What is the relationship between God’s will and our prayers?
John 15:7-8
One of the most striking statements about prayer in the New Testament comes in the great chapter, Romans 8:
In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express. And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints in accordance with God’s will (Romans 8:26-27).
A central problem in our prayer lives is our deep and pervasive ignorance of God’s will. We are in the dark about his purposes in the world, so our prayers go unanswered because we do not know what to pray for. Effective prayer is not us giving God a new idea, something that never entered his mind. Not at all… God in his omniscience has already thought of every idea that could ever enter our minds and has thoroughly analyzed all of them for its relative wisdom. Nor is prayer persuading God to do something he doesn’t want to do, as though we could wear him down by nagging him as Delilah did with Samson. That can never be, for no one has a stronger will than God, and his commitment to what he knows to be the best course of action could never be surpassed by any creature.
Prayer is us asking God to do what he has already determined in his heart to do but just hasn’t done yet.
Instead, prayer is us asking God to do what he has already determined in his heart to do but just hasn’t done yet. Praying “in accordance with God’s will.” The Holy Spirit has been given to train us in that exact matter. The Spirit helps us out of the weakness of our profound ignorance of the will of God. He does that primarily by the scriptures, which he inspired at their beginning and which he illuminates now in our minds.
It was the Spirit that moved the apostle John to record the words of Jesus in John 15, in which he trains us in effective, fruitful prayer. The night before he died for us, Jesus instructed his apostles on many things. He gave them a powerful image, saying “I am the vine, and you are the branches. Abide in me and you will bear much fruit” (John 15:5). A branch on a grapevine is physically connected with the vine, which itself arises from the earth. By the vine’s power to suck moisture and nutrients from the soil it can deliver to each branch everything that branch needs to be alive and to bear fruit. But if the branch is severed from the vine, it will die fruitless. In the same way, a Christian must stay connected to Jesus to continue to live and to bear fruit. This is the abiding lesson. But whereas the grapevine maintains a physical connection to each of its fruit-bearing branches, our connection to Jesus is spiritual.
Foundational to that is the word of God. It is by the word that be are first made alive through faith in Christ, for “faith comes by hearing the message about Christ” (Romans 10:17). And it is by the ongoing ministry of the word that we continue to abide in Christ.
Jesus made this perfectly clear by his statement in John 15:7-8, “If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. By this my Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit and so prove to be my disciples.” If we continue to abide (dwell, live, remain) in Jesus spiritually by faith, and if his words (nouns, verbs, adjectives… parables, commands, warnings, promises) continue to abide (dwell, live, remain) in our minds and hearts, then we will be prepared to pray according to God’s will. And then we can look around us by the indwelling Spirit, see various needs and issues and ministry possibilities that haven’t happened yet, and we will be ready to “ask whatever we wish” according to God’s word and those specific needs. As we do this, our prayer lives will no longer be based in ignorance, as though we are cluelessly shooting in the dark. Instead, we will ask God to do what he has determined to do from before the foundation of the world to build the kingdom of Christ, and he will do it.
In all this, we will be bearing fruit, fruit that will endure for all eternity. Therefore, it is essential for us to immerse our minds, hearts, and souls in the word of God—to have those specific words burning within our hearts so that we can know what to pray for and bear much fruit. We must pray more and more based on scripture. And if we do this, we will fulfill God’s original purpose for our existence: the display of his own glory.