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April 24 - May 5, 2020
God does not need our prayers to fulfill his purposes, but—for reasons that are not entirely clear to us—he promotes his glory and our significance by using faithful prayer to advance his kingdom.
By listening to our prayers, the Father indicates that we are precious to him. By answering our prayers, the Father indicates his willingness to display his glory through us.
Our concern about not grieving the Spirit ultimately reflects our own grief for failing our God. Curiously, this grief is also the Spirit’s witness in our heart that we are God’s children. Without the Spirit, we might still grieve over the consequences of our sin, but our grief would be for our own hurt. Only the presence of the Spirit in us enables us to love God so much that we truly grieve for the hurt we cause him. In this way godly sorrow for sin confirms—rather than challenges—our standing with God (2 Cor. 7:9–11).
the Spirit uses godly sorrow to encourage prayers of repentance by granting us the confidence that God has not rejected us but still treasures us. Our sorrow for sin confirms the continuing presence of the Spirit of holiness in us.
The changes that the Spirit brings to our heart and through our prayers are God’s seal validating that we are his.
Jesus does not teach us to pray with the precepts of a dumb fatalism—what will be, will be. Instead, he teaches us to offer our desires to God, sends his Holy Spirit to conform our desires to his will, and then promises to empower our prayers by the Spirit so that they accomplish his Father’s purposes for us.
we should never petition heaven without the humility and trust implicit in praying in Jesus’ name. By praying in his name, we submit to a wisdom greater than our own to promote a love greater than we can measure.
Prayer that seeks God’s will is not tantamount to receiving a punch in the chops. The Holy Spirit’s work assures us that we can offer our desires to God with arms wide open to receive the best that a heavenly Father, who loves us infinitely and eternally, can provide for this life and the next. He who loved us enough to send his Son and his Spirit to us has proven by their ministries that he will respond in ways that are right and loving when we pray.
Our identity as sinful creatures alienated from the Father has forever been eclipsed by our union with the Son he loves (Eph. 2:13–22).
We speak with the voice of our Savior whenever we pray in his name.
The heart of faith believes what the eye cannot observe of God’s hand. This is why we continue to pray boldly for his sovereign control of all things to enable us to glorify Christ in all our lives.
Mueller’s oft-cited expectancy of God’s intervention was not a presumptive confidence in God’s doing all that the one praying asked. Mueller used Jesus’ name with the expectation that God would answer in the way that most glorified the Savior.
constant and specific prayer provides the privileges of a nearly unbroken conversation of the soul with God in a life of perpetual worship.
Specific prayer offered as a continuing act of worship seeks to submit every moment of life to God’s wisdom as a means of knowing, loving, and honoring him.
Scripture never presumes prayer will remove all suffering. Instead, the biblical writers repeatedly testify that faithfulness through suffering confirms the glory and necessity of Christ’s eternal promises.
The father says that he would not have chosen this path, but the Lord’s answers to specific prayers have confirmed God’s hand in this family’s life and reaffirmed the value to God of the daughter who was taken to him so early. God used a child’s tragedy to bring an entire family to himself. Could the eternity of so many have been secured without such soul-shaking pain? Only God knows. Still, this family trusts him, knowing he gave his Child to save a more extended family on earth for eternity.
The Bible encourages us to pray for what God alone can change—for church and government leaders, for the salvation of persons in other nations and future generations, for social ills that blight a land and moral decline that endangers the young, for the restraint of Satan and the soon coming of the Savior. Our failure to pray for such things is usually not due to our lack of concern—they are sometimes our greatest anxieties—but rather due to our limited perspective on the power of prayer.
We have the right to speak with the voice of the Son in compelling the armies of the Lord to defeat his enemies, protect his servants, and change hearts in this generation and in the future. When we do not exercise these rights, we indicate we are too willing to depend on human resources or are unable to see that the greatest battles of this world are spiritual.
Prayer is our most potent weapon for breaking down distant strongholds that oppose the advance of the kingdom of God. For this reason it’s been said that prayer is not a seeking after a greater work of God; prayer is a greater work of God.
Through the privilege of specific prayer, the believer applies the power of the Spirit of God through generations, across national boundaries, into the offices of presidents, and into the hearts of thousands. For God to exercise his power in these ways, does he need us? No. But he chooses to work through the prayers of his people to demonstrate his care for us, our value to him, and the significance of our lives in his kingdom. The full power of prayer is beyond mortal comprehension, but the magnitude we can grasp should make us zealous to pray and expectant that God will order our world
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He expresses to God his true feelings and repeatedly makes his requests known. If it seems improper to voice such attitudes in prayer, we should remember that it makes no sense to hide them. God knows the concerns in our heart. We might as well be honest.
We should not grow impatient or become discouraged. We should never give up, fear offending, or hesitate simply because we have already prayed. Jesus commands repeated petitions. The Bible records them. God honors them.
By persisting in prayer for answers that require the processes of time, we confess to God our perpetual need of him.
The Bible promises no magic but cautions us to measure God’s faithfulness by our understanding of his character rather than by our impressions of our circumstances.
We trust our Savior because he works perfectly, not because he works quickly.
Even before we were born, God knew us and was working to make Jesus “the firstborn among many brothers.” God does not define our good as the absence of difficulty but rather as our being “conformed to the likeness of his Son.” God wants to fill up his eternal family with many siblings of Jesus who are like him. The “good” God most wants for us is our Christlikeness.
prayer in our Savior’s name submits more than its content to his purposes. By invoking Jesus’ name, we also submit ourselves to Christ’s purposes.
Persistent prayer makes us more Christlike by tempering our human selfishness and by strengthening our divine dependence.
The key to spiritual happiness is not the Midas touch but trust in God.
Gain or loss is only an instrument of furthering Christ’s glory. Our successes provide opportunities to reflect on God’s goodness in the past. Our trials provide opportunities to depend on his sufficiency in the present. Our temporary sufferings teach us to relish his promises for an eternity without tears.
Understanding that God’s primary goal for our prayers is our spiritual transformation helps explain why he may delay his response to some requests. We may want a change in our circumstances, when God wants a change in us.
William Temple writes, “God is perfect love and perfect wisdom. We do not pray in order to change his will, but in order to bring our will in harmony with his.”
we may just as accurately translate Jesus’ words this way: “Be asking and it will be given to you; be seeking and you will find; be knocking and the door will be opened to you.” These words that indicate our prayers are to be ongoing and continuous remind us that in praying we often discern what we should pray.
Is it righteous? That’s the first question when seeking to make a decision or offer a prayer according to God’s will. If we want something that is wrong according to God’s Word, then praying for it cannot be in God’s will. We do not have to wonder if it is God’s will for us to steal. It is wrong to steal and wrong to pray to be a successful thief. No amount of fervency or persistence will make God answer such prayer affirmatively. Even asking in Jesus’ name will not force God to make someone a better thief. Prayers outside the fence of Christian righteousness are outside the will of God.
God’s Word is more authoritative than personal feelings or priorities.
Our feelings become our authority whenever they determine the priorities of our prayers. In essence we pray in the name of our comfort, our anger, our ambition, or our lust. Imagine how that sounds to God. Praying in Jesus’ name requires that we give his Word authority over our desires.
We do not have the right to stamp choices as evil or good when the Bible does not. We cannot assume greater authority than God’s Word without giving ourselves the status of God. Christians usurp the Bible’s authority when they force varying moral values onto legitimate options the Lord provides. The mistake may occur in a conscientious attempt to obey God. A person may reason, “I do not know what to do. I have these two options, but I can pick only one. Since only one of the options can be God’s will, the other must be wrong.” Then the person resolves to pray for God to reveal the “right”
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Humbly praying for the wisdom to apply God’s Word to our circumstances is more important than praying for miraculous signs.
The Lord graciously dealt with Gideon’s weakness by providing signs, but the doubting warrior’s requests are not a model for us.
Praying for courage to obey God’s Word is a better sign of faithfulness than pretending to know more than God’s Word says. Where faithful prayer and biblical thought lead us to believe that competing decisions are equally righteous, we should thank God for the bounty of choices and then choose. Such a choice cannot be wrong when made according to godly principles and priorities. If the choice takes us down a path that God does not want to continue, he is more than capable of redirecting us by future circumstances. Yet God will even use our time on the first path to teach us more about his
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As discussed earlier, we also pray according to God’s will by following Christ’s instruction in prayer. To do this, we make our requests for Christ’s sake and add, “Yet, Lord, not my will but your will be done.” In this way, we submit our petitions to God’s will at the same time that we are offering them in Christ’s name.
Responding in faith to all God’s answers to prayer grants Christians an understanding of his goodness that transcends the limitations of our bodies and circumstances. Praying for such faith in a time of stress always accords with God’s will because he has no greater desire than for our heart to be bound to his with nothing of this world between.
our first priority when seeking God’s will is to pray according to the standards of his Word. Within the fence of righteousness, we are in God’s will.
Key Thought: If our prayers involve a choice between alternatives, we should not pray for what the Bible disapproves or label as unrighteous what the Bible does not condemn. We discern God’s will by praying for him to provide us with the wisdom and courage to abide by his Word, and then we move forward with the confidence that he will rightly bless prayers offered in Jesus’ name.
Only when I asked the Lord to help me weigh the desires of my heart against the principles of his Word did I begin to head in the right direction. And only when I really trusted that honoring his priorities would be the path of blessing did my prayers to do God’s will bring his power and peace into my life.
The fence of righteousness determines whether our prayer is moral; the fence of prudence helps us determine if our prayer is wise.
The first question to consider in weighing the prudence of any prayer is whether our request is loving. Loving prayers consider others’ interests above our own (Phil. 2:3–8).
The world may not think such decisions wise, but biblical prudence says that it is wise to govern our lives by the priorities of the One who governs the universe.
Christians should ask: Does my prayer seek Christ’s glory? If God were to provide the answer I am requesting, would I be using the gifts and talents God has given me for the advancement of his kingdom? Am I praying for Jesus’ name or merely for selfish gain?
the best and most significant things that God has worked in my life have come when I strove to pray for what was righteous, loving, legitimate, and responsible.
