“ARE WE PRAYING IN HIS WILL?” God has given us the right as His children to come into His presence in prayer and ask Him for things we need, yet God has placed some boundaries. James 4:3 gives one of them, “Ye ask, and receive not, because ye ask amiss, that ye may consume it upon your lusts.” We have no reason to expect selfish prayers prayed outside God’s will for us to be answered any more than a parent would give into the request of a child for something that was not good for him. Our prayers must be guided by the will of God which is found in the Word of God. John Bunyan wrote that prayer is: “A sincere, sensible, affectionate pouring out of the heart to God, through Christ, in the assistance of the Holy Spirit, for such things as God hath promised, or according to His Word, for the good of the church, with submission, in faith, to the will of God.” When we read in Scripture that something is God’s will or that something is promised to us, we can pray with confidence. The means of God’s direction and revelation to us is not our feelings or emotions, but His written Word. Our Lord gave us an example of how to pray when He said, “Thy will be done.” The prayers we pray must always be subject to the purposes and will of God. When we ask for what we want—and we have the invitation do so as God’s children—we must never insist on having our own way. Prayer times is not only asking for what we want, but it is a time for us to surrender our will to His. If we are to pray according to the will of God, we must first be students of the Word of God. Here is a great prayer promise, “And this is the confidence that we have in him, that, if we ask any thing according to his will, he heareth us: And if we know that he hear us, whatsoever we ask, we know that we have the petitions that we desired of him” (1 John 5:14–15).
Posted on: Tue, 30 Sep 2014 13:57:47 +0000
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