Prayer and the Will of God -- Part Two

This is part two of our very brief look at prayer. It will also be the last blog of 2025. I will return to this space in January of 2026. [Don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss a blog.]

In my previous blog I outlined a brief theology of prayer and what we can expect when we pray. In this blog I want to draw a few conclusions based on what we learned. There are a lot of conclusions we could draw but I will only make a few here.

The first conclusion I need to draw is based on a serious misunderstanding of prayer put forth by several large churches in our area and thus all of us, I'm sure, have come across this error in some for or another. It's the issue of listening prayer. Put simply, the Bible does not teach listening prayer (Defined in this way – prayer where we entreat God with a concern, and then ‘listen’ to what God says back to us concerning our request).

A study of the passages on prayer in the Bible do not allow us to hold the view that if we pray a certain kind of prayer and listen in the proper manner then God will tangibly respond to us with an answer within a set time frame (usually minutes), or at all for that matter. [Sounds a lot like magic doesn’t it!?!] This kind of thinking is simply not found in Scripture, and it runs contrary to biblical teaching at a number of points.

Some may object. What about the fact that some biblical characters heard God, like Samuel, Peter, and Paul for example? Well, to put it bluntly, to prove listening prayer from these stories would involve hermeneutic cirque du soleil -- a dangerous contortion of the principles of biblical interpretation. Or what about John 10:27, “My sheep listen to my voice: I know them, and they follow me”? This is an oft-cited misuse of Scripture. The context of this verse is one of salvation, God’s calling, and the eternal protection that God provides his sheep. The ‘listening’ that is done in this context has to do with ‘eternal life’ and perseverance, and not with prayer. Or what about the fact that all of the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hidden in Christ (Col 2:3)? Does that not mean that a deep relationship with Christ will involve him communicating those treasures directly to me if only I ask? In a word, No! Once again, to come to that conclusion, one would have to ignore the context of the verse, ignore the focus of what can be ours in i Christ, and in general abandon proper exegetical procedures. Or what about my personal experience when I ‘heard’ God in a particular situation? I can’t argue against anyone’s experience any more than you can argue against mine, I can only search the Scriptures and put forth what it says. The Bible should determine whether or not our experience is legitimate. If the Bible does not allow for a certain kind of experience or behavior, regardless of how we might feel about it, we must jettison it from our Christian life. I speak strongly here, because the dangers of the opposite are so great.

Our second conclusion takes us in a different direction -- prayer is fundamentally an act of faith. We discussed this in our previous blog, but I must add one more thing. Prayer is not so much about the act of praying as it is the attitude with which we pray -- an attitude of dependency upon God. “Prayer is the taking of an attitude of dependency

upon God, the spreading of our needs before Him, the asking for those things which are in accordance with His will. . .” (Pink, Sovereignty of God, 121)

Our third conclusion is that I must pray according to God’s ‘will,’ or in ‘Jesus’ name.’ Two passages are significant here: 1 John 5:14-15 (cf. Matt 6:10; 26:39), ‘... 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 obtained the requests made of him;” and John 14:13-14 (cf. John 16:23-24; Eph 5:20), “Whatever you ask in my name, I will do it, that the Father may be glorified in the Son; if you ask anything in my name, I will do it.” Put simply, to pray in the name of Jesus or to pray according to God’s ‘will’ is to set aside our own wills, accepting God’s instead. It is not a magical incantation that will unlock the vault of God’s heavenly storehouse of blessing, but it is the way in which we admit our creaturely weakness and it is our confession of our great need of God so that no matter the

‘answer’ I receive I am able to accept it with fulness of faith. As one author states correctly,

“In prayer, we do not cajole God into doing something that he did not purpose to do, we ask him to do what he wants to do. Our first task in petitionary prayer is therefore to discern God’s will for the situation. The better we know God through our knowledge of his Word and through our fellowship with him, the more likely we are to accurately discern his will. . . Obviously Scripture does not tell us specifically what God wants to do in most of the situations that we face. But he has given us a picture of his general desires. He gives us wisdom by his Spirit so that we can examine situations and make judgments concerning what development in the situation would move things along toward the goals that we understand to be God’s goals for the world.

Nevertheless, on many occasions we find ourselves unsure of the specific action that God would wish to do in the situation that confronts us. And so we present our requests, but we qualify them with the condition “if it is your will.” This is not a lack of faith; it is a lack of knowledge. We believe that God will do what is best, but we are uncertain what that is and so we ask according to our best wisdom.”

Tiessen, Providence and Prayer, 339-340; italics mine.

The last conclusion we can make is that there are no guarantees when we pray. There are times we will get what we want when we pray, and there are times we will not. We see both in Scripture. We are told that the prayers of a righteous person are powerful and effective (Jas 5:16), yet we also see that Paul thrice prayed to have his thorn removed and God refused all three times (2 Cor 12:7-10). Was Paul not righteous enough to get his prayers answered? Surely he was. There are no guarantees in prayer for a number of reasons, the main one being simply this – God is sovereign and will work out his decretive will according to his purposes for his glory in his wisdom (Eph 1:3ff). God desires for us to seek from him the things we are in need of. God does bid us to pray. Prayer is part of effecting things in this world. BUT in all of this we must remember, God is not our servant, we are his, and often ‘unanswered prayer’ or prayer that receives a different ‘answer’ than we would have desired is God’s way of reminding us of that fact. Arthur Pink summarizes well, “Prayer is, indeed, a Divinely-appointed means whereby we may obtain from God the things we ask, provided, that we ask for those things which are in accord with his will” (Pink, The Sovereignty of God, 122).

I hope that this very brief overview of prayer and the will of God has been helpful. Stay tuned for more in an episode of the Here I Sit podcast.

Soli Deo Gloria