I was asked to preach at the women’s day of prayer in our church on praying the promises of God. What a fruitful time of study this was for my own heart. Below are three reasons why praying the promises of the Bible back to God are very good for your prayer life.
The first reason praying the promises will greatly enhance your prayer life is: the promises by their nature infuse grace into our prayer life. They’re generally promises that God will do something good-- in your or someone else’s life. That’s grace because the promises are expressions of God’s love and goodness to us--grace. When we sense God’s love for us, we will want to spend time with God because he is good and he loves us. The Law on the other hand brings failure, causing us to believe that God is mad or disgusted with us. Let me ask you, how many of you get excited about going into a room alone with someone who you think is mad or disgusted with you? If you are living under Law, that’s what your prayer life is like—no wonder you don’t pray. Your prayer life will either be very weak, or, at the other extreme, because it is rooted in your own effort, it will end up producing self-righteousness in you seen when you look down your nose at others who are not devoted “prayer warriors”… like you.
A second reason praying the promises will greatly help your prayer life is—all the promises are God’s Word and are therefore authored by the prayer-inspiring Holy Spirit. As the Holy Spirit-inspired Word gets into your mind and heart, that will stimulate your prayer life because the purpose of the Spirit in you according to John 16:14 is to cause you to glorify Jesus. That’s the Spirit’s mission in your life and Jesus is glorified as his people IN PRAYER voice their dependency upon him. The Spirit-inspired Word of God brings about this urgent sense of dependence upon him. Also, praying the promises causes more of your prayers to be prayed in the power of the Holy Spirit simply because you are praying the words of the Spirit—these promises are ultimately his promises.
Third and related, praying the promises will stimulate your prayer life because: you will be assured that what you are praying for is the will of God. Part of what demotivates people to pray is—they don’t have much faith their prayers will be answered. If we think an activity is futile, we won’t do it with much enthusiasm or for very long. If you are told to mop the floor, but are only given a newspaper with which to mop, you are not going to be motivated to mop the floor because, no matter how hard you work, the floor will not get very clean—it will be futile. Praying the promises is anything but futile because when you pray the promises, you can have confidence that God will answer your prayer because he has already communicated that the promise is his will for whatever you are praying about. God promises us in First John 5:14-15 says, “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.” Knowing you are praying in God’s will bring faith and boldness to your prayers. For instance, when you pray that the Holy Spirit would have a greater measure of influence in your life, you don’t have to wonder whether God is going to answer that prayer because Jesus promises in Luke 11, “11 What father among you, if his son asks for a fish, will instead of a fish give him a serpent; 12 or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? 13 If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!” Beyond that, the promises are the Word of God and we know that the Word of God itself increases our faith. Romans 10 tells us , “17 So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ.” Praying faith can come through the promises.
"for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure" (ESV Phil 2:13).
ReplyDeleteThis promise came to mind when I was subbing in a biology class at a high school today and listening to a DVD talking about how our brain evolved--first the amygdala, then the cerebellum. I started thrashing around at the teacher's desk, wanting to get up and oppose the empty dogma that was "conjectured" as fact and started wondering why I took a science class when I usually avoid them like the plague. I was seething pretty badly, and my mind settled on--well, why should I expect them to think any differently?--"They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart" (Eph. 4:18).
But, now, back to me--how can I address the anguish I feel when I cannot really do anything about something that needs correcting? This promise assuages some of my unrest. It's only by the grace of God and his working out his purpose for his pleasure in me that I see people beyond the empty dogma they espouse. Could it be me that needs more work?