[OBW]

This has always been a troublesome concept. Nothing happens without prayer. We have to pray. We must pray according to His will.

But when you couple that with the kind of certainty of preordination, the foreknowledge of God, etc., then there is potentially the kind of extreme predestination mentality that some of the most extreme Calvinists (more extreme than Calvin himself) seem to hold that it is going to happen the way it is going to happen. And there are verses to support that. (sort of)

So somewhere between "I can simply pray for anything and because I am a Christian I will get it" and "why bother, it is all going to happen according to his predestination" must be real.

Do we over-attribute His will? Do we incorrectly assert that every minute detail has His will on it? Is it possible that His will is more about us and our being than about particulars of otherwise irrelevant details. Maybe He doesn't care which job you take (assuming the options do not include robbing banks) but rather than you acknowledge and seek Him in your considerations. Maybe we really can move the hand of God. I do not diminish that even that may be known before hand by God. But that it went the way it did was not as much a matter of Him deciding how it would be and making it so, but knowing how our free will would choose to seek Him and to ask concerning our needs and He joyfully responds.

So, in this kind of context, what is "according to His will"? Is it possible that to pray according to His will is sometimes little more than to actually pray. To have a heart for something for which He is happy to agree and respond accordingly.

If His will is summed-up in "love God" and "love your fellow man" then his will is not necessarily something that is always predefined in terms of specifics, but is rather much more broad. There may be more than one "solution" to an issue. We can pray in any of those ways and be within His will. But some other option is not.

But most importantly to me, it seems that trying to define God's will before you pray is a kind of man-made limit on God. I think that it is better to pray outside this expanded definition of "will" than to be so narrow that we need to predetermine God's will before praying. It is true that a prayer not according to His will likely gets the "no" answer. But at least you are praying.

And, like another simplistic statement, it is better to ask and not receive than to not ask. If you ask, you may receive. If you do not ask, you will never receive.