There are various reasons for people to turn to God with prayer. Someone does this out of despair, completely losing faith in their own strengths, for someone prayer is the joy of communication with the Almighty. But especially often people pray in order to ask God for something.
Human requests to God are different: a seriously ill person begs for healing, a mother who accompanied her son to the war asks him to return alive … But it also happens that a person who is relatively well in life wants something more, most often - good luck and money. Many sincerely believe that prayer can attract both.
Attracting good luck
The concept of luck comes from pagan antiquity. From the point of view of the ancient pagan man, luck and failure were not just a favorable or unfavorable coincidence of circumstances, but qualities inherent in a certain person, some forces accompanying him.
These forces seemed to be almost a material phenomenon - so much so that they could be "infected" by receiving some object that belonged to a person, or simply by having close contact with him.
Within the framework of the mythological thinking inherent in ancient man, it was believed that everything in the world can be influenced according to certain laws, and the main of them - "Like gives birth to like." They also tried to influence luck according to this law, this is the origin of many signs: a rich, successful person has a lot of cattle, horses, which means that some object associated with a horse will attract luck and wealth - for example, a horseshoe … This is only one an example of an attempt to "attract good luck" - there were many such magical actions. In the course were also incantations - certain verbal formulas that guaranteed, in the opinion of the ancient man, the result.
A modern person who hopes to attract luck and money through prayer perceives prayer as the same pagan spell. This view is absolutely inconsistent with the Christian understanding of prayer. For a Christian, prayer is not a way of directly influencing the world around him, but direct communication with the Almighty. Communication cannot guarantee any specific result, including in the form of luck and money. The maximum that is possible in prayer is to ask God for what you want.
Asking for luck and money
A person is often convinced that God is obliged to give him everything he asks for in prayer. It would seem that such a point of view finds confirmation in the Gospel: "Which one of you is a father, when a son asks him for bread, he will give him a stone," says the Savior in the Sermon on the Mount. But if we continue this analogy, it should be noted that a loving father will never give his son anything harmful or dangerous, no matter how the unreasonable child may ask for it.
A person - even the most reasonable and wise by experience - in comparison with God, always remains a "unreasonable child" who does not fully understand what "luck" will bring him in the sense that he understands it. Here is a young man asking God for good luck in the entrance exams. Or maybe the faculty to which he wants to enter is not his calling, for God it is obvious, but for a person - not yet, he will perceive his failure as a failure, and only many years later realizes that it was for the better.
It seems even less reasonable to ask for money. In itself, wealth from the point of view of the Christian faith is not considered a sin, but the pursuit of wealth at any cost is definitely a sin. If money is so desirable for a person that he asks God for it, it means that wealth has already become a greater value for him than the salvation of his soul. To bestow upon such a person the desired wealth would be to create a disastrous temptation for him - which, of course, God will not do.
For these reasons, a deeply religious Christian will never ask God for money and luck. And a prayer that aims to attract both is not even a prayer.
