Magnificent Prayer #271
Magnificent Prayer #271
When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures.
James 4:3
A great many people get discouraged because they are praying with wrong motives—for temporal blessings; for what is not good for them. God doesn’t answer such prayers; and they ought to thank Him for it.
The men who are taken up most prominently in Scripture, perhaps the most eminent men who ever lived, don’t get their prayers answered.
Thus, it’s no sign that God doesn’t love us, if we don’t get our prayers answered as we want them answered.
Consider Moses, whom God favors more than any man in the Old Testament. He prayed as no one else prayed. He was a man of prayer, and we can hear him praying to God to allow him to take His people into the promised land. But God didn’t answer his prayer—not because He didn’t love him, but because He had something else in store for him.
We can imagine Him talking to Moses as a mother to a child, who is asking for something she does not wish him to have. God says: “That will do, Moses! I hear you; I know you want to go over there pretty bad; but I am not going to let you go. It’s no use.” But God did for him that which was much greater than any answer to his prayer could have been. He did for him what He never did for any other man. He conferred upon him the greatest, the most sublime distinction He could give to any mortal. God buried him…
God does not answer our prayers, sometimes, because we ask for things that would be harmful to us. We would get a good many things we asked for, if God did not love us too well to answer our prayers.
DWIGHT L. MOODY
Pray About It: Not only did Moses’ prayer not get answered, but even Jesus prayed a prayer which God didn’t answer. In the garden at Gethsemane, Jesus prayed for “this cup to pass from me, if it’s possible.” And then Jesus added, “Nevertheless, not my will but yours be done.”
Can you imagine our fate if God had answered Jesus’ prayer and let that cup of suffering that lay ahead pass from Him? We would still be in our sins.
God knows best—for Moses, for Jesus, and for us. And twenty centuries later, that’s still the determining factor in how God answers prayer.
His love decides. And it will always be that way.
Faith in God will not get for you everything you may want, but it will get for you what God wants you to have.
VANCE HAVNER
From the book
