How To Pray According To God's Will

I thought about calling this post 12 easy steps to praying according to God’s will.  The problem with that is there aren’t easy steps to praying according to God’s will.  So, I just stuck with the original title.

Why am I writing a post like this?  Last week I wrote a post about how to get every prayer answered.  I stated that all you had to do was pray according to God’s will.  It’s that easy.  That’s all you have to do.  There’s just one problem.

We don’t usually know what God’s will is.

What I mean is that God doesn’t directly reveal to us a direction on specific events.  It’s not like I’m going to find a verse in the Bible that is going to tell me whether I should buy a specific car or move to a specific city.  The Bible just wasn’t written for that.

So, how do we pray according to His will?  I don’t think Jesus left us without any idea on how to “do” this.  There just isn’t a magic formula.

In John 15: 7, He said, “If you abide in Me and My words abide in You, ask whatever you wish and it will be done for you.”  There is it is.  Abide in Christ.  His words abide in you.  Ask.  It will be done.  It’s not a formula.  It’s a statement of fact.

I don’t think there is any difference between praying according to God’s will and abiding and asking.

Let me simplify it a hair for us.  Pursue Christ with all you have.  Go after Him hard.  Make Him and His word your pursuit.  Ask.  It will be done.

But we want to know how it works, don’t we?  I think He gives us a clue in the previous chapter.  He says that He will ask the Father to send another Helper.  This is this Spirit.  He says that  He is in the Father, we are in Him and He is in us.

In other words, we pursue Christ with all we have.  He is the center of our life.  We abide, or remain, in Him, which is a relationship like He has with the Father.  He has given us another Helper, the Holy Spirit.  We ask for whatever we want to.  Why?  Because our lives are so focused and so in tune with Him, that we can’t help but pray according to God’s will.

I know that isn’t easy.  It’s a fight.  We have to work at it daily to abide in Him because it’s really easy for us to focus on so many other things.  Is it easy to pray according to God’s will?  Yes.  Is it easy to get to the point where you pray according to God’s will?  No, it’s a daily struggle for all of us who still have flesh.

How about you?  Do you want to pray according to God’s will?  What are you doing about it?

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