Prayer Principles - Learning Through Experience

"This is the confidence which we have before Him, that, if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us. And if we know that He hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have the requests which we have asked from Him."
1John 5:14-15

The other day we had a prayer meeting where we asked God to commence Nicole's contractions that day! We proclaimed it with authority in our voices...but not with faith. I could feel a difference between the prayer I was offering to God then and the prayers I have offerred to God moved by His Spirit with an immense amount of faith. Don't get me wrong, I prayed for a guy the other day who was about to have a second treatment to his staff infection and he was 100% healed when he went in to the doctor and I didn't "feel" a whole lot of faith when I asked Jesus to do it...so I'm not promoting some over-emotional ooey-gooey feelings in prayer as necessary evidence of having faith, but I do think that there is something we feel in our hearts when we have "confidence before Him."

All that said, she is still pregnant as I'm writing this a day and a half later. But as I meditated on this Scripture and read it to Nicole, she asked what I had been asking God just a moment before: How do we know what God's will is? A fair question and one I believe God answered when I sat with Him for awhile. Firstly, we can know His will through His Word. There are many promises that we can claim from the Word and be assured that we are praying in God's will when our prayer is in agreement with it. But what about specific circumstances? Like, what is your will Lord concerning my wife and I having a home birth or a hospital birth?

First of all, in light of James 4:3 saying, "You ask and do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, so that you may spend it on your pleasures," we must ask ourselves, why do we want to know God's will? Many times I have prayed for God to show me His will so that I could appear pious or prophetic in front of others when He showed me. Of course, I couldn't detect this then, but hindsight is 20/20. Yet, if we are praying so that the prayer of our heart may be in agreement with God's heart for His glory then assuredly we are not praying in such a way as to exclude our prayers from being answered. Making sure we are praying in God's will is especially important so as to avoid disappointments from unanswered prayers that lead us to unload our frustration on God like I explained in my last post. The reason we do this is because we don't receive death to our will so that we may have His revealed to us. The devil loves for us to pray lofty prayers in our own will because it sets us up for disappointment and temptation to get angry with God which is sin (rooted in pride). I spent a good 15 minutes still on the floor of my room in an almost fetal position as God steadily killed my will as I offerred it up to Him. In order for our prayers to be heard and answered, we must not compromise the will of God with any mixture or insight of our own.

Ultimately, in these circumstances, we must first wait to hear from God before we can expect Him to "hear us". After we have let God crucify our will, we are in a place to have God reveal His will to us with the grace to pray in agreement with it. "Ask and you will receive." When I did this, I heard God assure me in my spirit that both my baby and wife would be healthy and right when I was about to ask God to make sure we had a home birth, I stopped myself...realizing I didn't have the assurance I had just a moment before. God then asked me, "What if you went to the hospital?" My will had to die some more. After that, I was alright with it and told God so. "So the hospital then? That is your will Lord?", I thought to myself. No answer.

Then came the realization that it is at God's discretion to reveal as much and conceal as much as He sees fit for the purpose of keeping us dependent upon Him. That is to say that if God revealed everything to me, I could treat Him like a car does a gas station...fill up and go..."in the know." Yet if God concealed everything, what's the point of even praying other than take a shot in the dark at God's will for specific situations? God then reminded me of Mattew 24:36 (no, I didn't know the specific text reference at the time =) when Jesus said, "But of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father alone." So, this principle of dependence upon revelation was even demonstrated in Christ Himself. He is truly the perfect example for us to follow.

After all this, I praised Jesus for awhile and rested in His peace. These lessons must be applied moment by moment...they aren't immediately downloaded into our character. My prayer is that we all may learn through experiencing their reality. Blessings!