The faith exercised in prayer is faith in the God who sovereignly accomplishes His will. When we pray, our faith recognizes, explicitly or implicitly, the overruling providential purposes of God. We may at times be given insight into that will, enabling us to pray with absolute confidence in God’s plan to answer as we ask. But surely those cases are rare – more rare even than our subjective, emotional desires would lead us to suspect.
Douglas Moo