Now this is the confidence that we have in Him, that if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us. And if we know that He hears us, whatever we ask, we know that we have the petitions that we have asked of Him.
—1 John 5:14-15
This is a powerful promise. The reason many people don’t ask God for His help is because they aren’t confident that they will receive what they ask for.
What is God’s will? His Word is His will. We don’t have to add “If it is Your will” at the end of every prayer. When we pray the Word and know we are asking in agreement with the Word, we can be confident that God has heard us. As 1 John 5:15 says, when we know God has heard us, we know we have what He has promised.
God hearing us depends on us asking according to His will (I John 5:14). This doesn’t mean that God doesn’t hear the concerns of our hearts when we pour ourselves out to Him. The Lord knows every word we pray. He hears every word that every person speaks, as revealed in Matthew 12:36. I John 15 speaks of hearing in the sense of God granting our requests. The Lord doesn’t answer prayers that disagree with His will.
In the Old Testament, God moved in response to prayer. In the New Testament, God has already moved by grace and provided everything we would ever need through the atonement of Jesus Christ. Prayer for the New Testament believer in Christ is receiving what God has already provided by grace.
“And you are complete in Him, who is the head of all principality and power” (Colossians 2:10).
Prior to salvation, we were incomplete, and there was a constant striving in all of us to satisfy that hunger. Through our new birth in Christ, however, we are complete in Him. Our hunger should be for the Holy Spirit to reveal to us what Christ has already given us. A huge part of temptation is dissatisfaction. When we see ourselves as lacking, we strive for something to satisfy, not realizing that in Christ, we lack nothing. We are complete in Him. Recognition of our completeness in Christ is a tremendous safeguard against the enemy's deception. Total satisfaction with Jesus disarms Satan’s lies.
Adam and Eve would not have eaten the forbidden fruit if they hadn’t been dissatisfied with what they had. Through Satan’s lie, they were led to believe that they were lacking and didn’t have a perfect life (Genesis 3:5), but they really did. Their lives were perfect in the Garden. They were more like God before they ate the fruit than after eating it. Their dissatisfaction was the beginning that led to their sin.
Satan tempts us in the same way he came against Adam and Eve (2 Corinthians 11:3). A revelation of our completeness in Christ will help keep us from chasing after all the things the devil has to offer. If anyone tells us that Christ isn’t enough—that we are lacking in our relationship with Him, then that is the enemy trying to turn us away from our completeness in Christ.
In the same way that Paul said Jesus had the fullness of God in Him, we also have the fullness of God in us (Colossians 2:9-10). In our spirit-man, we are reborn perfectly complete as new creations. As new creations, we have received the Spirit of Christ (Romans 8:9). He is now in us, identifying us as His own. He has given us His righteousness and His authority. We can have boldness in the day of judgment. As Jesus is in this world, so as we (I John 4:17).
God is no longer the God on the “outside” for us having to satisfy. He is our Abba Father on the “inside” that Jesus has satisfied in our place.
Jesus has already responded to our greatest need—the sin that separated us from God. His atonement for our sin is perfect and it is complete. Faith appropriates what God has already provided through grace. So our faith is a positive response to what Jesus has already accomplished. Jesus sits at the righthand of the Father. His work for us is perfectly complete and done (Hebrews 1:3). He has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in heavenly places (Ephesians 1:3).
Adopted as God’s children and redeemed through Jesus’ blood for the forgiveness of our sins, we have been given an inheritance and have been sealed with the Holy Spirit. We have been given the same power that raised Jesus from the dead. We have been made one with God as a new man. We have been made fellow citizens with other believers in the household of God, and we have been made a dwelling place of God (Ephesians 1:5,7,11,13, 19-20, Ephesians 2:15, 22).
God has favored us with Jesus’s grace. There is no greater blessing than His finished work we have received. His complete and perfect work in us identifies us as His own.
When we pray for things that are God’s Will, do we pray with the confidence of our position in Christ? Do we come boldly before the throne of grace in our time of need?
God has already provided everything we could ever need (Ephesians 1:3). His work is done. An Old Testament believer prayed, pleading for God to bless Him. A New Testament believer has been completely and perfectly blessed in the finished work of Jesus Christ. He doesn’t have to beg God to provide what the Word says Jesus has already provided by grace.
Prayer, for a believer in Jesus Christ, is a way to receive what the grace of Jesus has already provided. A believer in Jesus confidently asks, believing that His Father will provide according to His will with the provision He has promised.
Is this the confidence we have in Him? If we ask anything according to His will, He hears us. Do we agree with His Word? Do we know in our hearts that He hears us, and whatever we ask, we know that we have the petitions that we have asked of Him?
When the truth we believe in our hearts agrees with the truth the Holy Spirit reveals in the Word, we are transformed. We know that the Son of God has come and has given us an understanding, that we may know Him who is true; and we are in Him who is true, in His Son Jesus Christ.
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