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Confidence to Pray
To be a person of prayer we need confidence to pray. You may say, “I have confidence to pray.” But how much do you pray and how confident are you? We can all be more confident in our prayer life.
John the apostle speaks about this in his first letter. He says, “Dear friends, if our hearts do not condemn us, we have confidence before God and receive from him anything we ask, because we obey his commands and do what pleases him. And this is his command: to believe in the name of his Son, Jesus Christ, and to love one another as he commanded us” (1 John 3:21-23). John also says, “This is the confidence we have in approaching God: 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 what we asked of him” (5:14-15, NIV).
I encourage you to read 1 John to get a fresh sense of the “anything[s]” that John is talking about in relation to prayer. It is also worthwhile reading John 14-16 to see how John’s understanding of prayer, and no doubt his practice of prayer, have been influenced by Jesus’ teaching on prayer.
We have many needs. Often the ones uppermost in our mind are creaturely needs and various problems and challenges. We need to trust God for these things. But John’s “anything[s]” are those things that ought to be most important in our lives, the things that God says are a priority for His children. John’s letter spells out these things clearly and repeatedly: loving each other, obeying God’s commands, living righteously, persevering in opposition, overcoming the lies of the evil one, proclaiming the gospel so that people believe in Jesus and enter into His life. None of these things is natural or easy for us. Prayer is our lifeline to God whereby we ask Him for these things in our lives. They are the “anything according to his will” that John writes about. If these things are to increase in our lives it will happen only as we constantly ask God.
The good news is that as we live and pray in this way we discover greater confidence in our prayer life. We know what God wants and we want the same. We know what He has promised and we dare to ask Him for it. Our fear and our preoccupation with lesser things diminish. We experience the joy of answered prayer, of seeing God’s will done. We have confidence to ask Him for more.