And whatever you ask in prayer, you will receive, if you have faith.
Mathew 21v22
What is prayer, and how do we pray? That is the first thing we need to know when trying to understand what Jesus was teaching in this passage. Put simply, prayer is communing with God. But it is not a simple matter!
We commune with people every day, all on different levels. We have a chat with our neighbours about the weather, the garden, the dog or the children. Pleasant, but not deep.
We communicate with our colleagues about work related issues and what we plan to do on our days off, holidays etc. A bit more information about ourselves with some, but still keeping up our professional persona.
With friends and family, we will share things that are more important to us, and with spouses much more intimate details of our thoughts and emotions.
But the call to prayer is much higher and much deeper than any other type of communication. Real communion with God is an intensely personal thing. It is not repeating words and phrases over and over again in the hope that somehow God will look favourably upon us and answer our petitions. Prayer, real communion with God, is not just a matter of words, but of laying our hearts bare before Him and allowing Him to change our hearts, placing in them His will and removing from them our will.
The first thing to understand about prayer is that God’s Will, will always be done. His Will is sovereign. Prayers that are answered are prayers that are prayed according to His Will. That is why Jesus taught us that we begin our time of prayer with God by proclaiming His Kingdom will come, and His Will, will be done on earth as it is always done in heaven.
This does not mean that our prayers are useless and that it is pointless praying for anything because God already knows what He’s going to do in every situation. The point of prayer is that our hearts will be in communion with Him, our spiritual understanding will be quickened and we will know how to pray the Will of God fervently and effectively.
Psalm 37v4 states “Delight yourself also in the Lord and He shall give you the desires of your heart.” This is what Jesus is trying to teach His disciples. When you delight in God’s ways, when you delight and desire the things that He desires, when your goal in life is to please Him above everything else, then of course you will get whatever you pray for, because you are praying His will.
Delighting in God is surrendering your will to Him, knowing with assurance that His Will is the very best thing that could happen to you. Sometimes, in fact often, God’s Will involves suffering of many different kinds. Is it because He gets a perverse sense of pleasure in watching His people suffer? Definitely not! That is a cruel and distorted image that Satan tries to plant in our minds to turn us away from God. The Christian life is a battle against the forces of evil. We are in the family of God and in the army of God. God’s holiness and supremacy are under attack. As Christians we are called to be like Christ, conformed to his image, and He is depicted in Scripture as both the Suffering Servant and the Coming king. On earth He suffered, and on earth we will suffer too. As the coming King He will reign forever and ever, and we will reign alongside of Him. In 2 Timothy 2v12 we are told that “if we endure, we will also reign with Him.”
While we will know many blessings in our walk with God on earth, we will also know many times of suffering and hardship. We are living in a sin cursed world where Satan will do everything in his power to get us to abandon God. Nothing illustrates this so clearly than in the Biblical history of Job. Why do you think that God inspired the writers of Scripture to record Job’s life? It was for our benefit and instruction.
If you want to reign with Christ, you must be prepared to suffer for Him here in this life. The prosperity gospel with its emphasis on health and wealth and the power of positive confession has done much harm to the body of Christ. People are taught to believe that perfect health and abundant wealth and anything else that our hearts desire are ours for the claiming, if only we have enough faith. Illness and lack and suffering at any real level are put down to not understanding how to “claim the promises of God”, as if God’s promises were some type of winning lottery tickets given to us at the point of salvation.
Prayer is a call to fellowship with God on a much higher and deeper level than just asking Him to do for us what we want Him to do. Prayer is the call to surrender to open heart surgery, where our faulty, self- orientated wills are replaced with His sovereign and perfect one. Only then will we know and experience that whatever we ask for in prayer we will receive.
