Matt. 6:10 Your kingdom come; Your will be done, as in heaven, so also on earth. 1 Tim. 2:1 I exhort therefore, first of all, that petitions, prayers, intercessions, thanksgivings be made on behalf of all men; (4) Who [God] desires all men to be saved and to come to the full knowledge of the truth.
The prayer here is "Your will be done, as in heaven, so also on earth." This shows that God's will is done in heaven, but that it is not fully done on earth. God is God; who can stop His will from being done? No one can stop God. Why then do we have to pray? Brothers and sisters, we have to realize that it is wonderful that such a thing as prayer can exist in the Bible. God truly knows our need already. Why then do we need to pray? In man's view, since God is omniscient, there is no need for man to pray. Yet according to the Bible, God needs man's prayer. Prayer means that God wants to do something, yet He will not do it Himself; He will wait for man on earth to pray about it before He does it. God has His will and thoughts. Yet He is waiting for man to pray. He will not move by Himself; He will move only after man has prayed. The Lord Jesus was to be born. But there needed to be a Simeon and an Anna to pray for this (Luke 2:25, 36-38). The Holy Spirit was to descend, but it could not descend until the hundred and twenty people prayed for ten days (Acts 1:15; 2:1-2). This is the principle of prayer. Can we through prayer ask God not to do what He wants? No, we cannot. Yet God has to wait for us to pray before He can do what He wants to do. At the time of Ahab, the word of Jehovah came to Elijah clearly, "I will send rain upon the earth." But Elijah had to pray before God would send the rain (1 Kings 18:1, 41- 45). What is prayer? It is first for God to have a will, second for us to touch this will and pray for it, and third for God to answer our prayer when we pray. Many people have the wrong concept that the reason man prays to God is to initiate something and ask God to do something. But the Bible shows us that God first has a will and wants to do something, next He shows us His will, and then we speak out with our mouth the will that we have come to understand. This is prayer.
Bible verses are taken from the Recovery Version of the Bible and Words of Ministry from "The Prayer Ministry of the Church" in the Collected Works of Watchman Nee, Vol. 22, pp. 165-166. Both are published by Living Stream Ministry, Anaheim, CA. Please visit us at www.emanna.com. Send comments to: [email protected].
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