The Power of Simple Prayer: How to Talk With God About Everything Page 12
. . .And Don’t Take It Back!
How would you feel if a friend were to give you a birthday present, perhaps a piece of jewelry, at a luncheon in your honor and then followed you home and said, “Oh, may I have that back for a while? I want to wear it tonight.” You might think that was strange, but if she returned it the next day and said, “Thanks. It was just what I needed. I know it’s yours, so I appreciate your letting me borrow it. I won’t ask again,” then you would probably tend to believe her. But, if she came back the next day and said, “Could I wear that piece of jewelry to a meeting today and then keep it for a party this weekend? I’ll try to return it next week if I don’t think of somewhere else to wear it,” then you would wonder if she had really given it to you in the first place—and she would not have!
Once we have prayed, committed our situations to God, and truly given our problems to Him, we have to leave everything in His hands. But that is easier said than done. We all tend to take our problems back because we are afraid God won’t do anything, or we do not think God is acting quickly enough, or we do not like the way He is handling things. Many of us give our problems to God many times a day. I certainly do, but I have also been known to pray and say, “All right Lord, I put this person in your hands. I give You this situation.” Then I walk away and the next thing I know, that person or situation is following me! I quickly find myself thinking about it again, worrying about it again, or the devil has given me a new idea about how to handle it!
When our problems are resting in God’s hands, we are not to go check on them!
How do we keep from taking back things we have already given to God? By learning to rest our cares in Him. The Amplified version of Psalm 37:5 says to roll our cares unto God, and then it says to “repose” each burden on Him: “Commit your way to the Lord [roll and repose each care of your load on Him]; trust (lean on, rely on, and be confident) also in Him and He will bring it to pass.” The word “repose” means to rest. When something is resting, it should not be disturbed. When our problems are resting in God’s hands, we are not to go check on them! We are to leave them alone. At the same time, we need to keep our minds at rest, being fully confident that God will do a masterful job handling what we have entrusted to Him.
First Peter 5:7 says, “Casting the whole of your care [all your anxieties, all your worries, all your concerns, once and for all] on Him, for He cares for you affectionately and cares about you watchfully.” Notice that this verse says we are to cast all of our anxieties, all of our worries, and all of our concerns “once and for all.” That means we cannot take them back. Once we commit them to the Lord, it’s hands off!
My husband’s theme in life has been “cast your care.” In the early years of our marriage, I worried and he enjoyed life. It made me angry that I had to take care of everything while he just enjoyed himself, but I finally learned that all of my worry was not accomplishing anything good. Instead, it gave me headaches, backaches, neck aches, stomachaches, made me nervous and grouchy, but did nothing beneficial. After years of tormenting myself with worry and anxiety, I finally learned to cast my care also. Actually, I learned that God does not take care of us until we cast all of our care onto Him.
When we are tempted to pick up our problems again in our minds or tempted to try to do something about them in some natural way, we have to stop and say, “No! I can’t think about that. I’ve given it to God once and for all—and I will not take it back! I am not going to try to do anything about this!” We have to refuse to revisit what we commit to God, because that’s what the prayer of commitment really means.
SUMMARY
There is no way for us to live as victorious, overcoming Christians apart from trusting God with our lives. When we pray the prayer of consecration, we choose to give ourselves, our entire beings, and everything about us to God. This includes making an intentional decision to give Him our bodies, our minds, our abilities, our weaknesses, and our attitudes and motives. When we give ourselves to Him in this way, we also invite and allow Him to deal with each of those areas in ways that make us holy and more conformed to His likeness.
When we pray the prayer of commitment, we are releasing our problems and concerns to God, trusting Him to take care of them. Once we give our cares to Him, we cannot take them back. God has not designed us to be packhorses for our problems, but He has created us to be able to roll them over onto Him. We are in relationship with Him; He is our Father and our friend; and He is the only one who takes care of every situation.
The prayers of consecration and commitment will bring great freedom to your life, so I encourage you to pray them and pray them often. And remember: nothing is too big and nothing is too small. Pray about everything!
Prayer Points
• Prayers of consecration involve giving ourselves to God and prayers of commitment involve giving our situations to Him.
• The prayer of consecration is a complete, willful surrender of ourselves and everything about our lives to the Lord. It means holding nothing back from God and making a deliberate decision to let Him deal with anything He wants to deal with in our lives.
• Consecration involves not only our bodies, our behavior, and our words, but also our thoughts, attitudes, and motives.
• It is an honor to live a consecrated life. It is not always easy, but it does bring blessings we could never imagine.
• When we pray a prayer of commitment, we are giving all of our problems to the Lord. The prayer of commitment comes when we realize we cannot run our own lives, control other people, or figure everything out. It means letting God be in charge. When we really commit our problems to God, we cannot take them back; we cannot worry about them; we cannot keep reasoning about them in our minds. We roll them onto God and leave them there.
7
Petition and Perseverance
It seems like everybody, everywhere, wants something. It is hard to find a person who is thoroughly satisfied and cannot think of a single thing to wish for. The Bible says that we have not because we ask not (see James 4:2), and when we want something from God, we are to ask Him for it. The type of prayer we pray when we make requests is called a prayer of petition—and this kind of prayer is important. You see, we partner with Him through prayer. Prayer is simply the means by which we cooperate with Him and work with Him in the spiritual realm in order to get things done in the natural realm. Prayer brings the power of heaven to earth.
Sometimes our prayers seem to be answered quickly and other times we feel we need to persevere until God responds. In that case, we are praying prayers of persistence. God leads us to pray persistently not because He does not hear us the first time we pray, but because He is developing our faith and helping us build our spiritual muscles as we learn endurance through prayer.
One of the reasons we may need to persevere is that evil spirits can oppose the answers to our prayers. We find an example of this in Daniel 10, when Daniel fasted and prayed for twenty-one days until the answer to his prayer came. God sent the answer the first day Daniel prayed, but an evil spirit, the prince of Persia, was hindering the answer. As Daniel refused to give up and continued to pray, God sent Michael the Archangel to do battle with the prince of Persia and victory was secured. Daniel got his answer from God!
We need to petition God and make our requests known to Him and we also need to persist in prayer until the answers are manifest on earth. Both types of prayer are vital and necessary to an effective prayer life.
THE PRAYER OF PETITION
When we ask God for the things we want and need, we are praying prayers of petition. We probably pray this type of prayer more than any other and it is one of the ways Jesus instructed us to pray. He said in Matthew 7:7, “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you” (NKJV). If nobody knocks, no doors open. If nobody seeks, nobody finds. If nobody asks, nobody receives.
When our requests are in balance with our praise and gratitude, petitio
ning God is awesome and exciting.
Because we need to ask in order to receive, our petitions are very important. As we make requests of God, though, we do want to make sure our petitions do not outweigh our praise and thanksgiving, because we do not need to be asking for more than we are thankful for. Remember that Philippians 4:6 instructs us to “be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God” (NKJV). When our requests are in balance with our praise and gratitude, petitioning God is awesome and exciting. It really is. It is awesome to ask God for something, believe Him for it, and then watch Him bring it to pass in our lives. We may know in our heart that we have received the answer and never need to mention it to God again or we may feel we have to persevere in prayer; either way, we can be sure that God loves to give; He loves to answer our prayers, in His wisdom and His timing and His way. So go ahead—ask!
Petition and Desire
Here’s the way I believe petition needs to work. Let’s say you’re busy serving God; you are obeying His Word; you are seeking righteousness; you are truly seeking first the Kingdom of God, according to Matthew 6:33. The true cry of your heart is to treat people well, to live with integrity, to be wise, and to live in the center of God’s will. Now, when a desire arises in you, what do you do? You mention it to God, saying something like, “You know, God, I really need a new car. I know You are good, Lord, and You want us to be blessed, so I pray that You make a way for me to have this car, because I don’t see how I’m going to make it happen in my own strength.” What do you do next? You go right back to serving God, living the way you were living, and you wait expectantly for God to help you get that new car.
Petition is usually based on desire. I believe that we have to desire something before asking God for it. I believe that God puts the right desires in our hearts, and that we have to know the difference between the desires of our flesh and the true desires of our hearts. I agree with Charles Spurgeon, who observed that, “[God] will direct your desires to the things for which you ought to seek. He will teach your wants.. . .#8221;1 When God puts a desire within us, we are responding properly to say, “God, I want that,” and the Bible says that God will give us the desires of our hearts if we delight ourselves in Him (see Psalm 37:4). But we also have fleshly, carnal desires, desires that are not God-given—and He does not promise to grant those. The proper way to respond to such desires is to release them, to simply let them go. Sometimes a prayer is not answered because our prayers are related to a fleshly desire and are not really being led or inspired by the Holy Spirit (see James 4:3).
We frequently discover that we cannot be certain if our desire is a desire of our heart or our flesh. When that is the case, I simply pray, “Lord, I am asking You for this, but if it is not right for me, then I trust You to do what is best for me.” Since I know God is good and I know He loves me and wants good things for me, it would make no sense at all to persist in wanting something that God did not want me to have. Father always knows best!
We need to follow the Holy Spirit as we pray about what we want. We need to allow Him to teach us how to handle our desires, especially when they do not come to pass as quickly as we would like. We must not let a desire get out of balance and become an obsession, and that can happen when our desires are not submitted to God. When a desire for something becomes so strong that we think we cannot be happy without it, that desire has turned into lust—and lust is sin. There is nothing on this earth we cannot be happy without as long as we are in Christ and as long as He really is our joy. Personally, I work toward not allowing any desire to control me and I refuse to lust after anything because I know that whatever God asks me to do without, He will more than compensate for with His presence in my life.
Let me give you a practical example of what it looks like for a desire to get out of control. There are some single women who can hardly think about anything but getting married. They keep telling God, “I have to be married. I have to be married.” They ask their prayer group to get into agreement with them, and during the prayer time, everybody asks God to send them husbands. They ask for prayer over and over in this same area. They talk about it all the time. They get depressed and discouraged about it. They have made a decision that they absolutely cannot be happy unless they are married. Do you know what? Those people may stay single forever, and if not, they may end up with someone who makes them wish they were!
There is certainly nothing wrong with a single person saying, “Lord, I’m lonely, and I’d really like to have somebody with whom I can share life. And I am asking that You would bring the right person. I want to be married,” or “I need friends.” Sure, it’s okay to pray about those things, but we need to be diligent to avoid becoming fixated on one desire and allowing it to become the entire focus of our lives. Focus on serving God and obeying Him. Focus on being a blessing to others and you can be sure that whatever God’s will is for you will come to pass at the right time. You won’t have to struggle, be frustrated or upset. You can enjoy where you are on the way to where you are going.
I am sharing this with you because I really want to help you live a victorious life, and I do not want you to make the same mistakes I have made. I once allowed my desires for my ministry to become inappropriately important to me. All I cared about—and all I prayed about—was my ministry. True, God put a burning desire in my heart to impact people and to preach His Word. A thriving, effective ministry for me was His desire, but I let my own desire for it get out of balance. As a result, I began to pursue what God had given me more diligently than I pursued Him.
Let me share another example. Dave and I have children. If, when we had our first baby, I had stopped paying attention to Dave, he probably would not have wanted me to have more children. But because my relationship with him was deepened because of that baby, then he wanted me to have more if I wanted them.
God wants us to have anything we can handle—as much of it as we can handle—as long as we keep Him first in our lives.
God is the same way. If He gives us something and it separates us from Him, then He will not want to give us anything else. But if God gives us something, and it deepens our relationship with Him, inspiring us to love and worship Him even more than we did before, then He is not bothered by what we ask for. God wants us to have anything we can handle—as much of it as we can handle—as long as we keep Him first in our lives.
At the same time, we are not always smart enough to know the right things to ask for. Jesus said that if we ask for bread, He will not give us a stone, and if we ask for fish, He will not give us a scorpion (see Matthew 7:9,10). But do you know what? Sometimes we think we are asking for bread, when, in reality, we are asking for a stone. In other words, we may be asking for something that we truly believe is right, but God knows that if He were to grant that request, it would be the worst thing He could ever give us. We have the ability, in all innocence, to ask for something that is potentially dangerous without even realizing it. In that case, we need to be glad God does not give it to us! Sometimes we may be asking for something or for a certain person to come into our life, and little do we know that if God said “yes” to that request, it would be like letting a serpent into our house. So we have to trust God enough to say, “You know, God, I have the confidence to ask You for anything. But I don’t want anything that is not Your will for me. And I trust You, God. If I don’t get it, I will know that the timing is not right or that You have something better for me and I simply have not thought to ask for it yet. But I am not going to get a bad attitude or go pout because You are not giving me everything I want.”
We are God’s children, and He wants us to be blessed. He wants us to have not only what we want, but what is best for us. We always need to keep that in mind when we pray prayers of petition. If we truly trust God, we must trust Him when He says “no” to our requests as much as we do when He says “yes.”
King David wanted very much to build a ho
use for God. God told him that he would not build the temple, but that his son would. David did not have a bad or even a sad attitude. Instead, he got busy helping by giving and collecting finances and supplies from others for the building of the temple.
If God won’t let you do or have exactly what you want, find out what He does approve of and get busy doing that. Don’t spend your life being confused because you do not understand God’s ways. We are not meant to understand God; we are meant to trust Him. There is no such thing as trust without some unanswered questions in our lives.
Come Boldly
Romans 8:26 says, “. . .for we do not know what prayer to offer nor how to offer it worthily as we ought.. . .#8221; Sometimes we do not approach God with confidence because we feel so worthless or condemned or ashamed. Sometimes we do not think He really wants to help us, which is another manifestation of feeling worthless. Some people only pray on days when they think God should approve of them because they have been “good” that day! All of these ideas are lies of the enemy. True, we do not know how to offer our prayers worthily in our own strength, but we do not go to God in our own strength; we go to Him in the righteousness of Jesus Christ. Because Jesus has made us righteous, the Holy Spirit intercedes for us (see Romans 8:26). That, coupled with the fact that Jesus lives to intercede for us (see Hebrews 7:25), should convince us that God will indeed hear our prayers and should give us the courage to approach Him with confidence.