Ask & You Shall Receive #4:Praying According To God's Will

Our keynote Scripture reference for this article is the following one:

Now this is the confidence that we have in Him, that if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us. And if we know that He hears us, whatever we ask, we know that we have the petitions that we have asked of Him.
1 John 5:14-15

And this is the confidence (the assurance, the privilege of boldness) which we have in Him: [we are sure] that if we ask anything (make any request) according to His will (in agreement with His own plan), He listens to and hears us. And if (since) we [positively] know that He listens to us in whatever we ask, we also know [with settled and absolute knowledge] that we have [granted us as our present possessions] the requests made of Him.
1 John 5:14-15 AMP

One of the biggest fears concerning prayer among the spiritually immature or scripturally untaught is a question something along the lines of, “What if I pray for something that isn’t Gods will?” The obvious answer, of course, is a corollary of the verse we’ve just read: God is not going to answer our prayers which are not in agreement with His will.

That is a given.

However, I feel this is asking the wrong question in the first place.

Why? Because:

It is a question borne of fear rather than faith, and;
It is a dead-end, leaving us with no path upon which to move forward.

Personally, I believe the question we should be asking is:

“How can I pray prayers which are in agreement with the will of God, thus greatly enhancing the likelihood I will indeed receive what I am praying for?”

God’s Word is His Will

This is not rocket surgery: if we can find something that God has promised in His Word, that is His will, period, end of story. Whenever we pray in agreement with His Word — or better yet, actually integrate His promises into our prayers — we will always, at all times, in all places, and under all circumstances be praying the will of God.

Here is one of my favorite quotes:

It is impossible to boldly claim by faith a blessing which we are not sure God offers, because the blessings of God can be claimed only where the will of God is known, trusted, and acted upon.
T. L. Osbourne

This is a massively profound statement, so let’s unpack it a bit: The first half simply states that for us to “boldly come to the throne of grace,” we need to know — not guess, not kinda-sorta-maybe think, not hope something our pastor/parents/etc. taught us years ago, but know with certainty — God has promised what we are about to pray for.

This is why I described the process of how to know the will of God for healing in a previous article, though the principles I taught there are applicable to any other area of our Christian lives.

The second half explains why: the will of God has to be: 1) known; 2) trusted, and; 3) acted upon. So before we can boldly come before the throne of grace concerning an issue, we need to do the following:

Find our what God’s Word says on the matter
Develop our faith in those verses
Incorporate them into our prayers
Act upon what we find in them

If you attended one of our weekly prayer meetings whenever I am present, you would hear me quoting God’s Word extensively as I was praying for people and even the parts where I wasn’t directly quoting Scripture would have a solid biblical foundation. This ensures that what I am praying is indeed in agreement with God’s will without question.

God’s Universal Will for Everyone

This is God’s will for everyone alive on this planet. It is always His will to:

Save us when we receive Jesus as Lord.
Forgive our sins when we confess them to Him
Redeem our mistakes, though we may suffer natural consequences for our actions.
Redeem the mistakes and sins made against us by other people
Give us His peace that surpasses our human comprehension
Baptize us with the Holy Spirit with the evidence of speaking in tongues
Speak to us by the Holy Spirit though His Word and the gifts of the Spirit
Give us His wisdom when we lack it and ask for it
Mold us into Christ-likeness through the renewing of our minds
Have constant fellowship with us
Give us abundance of grace
Bless us whenever we obey Him
Receive our worship, praise, and thanksgiving
Heal our bodies from sickness and disease
Heal our minds from the aftermath of trauma caused by abuse, neglect, and tragedy
Restore our broken relationships.
Deliver us from the temptations and schemes of the devil.
Provide for our financial needs according to His riches in glory by Christ Jesus.
Reveal His will to us concerning things not specifically covered in His Word
Use us to minister life to the broken, hurting, and lost.
And the list goes on and on and one…

You may consider some of the previous list a bit controversial, especially the item concerning healing, finances, and the baptism in the Holy Spirit. But there are numerous verses that, when taken in context, specifically promise those things to us. You can read about these topics elsewhere on this site using the links I’ve provided, but don’t take my word for it — look them up for yourself, letting the Word interpret itself without consulting other books, commentaries, or denominational traditions.

One of the interesting observations I’ve made is that all Christ-followers will emphatically believe and proclaim that at all times, in all places, and without exception, it is God’s will for a sinner to repent, receive Jesus as Lord, and thereby become “born from above.” When you ask them why, they would with equal authority declare, “Because God’s Word says so, God promises it!”

Yet many of these selfsame believers will hedge when it comes to divine healing or the baptism in the Holy Spirit, both of which are also clearly promised in Scripture. I’ve covered this issue in far more detail in a previous article on God’s Word and His promises, so I’m not going to delve into that again here — you can read the article if you want a more in-depth discussion on the matter.

Anyway, the point here is we need to be digging into the Word, discovering for ourselves what God has accomplished in the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ, what He has imparted to us at the moment of salvation when we surrendered our lives to Him, and what He has promised us as believers under the New Covenant in Jesus’ blood.

The ongoing renewal of our minds by the Word of God is crucial to an effective prayer life!

The Specific Will of God for Each of Us Individually

There are numerous issues we face in life where we do not have specific revelation in God’s Word concerning a matter. For example, should we:

Accept a job opportunity offered to us
Marry a specific someone we are attracted to
Relocate to a new community for whatever reason
Change churches
Buy a house, car, or other major purchase
Make a financial investment of some kind
Have a baby or foster/adopt a child
Any other major life decision
Are unsure of God’s timing for any of Items 1-8 above
And so on…

It is only in such cases where we should ever utter the words, “Lord, if it be your will.” This is what James is talking about in his epistle when he admonishes:

Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city, spend a year there, buy and sell, and make a profit”; whereas you do not know what will happen tomorrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapor that appears for a little time and then vanishes away. Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we shall live and do this or that.” But now you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil.
James 4:13-16

This passage is admonishing people for pridefully indulging in self-lordship. Who are we to be determining our own courses of action without consulting the Lord, seeking His guidance and wisdom? Whenever we face these situations — and indeed we will — what we need to be doing is seeking God’s will about them, asking the Holy Spirit guide and direct us by His wisdom. Then, after He reveals His will concerning a situation, we can strongly pray in agreement with it.

Where God Guides, He Provides

God never leads us in a given direction and then leaves us hanging without the means, financial and otherwise, to get the job done. For example, as we take our desire to move into bigger living quarters to Him, we pray that God will lead us to the right place in the right location at the right price at the right time. We then begin looking, avoiding hardening of the categories and allowing God to direct us in His path. Once we discover where He is leading us, we then pray fervently in agreement with that will.

You know how we ended up buying a house in the high desert of Northern Arizona? My wife and I started out by looking for a larger apartment in Tucson where we were already living, a good 4-hour drive south of here.

When we began, we thought all we could afford was rent an apartment. As we walked out the search process, we discovered to our delight we actually could buy instead. After we searched for houses to buy in Tucson to no avail, the Lord led us to visit our current town, and on the 4th look, we found a really nice house for an amount we could afford — a place which was far newer and in a much nicer neighborhood than any of the houses we looked at in Tucson for a comparable price.

We then prayed for our offer to be accepted. It was. We also prayed for favor with the mortgage company, that God would reveal any problems with the new place through the various inspections, that closing would go without a hitch, and that we would have a smooth, incident-free move to our new digs. All were answered, but one: the mortgage broker missed the closing date by a day, so it caused us come minor personal and financial inconveniences. But everything else went perfectly!

The Religious Escape Clause

I have grown heartily fed up hearing well-meaning, but scripturally ignorant, Christians pray for someone’s needs, such as healing or financial provision, and somewhere along the line throw in what I call The Religious Escape Clause: “Lord, if it be your will.”

Some of you might be bristling a bit at this point because you have tacked this phrase onto your own prayers for someone on one or more occasions and I’ve just described you as “scripturally ignorant.” Please cool your jets — I said ignorant, not “stupid!” Ignorance simply means you haven’t been taught something and you might be surprised to find out this phrase appears only twice in the entire Bible.

The first instance is in the Garden of Gethsemane where Jesus is praying to the Father concerning His imminent trial, torture, and execution. Remember the types of prayer I described in the second article in this series? What we find here is a prayer of consecration where Jesus is submitting His future to the will of the Father. At no time during this event, as recorded in any of the gospels, is Jesus praying for someone or something, which — were it to have happened — would then be classified as a prayer of intercession or supplication, respectively.

The second instance is the one in James I just discussed a few paragraphs ago. And even then, since prayer is involved in our submission to God and seeking His will, we can stand upon His promises to guide and direct us and provide us with His wisdom.

So other than when we are determining God’s specific will for our lives concerning something that is not clearly spelled out in the Word or used in the process of consecrating oneself to God, the phrase “if it be God’s will” is not only inapplicable, it’s totally unscriptural.

Honestly, it is a manifestation of personal unbelief, whether conscious or subconscious. In other words, the person saying it cannot bring him- or herself to believe something clearly promised in Scripture for whatever reason, subconsciously shifting the blame to God in advance if it doesn’t come to pass.

Selah!

So that about wraps up our discussion of praying according to God’s Will. In the next article, we’ll begin discussing the role of faith in the equation of prayer.

Thanks for reading!

Praying in Faith