I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, that you may know that you have eternal life. 14 And this is the confidence that we have toward him, that if we ask anything according to his will he hears us. 15 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.
1 John 5:13-15
Many Christians struggle with praying prayers that they can have confidence God will answer. Or simply, is it right that I pray for this or that?
One of the greatest keys to a joyous prayer life is to learn to pray God’s word. In our text above, the logical flow is confidence = ask according to God’s will = God will hear us = God will grant our requests. Or, back it up. God granting our prayer requests happens when we know God hears us. We know he hears us when we pray according to his will. So, the remaining question is, “How do I know God’s will for the purpose of my prayers?” It’s a simple answer. God’s will is revealed in his word.
God’s word speaks authoritatively to whatever it addresses. You can bank on it. As you read and meditate in God’s word over time, you will, if you look for it, discover some beautiful gems that will change your life to be more like Jesus when you act on them. Let me share a couple of examples that have had meaning in my life.
Incline my heart to your testimonies,
Psalm 119:36
and not to selfish gain!
All of us have times when our hearts stray from our love of God’s word. Psalm 119:36 gives us a remedy for this soul-sickness. The prayer is, “Incline my heart to Your testimonies.” Testimonies is one of several words used in Psalm 119 to refer to God’s word. Of course, it makes logical sense that it is God’s will that we love his word. But it bolsters our faith when God’s word puts it so directly in this prayer. Incline my heart to your testimonies or word. Give me a heart to love your word. I will guarantee you that if you pray that prayer with a genuine heart for God to change your dry listless heart, he will do it. You will find richness rising from the pages of your Bible again. You will once again feast at the table of God’s word. It is a short, simple prayer that can change your life.
The second half is that prayer reveals the nature of our hearts and what will often lead us away from our love of God’s word. It is said that there are three primary ways Satan takes down a Christian, sex, power, and money. Money is not bad. The love of money is the root of all sorts of evil and will cause a believer’s heart to shrivel and lose their love for God’s word. So our short, powerful prayer addresses our problem from both directions: Help me, Lord, to lust after your word again and take from me the lust for money. Again, may I say, money is not evil. Money is necessary in this world and is our means of exchange to meet our families’ needs and our neighbors who are in need at times. Our use of money is one measure of the generosity of our hearts.
It is always a heart issue, and only God can truly change our hearts. If you sincerely pray this prayer regularly for a period of time, I promise you will realize that God has changed your heart. The prayer is little, and it is powerful.
Teach me your way, O Lord,
Psalm 86:11
that I may walk in your truth;
unite my heart to fear your name.
The huge problem we have in living life successfully is in our minds. No, I’m not talking about the power of positive thinking or any other mental manipulation technique. I am writing about wrong thinking. When we come into this world, we are a mental blank slate, and we learn about reality from what we observe and what we are formally taught. If we were fortunate enough to have been born into a godly home that honors God’s word and sees the world as God sees it, then we learn about reality as it is, not as it seems to be.
Many of us did not have the privilege of living in a Christian home and were taught by example and possibly precept that the world is as it appears in its fallen state; that is, a world uninformed by God’s word. That is an upside-down view of reality. The world says that the way to greatness is to lord it over others, but Jesus says that the way to greatness is to be a servant. And, there are many other opposites like this between the ways of the world and the ways of God.
This short and powerful prayer petitions God to teach me his way. There are the world’s ways, and there are God’s ways. I want to learn God’s ways. A similar way of God to the way of servanthood is the way of humility. The world’s way is one of pride and arrogance. I believe that humility is one of the godliest attributes because it is what Jesus demonstrated when he became a man and forever took on himself human flesh, having given up the glory he had with the Father. This world will not teach you to live in humility.
The ways of the Lord are many, so there are lots of God’s ways for us to learn. The purpose of learning God’s ways is for us to walk in those ways or, as the Psalmist says it, to walk in God’s truth. In other words, we learn God’s ways so we can obey him and live in his truth.
The last phrase speaks to the heart of the matter, literally. The Psalmist writes, “unite my heart to fear your name.” This phrase initially puzzled me until I read it in another translation. The New International Version of the Bible translates this phrase as “give me an undivided heart, that I may fear your name.” A united heart is an undivided heart. A united heart is required for us to fear the name of the Lord alone. A divided heart will keep us from walking in God’s ways because we will fear things other than God. The fear of God is essential for living life successfully.
If we fear man alongside our fear of God, our hearts will be divided, sometimes responding properly and sometimes giving in to the fear of man. It is amazingly liberating to have fears other than the fear of God removed from your heart. I’m not naive enough to think I have this battle all sown up, but I will tell you that because of this little and powerful prayer, I have far less fear of things other than God than I did at one time in my life. I can now say, in a positive way, “I don’t care” when following Jesus is offensive to someone else. I want much more to live in God’s favor than in favor of fickle man, so “I don’t care” what people think. God’s truth is God’s truth and will stand forever. Fleeting things like the current political or cultural fad will pass away, and even if it results in persecution, I trust I won’t care what the culture thinks. I trust I will fear God alone.
I am not writing this article out of some academic realization but out of my personal experience of the truth of God’s word that has changed me as I have prayed God’s word. You should do the same. And I do mean, “your should.”
We only looked at two little prayers in two verses of the Bible, and both have changed my life. The Bible is loaded with other such prayers that may be just what you need to pray. Read and meditate in God’s word with this question in mind, “What Biblical prayers are here that I need to appropriate as my own?” Do it and watch yourself be changed from glory to glory into the image of Christ. This is a great little “secret” to living a life worthy of the calling to sonship that we who follow Jesus have received.
