Third in our series of reasons to pray is the following: we pray because prayer is crucial in determining God's will.
"Now you're talking," you say. "I always use prayer when I want to know God's will. I pray about my choices, and when I have `peace' about one of the options, then I go with it."
How many times have these words been uttered? -"I did it because I had peace about it?" Yet, how askew is that from God's Word. Prayer certainly is vital in determining His will, but not because it gives us peace. Let me show you how faulty such thinking is (and I had it for a long time). How many of you have ever shared your faith, witnessed to another person?
Well, right before you shared your faith, which was almost certainly God's Will, how many of you felt this warm, calm sense of `peace?' Hold up your hands. Hmmm. No hands! Weren't you rather scared, nervous. Perhaps your Adam's Apple turned to applesauce and the butterflies in your stomach turned to helicopters! Your palms sweated. Shoot, your hair sweated. No great feeling of peace there, but you did it anyway because it was God's will, right?
You see, you knew it was God's will in other ways besides a subjective emotion and contrary to it. You used God's Word, the volitional promptings of the Holy Spirit, and maybe some training you had received. Peace is often only a synonym for "comfort," behind which people hide so they won't have to find God's real will. God's real will often produced scary feelings, not warm fuzzy ones.
So wait. How does prayer help determine His will then? Jesus again gives us a demonstration in Luke's gospel. Read the sixth chapter, the twelfth through the sixteenth verse. Here, He prays all night about what seemed at the time an insignificant issue in history: the choosing from the crowd which followed Him a special group of disciples which we now know as the Apostles.
Who could have cared what group of men an obscure rabbi in an obscure province of an obscure corner of the Roman Empire chose for leadership. No major newspaper or television station covered the story of that all-night prayer vigil. Yet, because of those prayers, through the influence of men, today (2000 years later), 1.3 billion people around the world call themselves by this "obscure" Rabbi's name.
Obviously, He needed to know which of His several hundred followers were chosen by His Father to be Apostles. How did prayer help? It helped in the way John Wesley described. "I find," he said, "that the chief purpose of prayer in seeking God's will is that prayer gets my will into an unbiased state. Once my will is unprejudiced about the matter, I find God suggests reasons to my mind why I should or should not pursue a course."
The chief purpose of prayer, then, is to get our wills unbiased! The purpose is not to give us an ethereal sense of comfort. Thus, we pray to God about His will in some area, knowing (usually) that we are already leaning in a certain direction. We implore Him first to help our wills to move back to the center -that is, willing to do whatever is His will. Once we arrive there (and it may take some time), He shows us through our minds why one alternative is better than another and therefore is His will for us.
Thus it must have been on that night for our Savior. As He prayed, He must have had preferences for His followers. He probably had a list -at least a mental one. Perhaps Peter was already on it, but perhaps Andrew was not. Thomas certainly wouldn't have been on mine, and neither would Simon the Zealot. Maybe they weren't at the top of Jesus', either. Yet, through the work of His Father and His own yielded nature in intercession, the reasons came clear to Him why all three of these men plus nine others should be tapped.
Our searching out of God's will can be the same. We pray so that our wills (not our emotions) can be yielded to the Divine "whatever." Then II Timothy 1:7 becomes alive: "For God has not given us a spirit of timidity, but of power and love and sound judgement." May the tribe of "unprejudiced wills" and "sound judgement" increase!
You excited about prayer yet? Four more to go! :)
-Kells
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