Our prayers are imperfect, yet God hears and understands them perfectly and completely.

“…do not ignore this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day.”   – 2 Peter 3:8

What do these statements have to do with each other?

We creatures are bound, contained, and limited in time. Yet we pray to God who spoke time and creation into existence. He is beyond time. He is eternal.

God’s eternality is no mere timeline without beginning or end. In His divine, eternal perfection, He is timeless.

By contrast, in our temporality events occur in succession, one following another. We experience one thing, one thought, one day at a time. Our knowledge of the past is fragmentary at best, and our grasp of the future is virtually nonexistent. 

God has no such limitations. He transcends creation and time. His ‘present’ is eternal. 

God does not ‘wait and see.’ He makes no decisions based on the unfolding of events. He is under no sense of urgency. He does not learn by experience or observation, as we do. He does not depend on us to explain things to Him, neither does He remember or forget anything. He does not learn at all, for His knowledge is eternal and perfect. 

When we express gratitude to God in prayer, we express it as we feel and experience it in our temporal present. Likewise, as we bring our needs to Him (Philippians 4:6; Luke 11:13; John 16:24), we do so from the place we occupy on our creaturely timeline.

God knows not only what we explicitly ask and express, He has instant, perfect, infinite, timeless knowledge of every past, present, and future aspect and implication of our prayers and our lives. 

Our morning prayers are known perfectly by Him now, a million mornings ago, and a million mornings from now. 

He knows what we need, even before we ask Him (Matthew 6:8). 

Though perfections of God are incomprehensible to us, He has made them known. Let us be mindful of them as we pray.  Why approach God in a state of insecurity caused by our limited understanding, our anxiety about the future or the past, or our shortage of words? 

Let those in Christ approach our God with full confidence in His divine, eternal, loving perfection. 

Soli Deo Gloria!