Praying in the will of God

The walk of faith is a cord of three interwoven strands: worship, Scripture, and prayer. And yet there’s a great deal of unnecessary confusion afoot over praying in the will of God.

What does it mean to pray in God’s will? How do we pray in God’s will? Is it necessary to pray in God’s will?

On the one hand, you have a lot of people who pray for anything and everything. They never give a second thought to whether their petition is in the will of God. Let’s consider a couple of common examples.

How many times have you been in a church service where you were asked to pray for world peace? But do they really expect universal peace to break out all over the globe? What is this expectation based on? Does God promise that if we pray for peace around the world, then this will happen?

When we pray for world peace, for what are we praying? Are we praying that God will make Sunnis and Shiites, Hindus and Buddhists, Hindus and Muslims and other suchlike, love each other? Is that realistic? Or are we praying that God will convert them all to Christ, in which case they well be brothers in Christ?

For there to be peace on earth, everyone would have to be of a peaceable disposition. Everyone would have to be sinless. Where in the Bible does God predict that everyone will be sinless—whether in this world or the world to come? Is hell a peaceful place?

A more thoughtful prayer would be to sponsor missionaries, and pray that God bless their labors. Peace does not happen in a vacuum. As long as Muslims are Muslims and Hindus are Hindus, you won't have world peace.

A prayer for peace should be a prayer for Christian conversion. And such a prayer ought to be a preparation for action rather than a substitute for action.

It is a perilous thing, spiritual speaking, to constantly pray prayers that have no prospect of success. Unless we have good reason to believe that prayer makes a difference, the practice of ineffectual prayer makes pray a dead, pro forma exercise. We just go through the motions, like wind-up toys. And like a dying tree that's leafy on the outside, but rotten on the inside, such empty gestures threaten to hollow out our own piety. It is a mockery to God and a blight on the soul to pray prayers that are never answered because they're never planted in the Promised Land of Scripture.

To take another example, a lot of folks pray to learn the will of God. They ask God to let them know if this is the right job for them, or the right person to marry.

But that sort of prayer rests of a couple of assumptions. Where does Scripture say that prayer is a means of finding out the will of God? And what form would that take? Are they expecting to hear the voice of God? Are they counting on some unmistakable sign? Are they hoping for some sort of warm feeling or serene impression?

If so, what is this expectation based on? Does the Bible promise anything of the kind?

My point is not that we should never pray about such matters. It is only natural and proper to pray about matters of utmost importance.

Rather, we need to cultivate a clearer sense of what we hope such prayers to accomplish.

Is the underlying assumption of such a prayer that if this job or that engagement is not pleasing to God, then he will intervene to prevent it?

If so, then that is a false assumption. God may intervene, and there is nothing wrong with asking him to do so, but God is under no obligation to do so. If he does, then this is an uncovenanted blessing. But if he chooses not to intervene, that doesn't necessary mean that he approves of our choice. There's nothing wrong with asking, but done go assuming that God is bound to answer on your time and on your terms.

At this point, someone might ask, then why bother at all? Well, it's like planting a flower. Planting a flower is an act of faith. You don't know when or even if it will blossom. But if you never plant it, it will never blossom.

Part of the beauty of the thing lies in not knowing, in the element of surprise. One day you turn a corner and your flower is abloom. And prayer is like that. You don't know when or even if it will be answered, but if the answer should come, it comes unannounced, like a budding flower.

On the other hand, you have a fair number of folks with just the opposite approach. They are extremely scrupulous about never praying outside the will of God. They feel that you should never pray for something unless you know in advance whether it’s the will of God. They imagine that you cannot pray in faith unless you already know that God will answer your prayer.

So they cast about for various ways of finding out or guessing at God’s will. They put out a fleece of some sort or another. They propose a sign for God. This is highly presumptuous because it attempts to compel an answer from God. God cannot be coerced.

Again, though, where does Scripture say that you must always know the will of God to pray to God? Or is this just another thoughtless assumption that some people make?

I do not deny that God may, on rare occasion, intervene in some extraordinary fashion. But the point is that we ought not base our decision-making on any such expectation, for Scripture does not authorize any such expectation.

And there are a couple of obvious dangers when a believer does so. Sooner or later, a false expectation is bound to be disappointed. And when his hopes are dashed, he may suffer a crisis of faith.

In addition, it fosters a false sense of piety when we feel the need to live up to a level of spiritual experience not promised in Scripture. We feign a degree of spiritual intimacy which we do not, in fact, enjoy.

And this, in turn, sets us up for the fall at times in life when the Lord seems to be absent rather than present. If we build our faith on thin air, the Lord will not suspend the laws of spiritual gravity when we "step out in faith." Walk off a cliff, and the only way is staight down. Even the Son of God did not presume to put his Heavenly Father to the test (Mt 4:5-7).

Now, we might say that both sides are half-right and half-wrong.

1. To draw a preliminary and primary distinction, we need to distinguish between the secret things of God and the stated things of God (Deut 29:29).

2. We should pray for things commanded in Scripture and promised in his Word. This is his stated will.

3. We should never pray for things forbidden in Scripture. This is his stated will. For example, there are churchgoers who pray that God will bless an unscriptural divorce. God will do nothing of the kind.

4. It isn’t always essential to know the will of God to be in his will. God, in his providence, can cause you to be in his will without your knowing about it. This is his secret will. Just look at how God, without tipping his hand, guided Abraham's servant to find the right wife for Isaac (Gen 24).

5. One way of learning the will of God is to pray about a matter and see what happens. If your prayer goes unanswered, then it was not in his will.

At the same time, this is not a hard and fast rule, for a certain persistence in prayer can be a virtue. Perhaps the best thing to be said is to pray as long as the door remains open, but if the door shuts, then that's that.

And we should not necessarily wait for an answer before we go through the door. Unless the door says "Do not enter!"—according to the word of God, there is no sin in trying the doorknob. This is question of what is prudent rather than permissible. Whatever is not forbidden is allow, but wisdom and freedom are two different things, and the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom (Ps 111:10; Jas 1:5).

6. There is nothing unspiritual about making plans and decisions on the basis of sanctified common sense. Holy reason has an honorable place in Christian life (cf. 1 Cor 2:16b; Eph 4:23; Col 3:10).

7. If it were all that important for us to know the will of God in some particular question, then God would be more than capable of making his will unmistakable plain. And I do not deny that, on rare occasion, God might speak directly to a Christian or intervene on some unmistakable way.

But that's the point: whatever God is willing to do, God is able to do. He either speaks clearly, or not at all. So we should not strain our eyes to make out shapes in the clouds.

Conversely, God is able to do many things he is unwilling to do. So we should never set our heart on something that was never promised us.

8. Prayer is not a means of making an unwilling God willing. God is not the sort of person we either can or ought to arm-twist. And faith is not a matter of mustering a can-do feeling.

9. There is no danger of asking God to do something outside his secret will, for he would never do anything outside his own will.

But you can do something outside his stated will, and in so doing, you will do great harm to yourself and others.

Christians sometimes fret over making the wrong decisions. They are haunted by self-doubts and afterthoughts and vain regrets.

But you can never make a mess of your life by not knowing God's secret will. Yet you can make a mess of your life by not knowing his stated will, or by flouting his stated will.

Never torment yourself over what you were never granted to know. Leave that in his almighty hands. You are responsible for what he revealed, not what he concealed. The way to miss out on life is to be looking in the wrong direction.

10. Many believers feel that they must pray in faith. And indeed they must. But faith in what? Praying in faith doesn't mean that you believe you'll get whatever you ask for.

Praying in faith is not the assertion of my will, but the resignation to his will. We put our faith in the faithfulness of God and the goodness of his Word.

It’s funny how so many people get tied up in knots over the subject of prayer. Children don’t have this problem.

Children ask God for something in the same way they ask a parent for something. On the one hand, children are quite uninhibited about what they ask for. When you were a child, did you ever wait until you knew your parents' will before putting in a request? Of course not! You just went ahead an asked for it. You figured that either your parent would give it to you or not. You had something to gain and nothing to lose.

On the other hand, children also know better than to ask for just anything at all. Because they know their parents, they know that some things are off-limits. So it’s a waste of time to ask for forbidden things.

Good children of good parents know that their parents will never withhold anything they need or give them anything that would do them harm.

So when we pray to God, we should pray with the freedom and discretion of a wise child. Be bold, but not presumptuous; be prudent, but not overscrupulous.

There is, in this life, an element of mystery to the life of prayer. Prayer doesn't change the will of God, but God wills the act of prayer as a means of change in the attainment of ends unattainable by other means.

As we learn in Hebrews 11, we live by faith, not by sight. Much was mysterious to those living before the first coming of Christ that is clear us, living on the other side of the cross. But much is mysterious to us, living before the second coming of Christ, that will be made clear at the restoration of all things.

For further reading:

Paul Helm, "Can I know God's will for my life?" Modern Reformation (Jan/Feb 2004), 24-29.

Bruce Waltke, Finding the Will of God (Eerdmans 2002).