As I continue
growing up in Jesus Christ, I regularly see God addressing one of my most
annoying wrong beliefs, the works-based mindset. Not only is this mindset the
focus of much teaching in God’s book, but it is also a huge part of life in our
world.
The works-based
mindset is that we earn our place in life by what we do. Religions teach that
we earn standing with God by the good works we do, and will go to hell if our
bad works exceed our good works. Businesses reward people based on performance.
Awards are handed out to those who perform best in movies, music, and sports.
Life itself teaches
us through many broken relationships that we are dispensable once we are no
longer performing as someone says they needed from us. For some, this pushes
greater effort to perform so well that we don’t lose people; for others it
pushes them into hopelessness that they will ever be good enough to hold on to
friends or family.
God’s response to
the works-based mindset is the grace-through-faith experience. What he says
about our salvation applies to the whole of our walk with him, “For by grace you have been saved through
faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of
works, so that no one may boast.”
This morning, God
applied this grace-through-faith experience to my understanding of prayer. It
is not that I did not know these things before, but more like I was being
pushed into the next grade in my knowledge of how to approach God with freedom
and confidence.
As usual, it started
with a Beatitudinal confrontation.
In the way of, “blessed are the poor in
spirit,” I
had to see that, if prayer depended on us reaching God, there would be no hope.
If prayer depended on us, if we had to speak loud enough, or try hard enough,
or say things right enough, or appeal reasonable enough, we would have no hope.
Put another way, any
thought that prayer depends on me, and I’m no good at prayer, therefore there
is no hope of prayer working for me, is false. Any sense that I must be good
enough for prayer to work, is false.
The issue about
prayer is not whether we can pray and make prayer work, but that the prayer of
faith will always work because it is fellowship with the Triune, and they will
not fail to respond to us according to the relationship they have described in
their word.
This is where we
discover the glorious good of grace. Prayer must be based on approaching God by
grace through faith.
Prayer is
approaching God through the finished work of Jesus Christ, and, therefore, it
cannot fail. Praying in Jesus’ name, in him, cannot fail. There is no such
thing as unanswered prayer. Prayer always reaches the throne-room of God; God
always hears what we pray; God always answers our prayers.
However, prayer does
not originate in us. When we think of prayer as originating in us, we are
thinking first covenant. The first covenant presented the way we had to live in
order to ensure God’s blessing upon us. We failed. The law could not do it. In
fact, that is the point of this next Scripture: “For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do.”
I know this speaks
of the whole work of redemption. I know it is talking about how God has brought
us to himself, accomplishing the greatest work of all, to redeem sinful souls.
And yet, I see how
it then applies to prayer. God has made prayer what it is. The law, weakened by
the flesh, could never produce people who prayed, and prayers that could be answered.
The law produces works of prayer, while the gospel produces children who pray.
Prayer under the law is a work we do; prayer under the gospel is talking to our
Father in response to his grace.
If there was a law
to “pray without ceasing,”[7] and
that is all it was, a law, then there is no doubt that the law would be holy,
and the commandment to “pray without
ceasing” would be “holy and righteous
and good.”
However, if it is a
law, then sin will seize the opportunity given by this law, and it will weaken
the commandment by our flesh, arousing our sinful passions through this law, so
that our sinful passions will work within us to bear fruit for death, to do
things that kill relationships, that kill the work of God.
Why is it so important
to understand that, “There is therefore
now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the
Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death”?[10]
It is because prayer
under “the law of sin and death,” is
something we must do, and, therefore, it will be done in the flesh, which means
that sin will seize the opportunity given by the law to stir up the sinful
passions that will make us do what we do not want to do, and fail to do the
praying we do want to do.
Does this sound
familiar? We have within us the desire to pray, but when we set out to pray, we
end up doing the things we do not want to do, and we do not do the praying we
do want to do. If that describes your experience with prayer, you are likely
facing prayer with a works-based mindset, trusting yourself to be good at
prayer.
When we treat prayer
as one more expression of our relationship with God by grace through faith, we
do not need to be good at prayer. We simply need to have faith when we are
praying. It is better to pray lousy prayers by faith, than to be great at
prayer in the flesh.
The message is that,
when we come to God in faith, and we lay our hearts before him, he is not
receiving us because we are so good at prayer; he is receiving us because our
faith is responding to his grace.
This is why we never
look at prayer as something that we do in order to get a response from God.
When prayer is by grace through faith, our prayers of faith are always a
response to God’s grace working in us.
This means that, our
faith is not in our praying.
We can present prayers to God in which we are absolutely lousy in our faith in
what we are asking for, but we have faith in God, and so we present our weak
and feeble prayers to him.
When we don’t pray,
it is often because we have prayed in order to get a response from God, and,
when we don’t get the response from God we desire, we decide prayer is not “working”,
and, if prayer is not working, why pray.
But when we pray by
grace through faith, mostly based on what we receive through the word and the
Spirit as we spend time with God, our praying is then a faith-response to
whatever Father is doing.
After God ministered
to me about praying by faith in response to his grace, my prayer time turned
into an overwhelmingly liberating expression of pouring out my heart before my
Father. In a way I’m not sure I have ever experienced, I truly felt unburdened
in prayer. I had no concern about whether God was okay with what I was saying,
how I worded my requests, or anything to do with performance. My prayers poured
out of my heart as a child in unhindered fellowship with my Father. And it was
all because I was responding to his overwhelming grace through faith, not
through anything good I was doing.
I believe that God
speaks to us through his word, shows us what he is doing in us and around us,
and we experience him as we join him in his work. I testify that this is
exactly what happened when I learned my lesson about coming to him by faith and
pouring my heart out to him in prayer. Now God’s gracious invitation of, “pray without ceasing,” has taken on a
whole new level of meaning. And, for that, I am very thankful.
© 2016 Monte Vigh ~ Box 517,
Merritt, BC, V1K 1B8 ~ in2freedom@gmail.com
