to be in a different set of circumstances than we are currently. That might be true. God might indeed want you to have a different job, a different house, or live in a different city. But those changes in circumstances aren’t the primary thing God wants for you. The primary thing – God’s will, in fact – is for you and I to be conformed to the image of Jesus:

Perhaps, if you think back over the course of your life, you might have even seen how this works. Maybe you can remember a time when you prayed for a long season about a particular set of circumstances to change. But as you kept praying, you observed that even your prayer itself began to change.

You might, for example, have prayed for a new job. So you pray, “Job, job, job.” But as you focused your attention on this singular issue for more and more time, you realized that the better thing to be praying for was not a job, for the job only represented something else. A deeper need. A character need. You find, over the course of persistent prayer, that your prayer changes from “job, job, job” to “trust, trust, trust.”

God is changing you – not your circumstances.

We start out praying that we would have a job, or have physical relief, or have a deeper friendship, and find the deeper issue of security, or trust, or fellowship with God exposed. We find the need behind the need – the deeper issue behind the felt pain – and we come to see part of the redemptive power of God in answering prayers slowly and differently than we expect. It’s so that we can not only have what we perceive we need, but so that we might see what we truly need and then be truly healed in a deeper and more holistic way than we even realized.