Prayer and theological reflections.

Matthew 7:7

God is utterly sovereign. Ephesians 1 “He works out all things according to his purpose, for the praise of his glorious grace.”

God’s Sovereignty and Human Responsibility

1.God is absolutely sovereign, but his sovereignty never functions in Scripture to reduce human responsibility.

2.Human beings are responsible creatures, they choose, they believe, they disobey, they respond, and there is moral significance in their choices; but human responsibility never functions in Scripture to diminish God’s sovereignty or to make God absolutely contingent.

In his day, Joshua can challenge Israel in these words: “Now fear the LORD and serve him with all faithfulness.… But if serving the LORD seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve.… But as for me and my household, we will serve the LORD” (Josh. 24:14–15). The commanding invitation of the gospel itself assumes profound responsibility: “

Because God is sovereign, Paul offers thanksgiving for God’s intervening, sovereign grace in the lives of his readers Ephesians, (1:15–16).

Because God is sovereign, Paul offers intercession that God’s sovereign, holy purposes in the salvation of his people may be accomplished (1:17–19a). Just as Daniel prayed for the end of the exile because God had promised that the exile would end, so Paul prays that Christians may grow in their knowledge of God because God has declared his intention

The Mystery and the Nature of God

Christianity is not interested in tempting you to believe contradictory nonsense. It promotes mystery now and then; it does not promote nonsense.

Part of our problem is that virtually all that we understand by “personal” is shaped by our experience within time and space. We find it hard to imagine how God can be both transcendent and personal, even though we clearly see that the Bible presents him in just such categories.

Christians are prepared to accept certain mysteries. We confess that the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God—yet there is but one God.

What bearing does all this have on prayer?

The Bible insists that God is utterly sovereign, and human beings are morally responsible creatures; we except that God himself is both transcendent and personal. This involves a significant degree of mystery.

How can we assure that these complementary pairs of truths operate the right way in our lives? If there is so much mystery about them, will we not always be in danger of using these truths in a way that denies the mystery or contradicts something else we should know?

How do the constant exhortations to believe and obey function in Scripture?

They never function to picture God as fundamentally at the end of his own resources and utterly dependent on us; they never reduce God to the absolutely contingent. Rather, they function to increase our responsibility, to emphasize the urgency of the steps we must take, to show us what the only proper response is to this kind of God.

The repeated truth of God’s sovereign providence never serves to authorize uncaring fatalism; it never allows me to be morally indifferent on the ground that I can’t really help it anyway.

How does God’s sovereignty function in passages of Scripture where prayer is introduced?

It never functions as a disincentive to pray! It can forbid certain kinds of preposterous praying: for example, Jesus forbids his followers from babbling on like pagans who think they will be heard because of their many words. “Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him” (Matt. 6:8). But Jesus elsewhere urges that such perseverance is important (Luke 11, 18).

God’s sovereignty can also function as an incentive to pray in line with God’s will. Thus Jesus prays, “Father, the time [lit., hour] has come. Glorify your Son, that your Son may glorify you” (John 17:1).

Those who pray in the Scriptures regularly pray in line with what God has already disclosed he is going to do. In Daniel 9 we are told that Daniel understands from the Scriptures, “according to the word of the LORD given to Jeremiah the prophet” (Dan. 9:2), that the period of seventy years of exile was drawing to an end.

A fatalist would simply have wiped his or her brow and looked forward to the promised release as soon as the seventy years were up.

Daniel is perfectly aware that God is not an automaton, or a magic genie that pops out of a bottle at our command. God is not only sovereign, he is personal, and because he is personal he is free.

So Daniel addresses this personal God, confessing his own sins and the sins of his people: “So I turned to the Lord God and pleaded with him in prayer and petition, in fasting, and in sackcloth and ashes” (9:3).

Because Daniel is aware of the promise of this personal, sovereign God, he feels it his obligation to pray in accord with what he has learned in the Scriptures regarding the will of that God.

In his prayer he appeals to God to preserve the integrity of his own name, the sanctity of his own covenant, his reputation for mercy and forgiveness.

The extreme importance of these passages can not be missed. God expects to be pleaded with; he expects godly believers to intercede with him. Their intercession is his own appointed means for bringing about his relenting, and if they fail in this respect, then he does not relent and his wrath is poured out.

Something like this was in the life of Moses, Moses was effective in prayer not in the sense that God would have broken his covenant promises to the patriarchs, nor in the sense that God temporarily lost his self-control until Moses managed to bring God back to his senses. Rather, in God’s mercy Moses proved to be God’s own appointed means, through intercessory prayer, for bringing about the relenting that was nothing other than a gracious confirmation of the covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

The wonderful truth is that human beings like Moses and you and me can participate in bringing about God’s purposes through God’s own appointed means. In that limited sense, prayer certainly changes things; it cannot be thought to change things in some absolute way that catches God out of control.

It is also helpful to remember that the prayer we offer cannot be exempted from God’s sovereignty. If I pray right, God is graciously working out his purposes in me and through me, and the praying, though mine, is simultaneously the fruit of God’s powerful work in me through his Spirit.

By this God-appointed means I become an instrument to bring about a God-appointed end. If I do not pray, it is not as if the God-appointed end fails, leaving God somewhat frustrated. Instead, the entire situation has now changed, and my prayerlessness, for which I am entirely responsible, cannot itself escape the reaches of God’s sovereignty, forcing me to conclude that in that case there are other God-appointed ends in view, possibly including judgment on me and on those for whom I should have been interceding!

We must allow each biblically revealed attribute of God (God’s sovereignty, God’s goodness, God’s compassion, God’s wrath) to function with respect to our prayer lives only as it functions within Scripture and in no other way.

Philippians 2:12 Paul writes “My dear friends, as you have always obeyed—not only in my presence, but now much more in my absence—continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill his good purpose.” God’s sovereignty in causing you to will and act is used as an incentive to working hard, not as an incentive to fatalism.

This suggests that even in the mystery of the triune God there are degrees of personal relationship that must not be swept under the carpet of God’s sovereignty if the price that is paid is God’s personhood. So in our praying we must never allow biblical truths to function in ways that tend toward the destruction of other biblical truths. Never, ever appeal to God’s sovereignty, God’s sovereignty even in election, to diminish your zeal in intercessory prayer that God would have mercy.

We should never, ever allow God’s sovereignty to function in our lives in such a way as to diminish the biblical mandate for intercessory prayer, pleading with a sovereign, holy God, even while we acknowledge full well that should we do so it is the fruit of God’s powerful Spirit at work within us.

Eight Encouragements from Jesus to Pray

He Invites Us to Pray

Three times he invites us to pray—7–8: “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened.”

He Makes Promises to Us if We Pray

Seven promises. It will be given you. You will find. It will be opened to you.

God Makes Himself Available at Different Levels

Ask. Seek. Knock. The point seems to be that it doesn’t matter whether you find God immediately close at hand, almost touchable with his nearness, or hard to see and even with barriers between, he will hear, and he will give good things to you because you looked to him and not another.

Everyone Who Asks Receives

Jesus encourages us to pray by making it explicit that everyone who asks receives, not just some.

We Are Coming to Our Father.

When we come to God through Jesus, we are coming to our Father. Verse 11: “If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!”

Our Heavenly Father Is Better than Our Earthly Father

Then the Jesus encourages us to pray by showing us that our heavenly Father is better than our earthly father and will far more certainly give good things to us than they did. There is no evil in our heavenly Father like there is in our earthly father.

Verse 11 again: “If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!”

I am aware, and Jesus was even more aware, that our earthly fathers are sinful. This is why the Bible repeatedly draws attention not only to the similarity between earthly fathers and the heavenly Father, but also to the differences (e.g. Hebrews 12:9–11; Matthew 5:48).

So Jesus goes beyond the encouragement of merely saying that God is your Father, and says that God is always better than your earthly father, because all earthly fathers are evil and God is not. Jesus is very blunt and unflattering here. This is a clear instance of Jesus’ belief in the universal sinfulness of human beings. He assumes that his disciples are all evil—he doesn’t choose a softer word (like sinful, or weak). He simply says that his disciples are evil (ponÄ“roi.).

Don’t ever limit your understanding of the Fatherhood of God to your experience of your own father. Rather, take heart that God has none of the sins or limitations or weaknesses or hang-ups of your father.

And the point Jesus makes is: Even fallen, sinful fathers usually have enough common grace to give good things to their children.

We Can Trust God’s Goodness Because He Has Already Made Us His Children

Here is another implicit encouragement to pray: God will give us good things as his children because he has already given us the gift to become his children.

This insight came from St. Augustine: “For what would he not now give to sons when they ask, when he has already granted this very thing, namely, that they might be sons?”

The Cross Is the Foundation of Prayer

Finally, implicit in these words is the cross of Christ as the foundation for all the answers to our prayer. The reason I say this is because he calls us evil and yet he says we are children of God. How can it be that evil people are adopted by an all holy God? How can we presume to be children, let alone ask and expect to receive, and seek and expect to find, and knock and expect to have the door opened?

Does this mean that everything a child of God asks for he gets?

I think the context here is sufficient to answer this question. No, we do not get everything we ask for and we should not and we would not want to. The reason I say we should not is because we would in effect become God if God did everything we asked him to do.

He Gives Only Good Things

He gives good things. Only good things. He does not give serpents to children. Therefore, the text itself points away from the conclusion that Ask and you will receive means Ask and you will receive the very thing you ask for when you ask for it in the way you ask for it. It doesn’t say that. And it doesn’t mean that.

This tests our faith. Because if we thought that something different were better, we would have asked for it in the first place. But we are not God. We are not infinitely strong, or infinitely righteous, or infinitely good, or infinitely wise, or infinitely loving. And therefore, it is a great mercy to us and to the world that we do not get all we ask.