Is it wrong to pray that the Lord change his own laws of nature perhaps, to preserve life, such as calming the sea and the raging storm? Is that an abuse of prayer or a use of prayer?
There ought to be a word in the English language, 'yes-no'. As from this moment, I invent it. It is for application to questions that deserve both answers at once. The one answer says, yes, all prayer is thus asking God, and I'm reminded of what happened to Zechariah. Zechariah and his wife Elizabeth prayed for a child. Then, when they got very old, they stopped praying for one and when the angel came and said, 'You're going to have a child,' Zechariah refused to believe it. I suspect he was troubled by that kind of question. When he thought that all God needed to do was give nature a little bit of a jog to do the job she normally does, Zechariah thought it quite reasonable to pray. But to ask God to do something that would involve changing the laws of nature, that was too much for Zechariah's faith, and when the angel said it was going to happen he refused to believe and was struck mute for his unbelief.
So, on the theoretical side, yes, we all ought to be supernaturalists and believe that God can overrule the laws of nature. Not break them, but overrule them if it so pleases him. If God answers our prayers only to do what nature would do anyway, then something's gone out of our faith. We ought to be good supernaturalists.
Having said that, then I think on the other side. The 'no' bit of the question is that we should not expect God to be performing miracles for us every other day of the week. You see, miracles are miracles and God can do them; but if he did them every day of the week they'd cease to be miracles, wouldn't they?
