A prayerful community is a one which is close to God. In fact, there can be no closer links to God than when brethren and sisters pray to God in sincerity. We are a busy people and our lives are filled with the concerns of home, work, and ecclesial affairs. We find the pressures of life so demanding that there is little time for prayer. If prayer was to receive the time and priority that many of our secular pursuits receive, then many of the ecclesial disasters that overtake us today would never happen. However, like Israel of old, we risk Yahweh’s displeasure by ignoring the privilege of prayer. Surely the Father is pleased with a people that seek Him in prayer diligently and frequently (Psalm 65:2; Isaiah 56:7; Romans 8:26-27), but will the Father acknowledge us as such a people at the judgment seat? Are our prayers added to the incense offered upon the altar or are they an abomination before Him because we “turn away our ear from the law”?
Prayer is a great privilege. It is a gracious condescension on God’s part! Regretably, however, as that which is free in this life is often taken for granted, so the privilege of prayer also can be lightly esteemed (Ecclesiastes 5:1-2). Attitudes to prayer can become casual, rushed, lacking in thoughtfulness and repetitious. The degree to which we avail ourselves of the privilege of personal communion with God reveals the depth of our devotion to Him. “I never knew you” will be said to those who, though they did great things in God’s name, never formed that bond of fellowship which comes from the desire to please Him and seek His blessing and mercy in prayer.
Prayer is the closest link we have with God in this mortal age. It is a sharing in common and an expression of oneness of mind. Prayer is an acknowledgement of our belief in God, His existence, His promises, His redemption and His kingdom. Prayer also acknowledges that we think of God as a person, real and more substantial than we ourselves. He has feelings, understanding and principles. Prayer declares more than anything else that we believe that God is true and that we exalt Him above all other things. He is substantial — we are transient.
Prayer is sacrifice. It is giving to God our time and energy. Everything that belongs to us is offered up to God when we submit to Him in prayer. Above all else, prayer declares the righteousness of God:
“By him therefore let us offer the sacrifice of praise to God continually, that is, the fruit of our lips giving thanks to his name. But to do good and to communicate forget not: for with such sacrifices God is well pleased.” (Hebrews 13:15-16).
Prayer — Doctrinal and Practical
Prayer is both doctrinal and practical. An appreciation of both will enhance our sense of value of the privilege of prayer. It is important however to appreciate that prayer as we know it is less than the wonderful two-way communication shared by Adam and the Elohim before transgression. We have no comprehension of that relationship. The doctrinal side of prayer causes us to recall the reason for the loss of that relationship and to teach us a sense of appreciation of the fact that God will hear us at all. Prayer is the acknowledgement of the nature of God and the nature of man. When we appreciate that in its fulness, then we will understand the doctrinal side of prayer and our appreciation of the privilege of prayer will be enhanced.
The practical side of prayer may be illustrated in the Lord’s account of the widow’s mite. She, said the Lord, “of her want did cast in all that she had, even all her living.” Mark 12:44. The two mites and her action in casting them into the treasury was an act of prayer, a practical demonstration of what she believed. Those two coins represented her whole life and she gave it to God. It was an acknowledgement of her faith and dependence on Yahweh.
The doctrinal principles relating to prayer have their seed in the drama outworked in Eden. The sin of Adam and Eve was to believe that God was untruthful, unrighteous and unholy. This they demonstrated by believing the serpent and respecting the word of the created thing over the word of the Creator (cp Romans 1:23). The effect of their sin was shame, a defiled conscience and mortality. Worst of all it meant separation from God.
“But your iniquities have separated between you and your God, and your sins have hid his face from you, that he will not hear.” Isaiah 59:2.
Our sin separates us from God and our relationship with God is imperilled thereby. That sinfulness cannot, as some would have it, be minimised, but rather it must be acknowledged that God might be justified and our sins pardoned. Prayer through Christ is the vital link whereby man might approach God. In Eden a meeting place was established, not geographically but spiritually and figuratively. God meets with his people where the Lamb’s covering is worn! In accepting the covering of the Lamb, Adam and Eve declared God to be right. This is the doctrinal premise of prayer.
The result of Adam’s transgression was separation from God. God was hidden from them. The godly man falls seven times in a day and seven times in a day he is restored (cp Psalm 37:23,24 with Proverbs 24:16). Our mortal state separates us from God unless we reconcile ourselves to Him on His terms. Eve was deceived in desiring to disobey. She believed that what she was doing was good, not appreciating the consequence of her action nor realising that the desires within her were now inflamed.
These lusts are now shared by all. The source of temptation for us, however, is from within. The flesh we bare rebels against God by nature. We become unrestrained, selfish and untameable in the things of God. We revolt against the divine standards and His restraints.
In the scriptures, nakedness becomes the symbol of sin or the flesh at work without restraint. In this condition God invited Adam and Eve to seek reconciliation through His provision. In the same way, He offers us reconciliation through Christ and communion with Him through prayer. God invited Adam and Eve to come before Him on His terms and so they were called forth from their hiding place and they were face-to-face before God in that set-apart place in Eden. They were invited to participate in what was basically an act of prayer. They were stripped of their vanity and made to see themselves for what they were — naked before God!
God offered a basis of reconciliation that would declare His righteousness and cover their sin. He gave them a basis of instruction that they might believe. Their act of submitting to God’s requirement was a declaration on their part of God’s holy, just and right position above the unholy reasoning of the serpent. It was for them an act of prayer and praise in acknowledgement that they had failed God. They realised the enormity of their sin and wanted to have their relationship with God re-established.
Coats of skin provided as a covering by God were a token of their recovery. Man had to come to God and the standards of God had to be accepted. “He is a rewarder of them that diligently seek Him” so that God “might be just and the justifier of him that believeth in Jesus” Romans 3:26. God provided justification on the basis of faith and revealed Himself as a God of love and not of vengeance.
Prayer acknowledges the sovereignity of God. It puts God back in the mind where He should be. He is supreme, the Creator, the Holy One, without equal. He cannot condone iniquity nor will He contradict His principles.
“In his hand are the deep places of the earth: the strength of the hills is his also. The sea is his, and he made it: and his hands formed the dry kind. 0 come, let us worship and bow down: let us kneel before the Lord our maker. For he is our God: and we are the people of his pasture, and the sheep of his hand” Psalm 103:10-13; see also v9.
The sovereignity of God is what we acknowledge. Yahweh is a God who seeks recovery and is a Father to His people:
“As the heaven is high above the earth, so great is his mercy towards them that fear him . .. like as a father pitieth his children, so Yahweh pitieth them that fear him.”
We are the children of God. As a child before his natural father tries to express his problems in childlike ways and the father delights to see him ‘own up’ to his error and acknowledge his position that reconciliation might freely and lovingly flow, so also is God pleased with us as we come to Him in a childlike way and confide in Him. This position of claiming God as our Father is a great privilege. It is a condescension of God’s part and a demonstration of the abundance of His compassion. However, this fatherhood is conditional upon our separation and turning away from iniquity (II Corinthians 6:14). Jesus told the Pharisees of his day,
“Ye are of your father the devil and the works of your father ye will do.”
They had no relationship with God in that condition. They had to become as children in acknowledging their need for the covering of the Lamb and declaring God to be just in His dealings with man. All God’s children have equal status, whether it be kings like David, Solomon and Hezekiah or prisoners like Jeremiah, Paul and Silas, or slaves like Onesiphorus. God hears all their prayers. God does not have a priority line whereby the prayers of kings and rulers have preference over others. Whether it be the woman with two mites or the king upon his throne, God hears them all.
Yahweh is a God of power. His attitude to those who are less endowed is expressed eloquently in Psalm 146:
“He executeth power for the oppressed, giveth food to the hungry, openeth the eyes of the blind; Yahweh raiseth them that are bowed down. He loves the righteous, he preserveth the stranger, he relieveth the fatherless and widows, but the way of the wicked he turneth upside down.”
The God of power has His mind towards those who are less fortunate in the community of the saints. How close is God to us? Acts 17 says, “He is not far from everyone of us if haply we would feel after Him.” Paul uses language here as though he is describing a blind man. How far is God from a blind man, whose every step may imperil his very life and who walks with surety in only the most familiar situations? “God’s arm is not shortened that it cannot save” but rather it is extended that He might be found of those who diligently seek Him. There are those, however, whose blindness is of a different sort and who in their groping will never find God:
“We grope for the wall like the blind, and we grope as if we had no eyes: we stumble at noon day as in the night; we are in desolate places as dead men” Isaiah 59:10.
The Divine Instruction for Acceptable Prayer
Through His provision of prayer, Yahweh elevates and sustains the importance and status of His Anointed. “In the name of the Lord Jesus Christ” Ephesians 5:20, is the only acceptable means of approach to God. However, we should be careful not to use the name of Christ as thought it was simply a kind of password that must be found at the end of every prayer. The words are not to be thought of that way. In fact, we might well commence our prayers with the Lord’s name and the acknowledgment of who Jesus really is, making plain our appreciation of his work and showing our understanding of why we pray through the Lord Jesus Christ. All the work of God is focussing our attention on the Christ. Jesus Christ “came into the world to save sinners.” He is the one who bridges the gap, “turning everyone of you away from his iniquities.” Every mention of his name should fill our hearts with a sense of warmth, belonging and gratitude for what God has accomplished in him.
The more we acknowledge Christ in our lives as our Master and Lord, the more we will find our abode in him and have confidence toward God.
“And now, little children, abide in him; that, when he shall appear, we may have confidence, and not be ashamed before him at his coming” I John 2:28.
The confidence of which John speaks springs from a prayerful life (I John 1:6-7). Confidence is probably the last thing we will have when we are called before the judgment seat to “receive in body those things we have done whether good or bad.” Therefore, what does John mean when he speaks of having “confidence?” The word means ‘to be honest’ and implies ‘nothing to hide.’ God called Adam and Eve before Him that they might express confidence, not of themselves, of course, but in God. He wanted them to be open, to confess their sin before Him, and to tell Him everything. It is rather foolish to consider that we might try and hide something from God. Even though we know that God knows everything, we do not openly tell Him everything, but seek to ignore habitual practices that are not well-pleasing to Him, confession of which would force us to face the issue and change our behaviour. There can be no hiding from God nor self-justification before Him. The Father who sees all, knows our mind and what has transpired. If we have told Him in our lifetime all that we know about ourselves and have been honest with Him, then we can have confidence in that day. There will be sins of ignorance revealed to us at the judgment seat which, through the grace of God, will be forgiven.
These are unknown to us now and therefore the source of shame or concealment though we pray that God will forgive us for such sins. Confidence is a matter of the heart, of open honesty and trust. John speaks further on this subject of confidence in I John 3:20-21.
“For if our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart, and knoweth all things. Beloved, if our heart condemn us not, then have we confidence toward God.”
This word ‘parrhesia’ rendered “confidence” in the above passages is also translated –boldness” in I John 4:17. In this passage our confidence is linked with our manifestation of the essence of God which is love.
“Herein is our love made perfect, that we may have boldness in the day of judgment: because as he is so are we in this world.”
This confidence then is more than just a matter of attitude toward God but a practical demonstration of the principles of Godly characteristics in daily life. Our boldness has nothing to do with the natural arrogance so spontaneous in human nature, nor self-praise, nor self-congratulation, nor self-glory, but rather open confession and trust in a gracious Heavenly Father. Let us be a people of prayer, as individuals, as families, as ecclesias and as the united body of Christ.
“Let us therefore come boldly unto the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need.”
The Solution