Comprehension

(Matthew 7:11) “If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!”

How often I have heard believes pray, why is this happening? Or please make this horrible situation go away. When we become desperate in our prayer we are often in danger of losing sight on God’s will and our wants take priority. We lose perspective, but before we can pray with the right motivation we need to understand how we should pray. Our foundation to prayer must spring from our new life in the spirit. We once were dead in our trespass and sin but now have been quicken and made alive in and through the finished work of Calvary. The Lord Jesus Christ is our illustration; to find a solution in a maths equation an example is normally used by the teacher to educate a scholar on how to find the result. When the student understands the theory they can then apply the formulation to the problem and will end up with the correct answer. The theory commands attention and must be plainly understood; now for all those who have received the spirit of adoption whereby we are able to cry “Abba Father” must learn God’s formula for our prayer life.

I appeal to all of us who love to fall on our knees and pray to God our Father; how He loves to hear the prayers of the saints, in fact their prayers all being stored in heaven to be used upon the golden altar. They are deeply treasured; “And another angel came and stood at the altar, having a golden censer; and there was given unto him much incense, that he should offer it with the prayers of all saints upon the golden altar which was before the throne. And the smoke of the incense, which came with the prayers of the saints, ascended up before God out of the angel's hand.” (Revelation 8:3-4) - When we get to heaven and the angel offers up the prayers of the saints on the golden altar you may even hear your voice reverberate to the glory of God. What an overwhelming thought! Bless the name of Jesus Christ my Lord and Saviour, how precious He is to me.

We fall into a dangerous trap when we begin to misuse this privilege that God has afforded us. I think the apostle James gives us the best teaching on the misuse of prayer and explains why we find life frustrating at times. He tells us that we often pray expecting a favourable answer but our requests elude us. I have often heard people explain it away like this, “in God’s time”, but if our prayer is outside the will of God, it will never be answered to our liking, how could it ever be? The deceiver may have permission to lure us by the deceitfulness of sin and we may even think our prayers have been approved by God, when in fact they could never have been as they are outside His will, that request was never penned by the quill that God held in his hand before time began. It was never scripted. Receiving a grant at the obvious expense of others it is flawed prayer; foundationally we must build correctly to end defined. Let’s look at how James puts it; "... you covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel. You do not have, because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions. You adulterous people! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. Or do you suppose it is to no purpose that the Scripture says, "He yearns jealously over the spirit that he has made to dwell in us"? (James 4:2-5)

We must understand and grasp that our existence as believers is to find God’s will for our lives. So when we look at the Lord Jesus’ paradigm we see the attitude “of not my will but thine be done”. We will always be tempted to pray and ask amiss until we understand the importance of God’s will in our lives. Why must it be this way? God is sovereign and therefore is in control of all things, yes choice is afforded us as we can align ourselves with His will or we can be driven by our own wants. However it is only His will and purposed that will carry with it a true blessing with honour.

Let’s use history to tell us the same story; the destruction of God’s creation; “So the LORD said, "I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land, man and animals and creeping things and birds of the heavens, for I am sorry that I have made them." (Genesis 6:7) We see that God had determined that the time to judge the world had arrive and He was about to destroy it and all who lived in it with a flood. What if Noah pleaded with God to change His mind and he prayed day in and day out that God would repent. It would have been a futile prayer and obviously outside the will of God. God has already made up His mind. Some may say but Moses got God to change His mind, my retort would be when where you summoned to sit with God in the flesh for forty days? Although destruction loomed, Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord and he followed God’s instruction to the tee and built an ark. He settled his understanding, I am not sure what that entailed, we can ask him when we see him in heaven, but he got on with the task at hand. His prayers must have revolved around building the boat, how to gather the animals, and what provisions to take along. All these prayers hinged around the outworking of God’s will and not his selfish wants. In like manner when we pray in accordance with God’s will, how will our prayers be answered? Does a father give his son a gift that he knows will cause damage? Therefore we must put others before ourselves and pray with earnestness to find grace in time of need to apply ourselves to His will for our lives and if that is our persuasion, will we not find grace to walk in the spirit in accordance to His will. We have God in our corner, Amen! He will never be against His children, nevertheless we must learn to find His will in our lives. I understand that this is a process and will happen over time but we must shoot for victory. Our aim must be to glorify our God and Father with our lives. Let us store this glorious quote into the forefront of our minds; “How much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!”

Signing off

Tyrone