I wanted to write a blog post about prayer because the message about the purpose of this magnificent gift that we have has been becoming more and more skewed. I wanted to touch a bit on what it is, why we are even able to do it, and some of the questions that Dave and I have been asked about it over the years. Dave will have a longer podcast coming in the future about topics such as this, but this is a brief study on this wondrous conversation that we can have with our Heavenly Father.

So, amazingly, above all else, prayer has been given to us as the people of God in order for us to come before our sovereign God and speak with Him. He speaks to us through His word, and through our reflections on His word and through our conversations BASED ON His word (very important caveat), and we are able to come and talk with Him in prayer. We come as dependent children before Him, bringing our frets, our worries, our questions, our concerns, our thanksgivings. It is not going to Him with a particular prayer that we keep saying over and over, it’s not the use of a rosary where we pray the same words in repetition, it is not based on our eloquence with speaking. It is coming to Him with our worries, the things that we might be anxious about or wondering about, and, instead of fretting, we say, “No, we are going to go and speak to God because we know He is far bigger and His timing and plan is perfect. So, though I may not know what is going on or what the future holds, I am declaring through my coming to Him that I trust Him. I am dependent on Him and I am glad about that.” The neat thing is that all of can do this. Every Christian can go into the presence of our Heavenly Father every day, every moment, and speak with Him about our lives. Maybe it’s just a thank You in the car, or singing a song in the house, or crying in the bedroom through words struggling to come out, or a prayer shared between friends, or a time of stillness in your home to stop and speak out what is on your mind to Him who is far greater than yourself. And we can go into the presence of the Heavenly Father because of what Christ did for His people. This is the importance of understanding the direction of our prayers. Jesus says that we are to pray to our Heavenly Father. We don’t pray to Jesus and the Spirit. We pray through them, but we pray TO the Father. We pray to the Father BECAUSE of what Christ did and we pray through the power of the Spirit that now lives in us as a result of what Christ did. It’s important to understand this because it highlights the preciousness of this act. We can’t do this apart from being in Christ. We come as a child of God being seen through Jesus’ work. The Godhead planned our redemption and salvation that we might know the peace and delight in being able to come and speak with the sovereign God, seeing our smallness, but trusting in the bigness of Him because we have seen what He has done and who He is.

He knows our prayers and our situations already. In fact, He gives us the words to speak and the desire to pray in the first place. He just enabled us to come before Him to talk with Him, to sit before Him in trust (maybe even without words) because He knew it was good for us. It was good for us to thought process in His presence. He knows that it will bring peace, that it expels anxiousness, to come and talk with Him - the God who spoke the moon and the stars into existence, who worked and moved the minutest details to bring you to faith - instead of resting on us. It turns our eyes to Him. He knows it will help us to come with lives that know that He is bigger and that His plans are far better than ours.

There are three things that I wanted to look at as a result of knowing this joyous understanding:

God always answers prayer: He always answers your prayers with either a yes, no, or a maybe/not right now. It’s not that He only answers your prayers when He gives you things/wants that you prayed to Him in your feelings. See, a Christian will come to God in prayer always with the precedent set before them by Jesus in His journey to the cross: Let this cup pass from me, yet Your will, not mine, be done. We always come to Him in this mindset knowing that He is bigger and we are small humans. We come before the One who can see the future in one blink, one glimpse, and we cannot see anything beyond this moment here. So, ultimately, we begin our prayers with “if this could happen that would be great, but if it doesn’t, help us see more of Your glory, show us more of how You are working, for such as this is Your will.” Hence, the verses that say ask and it will be given to you are talking about this: when you pray, with eyes on Him and on a foundation of His word and a delight in seeing His glory, you say, “I don’t know what Your plan is, but if it’s Your will….. BUT, if it’s not, I pray Your will would be done…Show me You, strengthen my hope, let me see that You are my joy.” This prayer will always be answered - when we pray that His will would be done. Because His will IS always done. So, it might be that what we prayed (if it’s your will could this happen?) would happen and it would be a clear yes, OR it could be answered as a yes in terms of us seeing more of Him, and then the thing that we prayed “could this happen?” might be a not right now or a no. But that is still a prayer that is answered - in both circumstances.

So we come before Him in prayer and we are able to thought process before Him. We can talk with Him and ask our questions, bring our worries, talk to Him about what has been happening. And our prayers about the situation might grow and adjust as we see Him work and move in us, as He answered our prayers about showing us more of Himself and His glory. And, as this happens, we might see more about why our prayer was answered with a “not right now” or a “maybe in a bit”, we might see why He said no. We are mere humans. We cannot see all things. We pray sometimes with our feelings taking centre stage at certain times - oh fickle hearts of men - and as we talk with Him this changes. That’s why prayer is amazing - it’s for our good, do you see? It’s amazing that my prayers have not always been answered with what I originally just went into the prayers about on feeling. If it’s on us to make God do things through prayer, Jesus would have never gone to the cross. The disciples would never have prayed for Jesus to die! We cannot see the future. But God knows all and works all for the good of His people. And the good of His people, first and foremost, is that they see Him, they know Him more, they see His glory, they grow in Christlikeness, they understand Him as their greatest hope. Why? Because this declares Him to be God alone. There is no one above Him. He is worthy to be worshipped! This is a Christian’s greatest delight because the more they see of Him, the more they see that He is God, the more they see that His promises are certain, the more they see that they have a strong hope in this world where they are sojourners awaiting the fulfillment of the promises that they have been completely promised. Look at Paul, for example - He wanted to go to Rome, but instead He was imprisoned and He ended up writing the book of Romans - a wondrously rich book in the Bible. Do you think if it was up to him to pray and move God’s hand that he would have prayed to be imprisoned? But look what came of the imprisonment - this incredibly tight and cohesive and logical argument of a book for the Christian to read and take in and reflect upon. It is a neat position to be in to see that we are small and that it’s not on us to do things in our ant-like human strength, but instead we can watch as He does things and if or when something happens we can stand amazed at His glory. Remember, we are not owed anything by God, but, amazingly, each day we have many a reason to praise Him, and prayer is one of those reasons.

All of us have the same access to God in prayer: Every single one of us as Christians are able to go before God the Father’s presence and pray to Him. In the same way that every single one of us are able to read our Bibles and, through the power of the Holy Spirit, we are able to comprehend the mysteries of God’s plan of salvation and what His word has to say to every one of His sheep. You don’t have to go to a prayer ministry person - they don’t have special prayers. You don’t have to go to a particular person to pray a blessing over your house or your children - you can do it yourself and, indeed, the fathers of each household should desire to do this for their families, especially. Every spiritual gift should be in every person, maybe in different degrees, but if you are a Christian you will have discernment, you will have wisdom, you should be able to teach (and so on), and you will be able to pray. Jesus made the way for us to be able to do this for our good.

What prayer is not: Finally to sum things up, prayer is not about us having to pray for things in order for God to work. His hands are not tied by mere humans. His work will not be stopped because we didn’t pray for something. On the contrary, everything that He wants to happen will happen. If we think that it is dependent on us to cause Him to do something, that makes Him incredibly, incredibly small. And it erases a huge amount of His attributes that make Him God - His sovereignty, His omniscience, His infallibility, His immutability (that He doesn’t change), His authority. If we stand above Him and make Him work, then He is not a God worthy to be worshipped. It’s also not about us having to say the correct prayer repeated continuously at the right moment. That is superstition. If we have to tap the window twice, pray three times in the day at particular hours, etc, etc. If we have to ritualistically pray every morning in a quiet time and make sure that we get our prayer in for the day. It’s all human-led, it’s all humans doing things in the hope’s that they’ll get blessed if they do it that way. And it’s definitely not about having God be a genie. That’s moralistic therapeutic deism at its’ finest.

All of this fails to understand the most amazing truth: it’s not about us. He didn’t have us come to Him in prayer in order for Him to lose his God-ness and for us to steal His glory. He didn’t have us come to Him in prayer, at the cost of Jesus’ blood, so that there could be another Jesus and for us to do so that He would work in our lives. And the cool thing is this: when you see Him for who He is, when you truly behold Him, you know that His plans are far greater and seeing His glory is far more treasured than our little human “can’t see the future” selves. How then can we stand above Him and say we have to direct Him? Prayer is a precious thing because it has been brought into our lives for our good that we would find rest and peace and a sounding board in the Creator of the world. Think about that! Anxiousness is no match for this Hope that we have.