Prayer - what a lot of questions Part three.

Prayer that gets an answer.

Basically this couldn’t be simpler - or at least the theory of it couldn’t. What we’re looking to do is find the will of God and pray in accordance to that. We’re wanting to find out what God wants to do and then asking him to do just that. Often we are far too eager to wade in telling God what we want Him to do or even what we think He should do. What we fail to do is to ask Him what it actually is that He wants to do.

So, a friend becomes ill and we immediately start to pray that God would heal them. A brother loses his job and we pray for a new job, and quickly. A colleague get anxious over something and we pray for peace. To us it seems obvious the situations have changed - to us it seems for the worse - so our answer it to get God to reverse what has changed. Someone becomes ill we want them to be not ill, someone becomes unemployed we want them to be employed, someone is anxious we want them to be not anxious. Hang on a sec though, what if God wants to use these situations for teaching and instruction. People get sick and we pray for healing but God doesn’t heal time and time again. Does this not show us that it is not God’s will to heal (in those situations). We are therefore praying against the will of God. Not only is this futile and a waste of our time and energies but it is also a dent to our faith. If we are praying for healing and it is not forthcoming, over time, this will help diminish our faith in a God who heals. What if God wants to heal but only after a lesson is learnt or certain things have been done. We won’t know this until we search for the will of God. If God doesn’t want to heal in certain cases why fill the suffering person with false hope that He might. How much better is it to tell them god’s will and release them into that will. If it is known that it is God’s will for someone to die what an honour that is to know that. It gives the dying person time to put there house in order, have conversations that they’ve been meaning to have for years, tell their loved ones how much they love them and be a great witness of how God numbers our days and gives us a certain hope even in the face of death.

So, we need to take a step back. We need to tame our tongue and our emotions seek God for what He wants to do in any given situation. It’s not just a case of praying “Let your will be done”. It’s a case of asking God what his will is and then praying that with confidence. If we know the will of God we can pray knowing that God will answer with a great big YES. I always used to pray in faith knowing that God COULD do what I was asking, but with little faith that He WOULD actually do what I was asking. This was because I was asking God to do what I wanted Him to do not what He wanted to do. The Bible makes it quite clear that if we pray according to His will He will answer us - if we pray according to our will we enter the lottery of whether or not our will happens to coincide with the will of God. The Bible teaches us that whatever we ask in Jesus’ Name will be given to us. I used to believe that tagging the words “In Jesus’ Name Amen” onto the end of the prayer would give the prayer more power or more chance of being answered. I used it as some sort of magic formula for getting my prayers answered - and even though it didn’t work I continued it for years. I have now come to realise that praying in Jesus Name means praying with and under His authority. Praying in Jesus name, in essence, means the same as praying according to God’s will.

1 John 5:14-15

This is the confidence we have in approaching God: that if we ask anything according to His will, he hears us. And if we know that he hears us - whatever we ask - we know that we have what we have asked of him.

So finding God’s will and then praying that gives us a confidence in pray that we have never previously had. We can pray with the confidence and certainty that God will answer our prayers. Not that God could do it but that God will do it.

Part 4 will help us explore how we seek God’s will in practical terms.