04/21/2018
God hears our prayers; He gives each of them audience and provides us with all those things we have prayed within His will. The question for us who pray is this... “Do I have confidence that God hears me as I pray and that He will answer me?” Confidence in the Word of God is of the utmost importance to he who prays. Put more simply, we must trust in the fact that God will do what His Word said He would do.
“But as for me, I will look to the Lord; I will wait for the God of my salvation; my God will hear me. Rejoice not over me, O my enemy; when I fall, I shall rise; when I sit in darkness, the Lord will be a light to me.”
Micah 7:7-8 ESV
If we have no faith in God abiding by His Word, then we might as well walk away now. If our God fails to do what He says, then what is left to us? This isn’t fatalism, it is simply and obviously fact. But we have a part in this equation too... we must align ourselves and our prayers with His Word, and His will. Asking God for something contrary to His will, or that is against the very essence of who He is will place us in a position where our prayer has a foregone conclusion... it cannot, and thus will not, be honored.
If you have children then you are familiar with these kind of requests. A child asks something of you that goes against everything you believe in... so the answer was no before it ever left their lips. When this kind of request is made of God it isn’t unanswered prayer, this is asking Him for the answer to a prayer that was outside His ability to provide without changing who He is. It is the prayer of a child who either doesn’t know the core values for his parent, or wants something desperately enough to challenge them. We must ask according to who we know God is... according to His will.
“And this is the confidence that we have toward him, that if we ask anything according to his will he hears us. And if we know that he hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have the requests that we have asked of him.”
1 John 5:14-15 ESV
So if we pray within the bounds of who God is, and within His will, then His Word tells us He will answer... He will give us what we are asking for.
Reading our two verses today in Micah 7 encourages me. There was a time in my past prayer life when I would utter my request in uncertain hope that God would hear me, and that if by chance He did, that He still might not provide. This wasn’t the prayer of a man who didn’t believe there was a God... but the prayer of someone who didn’t trust in the possibility that the Creator of the Universe would take the time to listen to a lowly man like me, or to find my simple prayer as being worthy of His attention. I would continue to pray because the Bible said to, and on the outside chance that God would somehow find that my prayer fit into the grand flow of His creation. Did you ever feel this way? Do you still pray with this lack of certainty and expectation today? Many people feel this way, and this is why pastors preach and write so often about having faith in prayer... listen...
“When a man can and does declare in living faith, “My God will hear me!” surely nothing will keep him from prayer. He knows that what he cannot do on earth can and will be done for him in heaven. Let us bow in quietness before God and wait on Him until He reveals himself as the God who hears.” - Andrew Murray
These are a pastor’s words regarding the trust we should place in God, not just in his hearing, but in His promise to take action, and our living in faith. Are you a believer? Do you have faith in God’s Word? Are you asking and living within His will?
If you watched the adventure movie “Raiders of the Lost Arc” in which the Nazis during WWII were seeking to obtain the Arc of the Covenant so that they could use it against their enemies, and there was some semblance of truth there. What they found was that God isn’t a tool for man to use for his unrighteousness purposes. Well, prayer is like that too. Before you pray ask for forgiveness, accept God and Jesus Christ for who they are, and then as you pray ask for those things that you know the Father would willfully provide. Trying to use prayer simply as a tool to get what you want by convincing yourself that you can use God’s promises against Him is not within the Spirit of His Word. It is like taking a sentence out of a complex law and saying “This is it!” When we do this, we are removing something, and indeed ourselves, from the context of God’s will! We read scripture such as this...
“If you ask me anything in my name, I will do it.”
John 14:14 ESV
But we ignore scripture like this...
“You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions.”
James 4:3 ESV
Live and pray within the will of God, and ask for those things which reside within His will, and thus within His desire and ability, to provide. Don’t ask God to change who He is, His character, and all that the Bible says of Him, just so that your selfish need can be met. If we live and pray as we should then the entirety of God’s Word will come to rest on our prayers, and our desires... there will be nothing that He will not grant you.
God hears our prayers... do we hear His voice, and really understand who He is?
Prayer:
Father, I thank you for answering prayer, and giving good things to your children as we lift up our needs, and desires to you. I thank you for your Son Jesus who said you would provide anything we asked in His name, and I ask you to help me as I struggle to understand more each day what it means to ask in His name, and the life and faith that requires of me. Help me Holy Father to fathom these Words that I might find myself living and praying within your perfect will. I know that you hear my prayer, Merciful Father, and that you will answer me... lead me to ask in accordance with who you are, and within your Word, and will, because by doing so I find that my relationship with you has grown, and that my faith has been further perfected by my prayers. Great are you my God, and great is your Holy Word. Hear my prayer as I speak from within the name of Jesus... as He abides in me... and I in Him.
Rich Forbes