Foundations of Faith
PRAYER (I)
We recently (Jan99-Jul99) completed a series on gifts of the Holy Spirit. Each gift defines a special area of service for the Christian to carry out in the power of the Holy Spirit, in subjection to the Lord, and for the building up of the Church. There are many different spiritual gifts:each believer has been given at least one gift, no one has all of the gifts, and no specific gift of the Spirit has been given to all believers (1 Cor. 12).
We now begin a series on spiritual “non-gifts”-first prayer, and then worship, praise, and thanksgiving. These are all areas of service to the Lord, but they are not given to a few select persons in the body of Christ. Every believer in Christ is to pray to God and to give praise, worship, and thanksgiving to Him. These represent the response of our hearts to all that God has done for us; they flow from communion with the Lord and require no special gift of the Spirit for their exercise.
God is omniscient, that is, He possesses all knowledge (Aug93). That knowledge includes everything about every one of His created beings. If God knows all of our problems and concerns and needs already, why should we pray to Him about them? As an informal assignment, think about this question and see if you have a scriptural answer to it. We will ask once again-and try to answer this question-when we complete our study of the scriptures on this topic of prayer.
There are a number of moral principles that must be observed and practiced in our lives if we are to expect answers to our prayers.
1. We must be abiding in Christ. “If you abide in Me, and My words abide in you, you shall ask what you will, and it shall be done unto you” (John 15:7). To abide in Christ means that we have a deep, living, permanent connection with Him. In other words, we must be saved or born again through trusting in Christ’s sufferings and death on the cross for our eternal salvation (John 3:3,7,16; Acts 16:31).
2. We must have Christ’s words abiding in us (John 15:7). We must keep the lines of communication between ourselves and Christ wide open by letting His Word instruct, reprove, and correct us (2 Tim. 3:16). Just as we can clog our coronary arteries by eating lots of junk food, so we can clog our spiritual “arteries” by reading, looking at, and listening to all of the junk that is out there in the world today. “Whatever we ask, we receive of Him because we keep His commandments and do those things that are pleasing in His sight” (1 John 3:22).
3. We must have no unjudged sin
4. We must be as willing to help others as we want God to be willing to help us (See Assignment 11)
5. We must be righteous-our lives consistent with what we confess with our lips. “The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man avails much” (Jas. 5:16).
Running the Race
SOME EXAMPLES OF ANSWERED PRAYER (I)
Even though the Bible tells to “pray without ceasing” (1 Thess. 5:17), it takes a lot of spiritual growth and experience before we learn the full scope of problems, decisions, and other matters that we can and should pray about. By giving some real-life examples of how God has answered prayer, perhaps our readers will be stimulated to commit more of the matters of their daily lives to prayer.
The famous missionary to China, Hudson Taylor tells the following story (slightly abridged) of his conversion: “When I was about 15 years of age, my mother was absent from home and I had a holiday. In the afternoon I looked through my father’s library to find a book to read. Nothing attracted me, so I turned over a little basket of pamphlets and selected a gospel tract that looked interesting. I said to myself that I would read the story at the beginning and stop when it began to give a sermon.
“Little did I know at the time what was going on in the heart of my dear mother, 70 or 80 miles away. She rose from the dinner table that afternoon with an intense yearning for the conversion of her boy. Having more leisure than usual, she went to her room and turned the key in the door, resolved not to leave until her prayers were answered. Hour after hour did she plead for me, until she could pray no longer and began to praise God as she sensed that the Holy Spirit was telling her that her prayer had been answered.
“I, in the meantime, was so struck by the message of the tract that I fell down on my knees to accept my Saviour and His salvation. Thus, while my mother was praising God on her knees in her room, I was praising Him too.”
The following is one of hundreds of answered prayers experienced by George Müller in his orphanage ministry in Bristol, England:
On one occasion, with more than 2,000 mouths to feed, not a drop of milk remained for breakfast the next day and not a penny was in hand to buy even a cupful. That evening, Mr. Müller gathered his staff of workers together and on their knees they told their Father that His children needed milk.
The next morning the children sat down at the table-with empty mugs in front of them. They bowed their heads while Mr. Müller simply, gratefully thanked the Father for daily bread-and for milk! As soon as the prayer ended, a loud knock was heard at the door. It was a dairyman. His wagon had broken down just outside and he could not get to town with his milk. Mr. Müller was welcome to it if he would help carry it in. Every waiting mug was filled with milk that morning!
Have you ever mislaid your glasses, keys, checkbook? Do you, like me, frantically run about from room to room, stopping to pray only when every option has been exhausted?
On one occasion, when I had mislaid my checkbook, I remembered to pray first before running around. The Lord rewarded me by flashing a picture on my mind of where to look. It was the last place I would have thought of looking, but there it was!
Assignment 11: Write out a verse in Psalm 66 that illustrates Point 3 above, and a verse in Proverbs 21 that illustrates Point 4.