“In that day”, the day Jesus is talking about is when he returns from the grave, the resurrection, when their grief will be turned to joy. In that day the disciples will no longer ask him for anything because they will know that Jesus has opened the door of relationship/communication with the Father and they can go directly to the Almighty with their requests. The reason they had not asked anything in Jesus’ name yet was because he had not made them righteous in God’s sight in the crucifixion, and until the resurrection / receiving of the Holy Spirit, they had not trusted completely that He was the Son of God, Mediator to the Father.
Luther finds five requisites for true prayer in this text. First, the foundation for prayer is the promise of God to hear and answer it. Why would anyone approach God with requests if they did not believe God could provide an answer? And since the promise has been made, Luther questions why anyone would fail to take advantage of the riches offered since God is more willing to give, and even more than we ask.
The second requisite is faith by in the individual that the promise is true. This may be obvious, but it may be the reason why many people don’t pray. They don’t have faith that God will be true to God’s promises. Yet, faith is a gift from the Holy Spirit, so how can we criticize those who don’t pray? If you haven’t been given the gift of faith, why would you pray? So, if you have been given the gift of faith, then why not pray for high and lofty things? Like Elijah, who prayed that it not rain for 3 years – he became lord of the clouds! By faith. Our trust grows when we taste the sweetness of God’s promise in seeing prayers answered (1-#6).
We talked about answers to pray that help us to grow in our confidence in prayers being answered. Weeks ago, our church prayed for a preschool mom who had an inoperable brain tumor. Yesterday, she found out it was gone. What happened to it? She said to thank our church for praying for her. God is glorified when we proclaim the power of prayer and give evidence for God’s presence and power and activity in our world today.
A third requisite for prayer is to be specific in naming what we want. Jesus taught us to pray for specific things in the Lord’s Prayer. And we pray for needs, not necessarily frills. I suppose the more specific we are in our requests, the more clearly we can see God’s answers, and yet we can’t tie God’s hands with time limits, etc. One of our participants said her brother was very sick with a painful ailment, partially self-inflicted, and was living with her after her husband died. And she was praying that God would take him because she was so distressed about his discomfort. One day when she was at work, he fell asleep and dropped a cigarette, which burned down her house and killed him. She felt like she’d prayed for the wrong thing, and lost her house as a part of that ‘answered’ prayer. Maybe we should be careful what we pray for? Yes, but also what good came out of having to move? She moved out of Chicago to western KY where she’s in a wonderful neighborhood and gets to fish whenever she wants. Didn’t it all turn out good?
The fourth requisite is that our prayers arise from the depths of our soul that reveals the true desires within us, not just spoken words that are read from a page. The words are important to start the process, but our deepest needs are offered in wordless prayers in which the Spirit intercedes for us and which we cannot even speak. That’s pretty deep desire. Yet this is the truest prayer.
The fifth requisite is that we ask in the name of Christ. What he means by this is that we ask, knowing that nothing we have done or can do makes us worthy to approach the Almighty. But we ask, knowing that Christ has interceded for us, and God hears because we love Christ, the Son. Those who pray long, beautiful, and many prayers merit nothing. It is only because we trust our prayers will be answered for the Son’s sake and not our own sake that makes us worthy to receive answers.
Overall, the more we pray, the more we see the promises of God are true. So our faith grows in proportion to our prayers. Start praying, and don’t stop.
Blessings, PWM
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