Should we pray, “Your will be formed,” or “Your will be done.” Bruce Ware contrasts how God answers prayers according to Open Theism, which teaches God does not know the future in reference to prayer, and Biblical Omniscience, which teaches that God does know the future and answers our prayers according to his will.
“God does not necessarily know exactly what will happen in the future,” wrote Open Theist David Basinger in Models of God and Alternative Ultimate Realities, 163.
Jesus commanded, “Do not be like them [Pharisees], for your Father knows what you need before you ask him” (Mt 6:8). Because Jesus exhaustively knows the future and what we will be asking before we ask, He can providently prepare to answer our prayers. Open Theism, which teaches that God does not know the future, can only react when He hears our prayers. John Sanders, an Open Theism advocate, wrote, “To a large extent our future is open and we are to determine what it will be in dialogue [prayer] with God” (John Sanders, God Who Risks, 277).
Ware wrote, Jesus does not instruct us to pray, “your will be formed,” but rather, “your will be done.” God has a will that predates our prayers.
Ware shared receiving a newsletter, sent out from CBInternational, a missions agency, recording the answered prayer of an unnamed missionary serving with CBI in [Muslim] Indonesia.
The story goes like this: One Sunday, I [the CBI missionary] preached in the seminary chapel in Indonesia on Romans 1:16, all the while praying, “Lord, give me chances to witness directly to the people here in the ‘delicate’ situation, proving that I too ‘am not ashamed of the gospel.’” That night, on the way home from the city, our Toyota, which had never failed us in eight years, stopped dead and refused to start. Flashlight in hand, I was under the hood pretending to know something about cars when a voice hailed me from the sidewalk. “Can I help you? I am a Toyota repairman on my way home from work.” Under his arm, he carried a small bag. He took some wrenches from it and went to work before I had really answered him. First, he checked the gas to the carburetor because I was sure that was it. Next, he checked the points, and when he did, we saw in the darkness a spark flashing out of the coil. “Ah, that’s it,” he said, and proceeded to remove it. Then, of all things, he took a brand new Toyota coil from his bag, exactly the same size as the one he had just removed from my ’89 Toyota. The only problem was that I had just spent the last of my cash to buy medicine for a needy student. So, we offered to take the mechanic home with us to get the needed money. He was hardly in the car when he asked me, “Why are Christians always so easy to get to know?” From there on, he let me explain the whole gospel to him, right down to exactly what happened on the cross. At my house, over tea and a cinnamon roll, we talked more. He seemed enthralled and offered no argument. Before his taxi came, I gave him a little booklet on how to find peace with God, my name, and my phone number, and asked him to call me when he was ready to talk more.
This was surely a divine appointment. Our car stalling for the first time in eight years and a man walking by just after the car died, carrying a brand new Toyota coil in his bag was no accident.
What joy to know that before we pray, the Father already knows what we need, and the Father has already set in motion the elements necessary for the answer to our prayers.
This is not a God who learns what happens as things unfold; this is a God who unfolds what happens as he previously has known—and planned—that they will be.
Prayer, to be genuine and real, to be dynamic and authentic, requires that God be working out his eternally fixed and perfect purposes in a manner in which he graciously involves us in his work through the vehicle of prayer. May God grant us eyes to see the glory of prayer, because through it, we see better the glory of the God “who works all things according to the counsel of his will” (Eph. 1:11).
Bruce A. Ware, Their God is Too Small: Open Theism and the Undermining of Confidence in God (Function). Kindle Edition.