Word of Encouragement (9/16/2020)
Today, we will be reminded that the promises of God also provide the rules for our prayers. How so?
“Things absolutely promised should be absolutely asked for, with the great assurance that we will indeed, in the Lord’s wise time and way, receive the thing He has pledged” (p. 68). What are some of these absolute promises of God? The promise to give the Holy Spirit to those who ask (Luke 11:13); not to allow temptations beyond our ability to bear and to provide a way escape (1 Cor. 10:13); to give us wisdom when we ask (James 1:5) (pp. 68-69). We can pray with absolute confidence that God will fulfill these absolute promises. Even so, we must pray “in the faith of submission” concerning the time and manner of His answers.
There is another category of God’s promises, which dictates how we should pray. “But when the Lord has placed conditions and exceptions on a promise, our prayers must be conditional. We must then include some limitation on our prayers such as: ‘If God sees it to be good…”; “If it be according to His good pleasure…”; “If it may stand with His glory…”; or “If the Lord will…” (p. 68). But even for these conditional promises, we have the assurance “that God will give us either what we pray for or the equivalent. For example, if we pray for peace in a trial, we must trust that He will grant it if peace will glorify Him, but that if it will not, the Lord will give us patience in its place” (p. 69). You may wonder how giving us peace will ever not glorify God. For a time, God may withdraw the light of His countenance so that we might crave for and appreciate His peace all the more. Or, God may want us to taste the bitterness of our sins and our wayward ways so we come willingly to Him in true humility and repentance.
We can see how God promised eternal blessings absolutely while He promised temporal blessings conditionally. God will never take away the spiritual blessings in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus because they are essential to our Christian life. But we know from experience how the temporal blessings of this life come and go: God gives them sometimes and God takes them away at other times). Think about Job—how God gave temporal blessings to him so richly but also took them away so completely (except for his life and for a time). But God did not take His presence away from Job. We know this because it is contrary to His nature to leave or abandon His people. If Job was able to not “curse God and die,” it was because God was sustaining him all along (even though he probably did not perceive it). We have to keep in mind that God loves us too much to withhold or take away what is truly good for us. As hard as it may be to accept at times, the fact that God takes certain things away from us means that they are not essential (from the perspective of our eternal salvation). When that happens, let us not doubt God’s love for us. Rather, let us grow in our appreciation of His absolute promises and His goodness to give what is good for us even when He says no to what we are asking for.