This will probably be the last post on prayer. I saw something else today that I may end up doing a post on perhaps next week. For today, I'll be writing on Prayer and Faith.
They are completely linked. If you do not believe that God can, you wouldn't bother asking. If you believe that God is able, only sin would keep you from asking.
Faith, however, seems to be a very slippery topic. Misunderstandings of faith lead to misrepresentations of prayer. Much of this is due to the idea of the "prosperity gospel" - the idea that if you believe it enough and ask for it, God WILL give it to you. This idea, once again, puts God in a box. If I believe the mountain will move, God must make it move, right? No.
How does this put God in a box? Well, it takes a great many variables about we fallen, sinful human beings, and simplifies them down to two things - Do I believe? and, Did I ask? Jeremiah 17:9 doesn't let us get away with that. Our hearts are deceitful and desperately wicked! We don't know them. And so many times what happens is people think they believe and people think they ask God and people think that they are doing it all according to the Bible, and then God does not give them what they asked for. And their faith crumbles.
Rather than questioning themselves, or simply realizing that what they were asking for must not have been in line with God's will, they often question God. They think that He didn't keep His side of the deal, that He broke a promise.
But that in itself shows how weak their faith really is. "He that cometh to God must believe that He is and that He is a rewarder of them that diligently seek Him." The very foundation of Christian faith is believing that God IS. That God is what? That God is Who He said. That God is GOD - perfect. If you can't believe that God is God because God didn't give you what you asked for, where is your faith really placed? It's not in God. Most likely, it's in your own understanding.
You reasoned it out; you believed that Bible said such and such; you came to this conclusion. Such a foundation is not faith in GOD - such a foundation is faith in YOUR abilities to reason, to understand, to discern spiritual things. But why are Christians able to understand spiritual things? Because the Holy Spirit is with them. We don't suddenly understand because Christians are suddenly smarter people. We understand because the Holy Spirit reveals it. But if you're trusting in your own abilities, not the leading of the Holy Spirit, you will be just as blind as you were before God saved you.
Oftentimes, we're so oblivious to our sins, our faults, our own deceitful purposes that the only way we ever realize that we're doing something wrong is when God DOESN'T do what we asked.
This is not to say necessarily that we shouldn't have asked - not at all. Rather, the point is that GOD is not unjust, unfair, or dishonest because He didn't give us what we asked for. FIRST, we must believe that God is. If God is not answering any of your prayers, the problem does not lie with Him - the problem lies with you and your prayers. God only gives His children what is best. Sometimes we think that God has said He will do things that He never actually said He would do. That problem is not with God; it's with us. A lot of people get angry about that. They get mad because they misunderstood, because in their minds it should have been made clearer, when really, it's their fault for assuming and presuming.
And in the end, such a response shows that their faith was NOT in God.
So where does this little series leave us with prayer? We are to pray to God the Father, Who is the Giver of all good things and Who answers our prayers on the basis of loving us. We are to pray as Jesus would pray, putting the glory of God always first. We are to pray in faith, not that we will receive what we ask for, but faith that God is God and can therefore be trusted to do all He has said, whether or not we understand what exactly that is.
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