Confidence in Prayer

Vending machines are one of the modern world's great inventions. You put your money in and push the button for the drink or candy bar that you want, and, presto...most of the time you get what you want.

I understand that there is a fast food restaurant in New York City that just has walls and walls of vending machines. You can pick your sandwich, and your chips, and your drink at different slots, pay your money, and then sit down and eat. Its fast, easy, and relatively cheap.

Vending machines are great, but I think sometimes we view our prayers to God in much the same way we look at money and vending machines. We put our prayers in the slot, tell God what we want, and he sends it to us. I think that this is a very unbiblical way of looking at prayer. We seem to think sometimes, that once we pray, God is obligated to give us what we want.

The apostle John gives us a much more biblical perspective on prayer in 1 John 5:14-15, "And this is the confidence that we have toward 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 that we have asked of him."

Well, there you go. Doesn't that verse say that we can ask anything and he hears and answer our request. Yes, it does say that but there is a phrase that is left out of this interpretation. It is the phrase, "according to his will."

That little phrase changes everything. It means that if we are living according to God's will and we need something to accomplish his will he will hear us and answer our request. However, if we are living lives that are guided by our own selfish, materialistic desires, there is absolutely no promise to answer that prayer.

Jesus told us that if we are doing God's will, and a mountain stands between us and accomplishing God's will, we can pray that God will move that mountain and it will be moved.

Prayer, then, is essential to doing God's will. The truth is that God's will for us is impossible for us to accomplish on our own power. If we are going to be able to accomplish God's will for our lives, we will have to depend on God in prayer. But we have this confidence; that when we pray according to God's will he will hear us, and he will answer that request. God makes his will impossible for us to do in our own power because then we are forced to depend on him, and because in this way we can never receive the glory for accomplishing God's will.

I think instead of thinking of God as that great vending machine in the sky, we need to think of him as our Father who is in Heaven.

When I was about eight years old, a friend of mine got a BB gun. I thought that was so cool, that I went to my Dad and asked him for a BB gun for Christmas. Dad said no. Not because he didn't love me, but because he did love me. He knew that I wasn't ready for a BB gun; that I would just get into trouble with it.

Our Father in Heaven doesn't answer some of our prayers in the affirmative because he knows we aren't ready to handle the responsibility yet. Whether God answers our prayers yes or no his answer is always informed by his wisdom and controlled by his love.

But if we are committed to obeying God's will for our lives and we need something to accomplish that will, our Father in Heaven is always ready to answer "Yes!"