This just in: scientific study on prayer fizzles

Power of prayer overrated? - MALCOLM RITTER - Associated Press
New York — Does praying for a sick person's recovery do any good?

In the largest scientific test of its kind, heart surgery patients showed no benefit when strangers prayed for their recovery.

And patients who knew they were being prayed for had a slightly higher rate of complications. Doctors could only guess why.

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God, the Majesty on high, does not perform "on demand", nor permit himself to be subjected to laboratory testing by his subjects.

He has nothing to prove.

He has said everything He wants to say in His Word, and the self-sacrificial offering of Jesus on the cross tells us all we need to know about a) our sin and sinfulness and b) God's love freely offered.
For those who may be upset or angered by such rhetoric, let me assure you, you are under no constraint or compulsion to accept God's freely offered gift. You have the right to refuse. But, to as many as receive Him, to them he gives the right to become the sons and daughters of God, along with a promise of eternal life.

It's up to you.

* * *

What a wonderful God we have!

He gives us our freedom, even when he knows it will hurt us -- and him. He suffers the agony of the Cross to restore the fellowship which we threw away. Yet still, he does not compel us to love Him, or even believe in Him.

And when we do come to Him, still He is non-coercive; wooing us, persuing us, bringing us to the place where we truly trust him and freely offer ourselves to him. And, even then, unlike Islam, it is not a master-slave relationship; it's more like a friendship, a partnership, where we get to taste perhaps just a little bit of the mutuality that ever flows among the members of the trinity -- the unity of mind, purpose, thought, feelings, and determined actions.

What a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, wonderful God.

(I would like to get to know him better.)