When the Lord asked the Father in the Garden of Gethsemane to remove the cup (of crucifixion) from him, he immediately added, “Yet not what I will, but what you will.” (Mark 14:36).
One of the challenges of intercessory prayer is to learn how to align our will with God’s will. On the one hand, the Lord summons us to speak to the mountains that stand in our way that they be moved. “If you have faith like a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move, and nothing will be impossible for you.” (Matthew 17:20).
I love what Mark Batterson says about this. “There comes a moment when you must quit talking to God about the mountain in your life and start talking to the mountain about your God. Your proclaim His power. You declare His sovereignty. You affirm His faithfulness. You stand on His Word. You cling to His promises.”
We are summoned to approach God’s throne and pray with boldness (Hebrews 4:16), and I wish there were more bold praying in the church!
Yet on the other hand, God says to us, “My ways are not your ways” (Isaiah 55:8-9), which means we often lack full understanding of how we ought to pray. We’re told to pray bold for the sick (James 5:13-15), yet sometimes God allows illness to do a deeper healing in someone (2 Corinthians 12:7-10). We’re told to pray for peace, yet sometimes God allows persecution to further his mission (Acts 8:3-4). We’re to pray for God’s blessings on our homes and businesses, but if God ordains for a season of judgment to come to bring our culture back to God, we will suffer along with our neighbors (Jeremiah 29:7; Amos 4:6-12).
Psalm 37:4 says, “Delight yourself in the Lord, and He will give you the desires of your heart.” I can’t count the times where I’ve heard someone grumble because they didn’t receive the house, the promotion, the boyfriend, or the healing their heart desired, and believed God was shortchanging them.
But the promise comes with a condition. We must come to a place where we delight ourselves in the Lord first. Once I learn to desire the things that God desires before anything else, then slowly my own heart begins to change, and my prayers do as well.
In his humanness, Jesus looked at the sufferings he was about to endure, and asked the Father if there were another way to save humanity. When God told Abraham to offer up his son, God provided another lamb, saving Isaac. But Jesus was the Lamb of God. He was the way. And in His heart, Jesus knew this. So He yielded His will to the Father’s will, in trust and obedience, and “for the joy set before Him, endured the cross” (Hebrews 12:2).
E. Stanley Jones wrote, “Prayer is surrender – surrender to the will of God and cooperation with that will. If I throw a boathook from the boat and catch hold of the shore and pull, do I pull the shore to me, or do I pull myself to the shore? Prayer is not pulling God to my will, but the aligning of my will to the will of God.”
This is one of the most beautiful songs I know that illustrates the faith that can rest in the will of God.