God does not act as a genie granting us our individual wishes. Instead He offers something so much better.
The Bible says, “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find…” (Matthew 7:7) Another time it says, “Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart.”
(Psalms 37:4). Again it says that if you have a little faith, you can move mountains by your voice (Matthew 17:20). If the Bible is true, why does God not always grant the prayers that we ask of him? Especially when we believe that God can and will do it. To answer this we need to look closer at what we are asking for and why we are asking. James 4:3 says, “You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions.” God does not stand in the background to help us get what we want. We must walk behind Him, so that He can guide us where to go. James goes on to say in the first half of verse 8, “Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you.” We must start by drawing near to God.
Let’s look back at those verses we saw before.
Psalm 37:4 says, “Delight yourself in the Lord…” What does this mean? It means to get full joy and satisfaction from God. If you are fully satisfied by the Lord, then “He will give you the desires of your heart.” This is not the same as getting what you want. It is much better. We ask for money, or an intimate relationship, or influence or power, but those are merely the tools we use to try to get our deepest desires, of love, contentment, value, and joy. By getting our satisfaction from Him, we get the deepest desires that our heart is longing for.
Matthew 7:7 says, “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you.” Look at how urgent this quote is in its entirety. Ask, seek and knock. Persistence is key here. Looking at this in the context of James 4:3 where we are asking, seeking and knocking in an unselfish way, we then are intentionally seeking God’s will for our lives. We are asking to align our hearts with His plan. Then He will overwhelmingly equip you to accomplish His work.
Which brings us to moving mountains.
Matthew 17:20 says “He (Jesus) said to them, ‘…For truly, I say to you, 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.”” We often focus on the ‘mountain’ or the phrase ‘nothing will be impossible for you.’ Those are both positive outcomes, but this is the outcome and not the source. The source is faith. Faith is not just believing something to be true but also fully committing to that truth. God will not do what you want, but He will use you to accomplish His plans. If you are living with Faith, your goals are aligned with Him and He will use you to accomplish otherwise impossible things.
It is not always easy to know God’s plan, or to know His plan for your life.
Even those that showed some of the greatest faith in the Bible did not know for sure His plan, but they were committed to following it. In the book of Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego were thrown in the fiery furnace and God saved them. Before that happened, they said this to the king in chapter 3:17-18, “If this be so, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and he will deliver us out of your hand, O king. But if not, be it known to you, O king, that we will not serve your gods or worship the golden image that you have set up.” Imagine the comfort and confidence these men had who could say to the the king, “But if not.” They were living a life so secure and stable, that no circumstance would shake them, even the threat of death. ‘But if not’ could be an anthem of faith for us. When we stay true to God, sometimes He saves us from our present trouble and sometimes He does not. But if not, we still are true, because God’s desires for our life are bigger than our circumstance. In the New Testament, Paul was struggling with a difficulty. In 2 Corinthians 12:8-9 he said, “Three times I pleaded with the Lord about this, that it should leave me. But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’” God uses our difficulty on earth to complete His plans. Sometimes it is to show His great healing power. Other times it is to show us and others that ‘His Grace is sufficient’ through the trouble.
This is the wonder of God. He uses us as people to complete His spiritual, heavenly, miraculous tasks. In Acts 2:22 we see that we can do the same things that Jesus did on earth because, “Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with mighty works and wonders and signs that God did through him…” When Jesus was in the garden, He did not say that He could call down Angels to protect Him. He said in Matthew 26:53, “Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father, and he will at once send me more than twelve legions of angels?”
We have the same power to ask God, but we are to use it the same way Jesus did. Jesus was about to be killed, and he could have asked, but He did not because He came to earth to die for us. In that moment asking for personal relief would have given up every reason He came to earth.
God designed us to live a life aligned with His will. Living in the way we were designed will fill us with joy and give us the James chapter 1 life that is fully complete and lacking nothing.
