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Transcript 100A — Will God Save Someone if I Pray For Them?
HC: Good evening. Welcome to Open Forum.
CALLER: What if you are praying for an unsaved person, and you claim the promise of John 14:13, believing that the Father will be glorified through someone's salvation, and so you stand on that promise and pray for the person, and witness to the person, and you really claim that promise from the Lord. Now if predestination is so, and God has promised that we will have anything that we ask in His Name that will glorify the Father, would this mean that the person that you're praying for, as long as he's a burden upon your heart, will be saved? The only thing I want to know is: Can I stand on that promise? Okay? Thank you very much.
HC: Yes You're welcome. Good night.
This is a very fair question. It's a question that has puzzled many many people. When we read in John 14:13: "Whatever you ask in My Name, I will do it, that the Father may be glorified in the Son," and we are told to be a witness, we are told to practice our priestly office of intercession, when we pray for someone who is unsaved, and diligently bring that person to God in prayer, have we assurance therefore that this person will be saved? Can we believe that we are actually being motivated to pray for that person simply because God has predestinated that person to be saved, and He's using us as a vehicle?
Now we have to begin our answer by getting a little bit more commentary on John 14:13. In John 15:7 we have a very similar promise, but there's another condition added to it. "If you abide in Me, and My words abide in you, ask whatever you will and it shall be done for you."
Now this simply means that we, as born again believers, regardless of how serious believers we may be, how faithful we may be, cannot promiscuously ask God for this and for that. But maybe that's too big a word. Maybe that's too unwise a word to use. But the fact is that there are some things that we cannot know the will of God concerning.
We, for example, cannot know the will of God concerning whether a person is going to become well again who is afflicted in some way. There are so many things we can't know the will of God about. And one of the things we cannot know the will of God about is whether the person we are praying for has been predestinated or not, whether he is one of God's elect or not. That is Cod's hidden will, His hidden counsel. It's not for us to know.
And we know this from the Bible. We know that God is sovereign. He saves whom He will. And if we are abiding in Christ and His words abiding in us, then we are aware of this, that there are those who are elect, who will be saved, and there are those who will never want to be saved, and God will make no move to save them. Now we don't know who these individuals are. That is God's program and not our program.
And so when we pray for someone who is unsaved (and what Christian of us has not done this?), with great zeal and with great fervor and with great beseeching of the Lord, we still must condition our prayer, recognizing that we don't know God's will in this matter. We know it's God's will that we are to witness to this person. That we know absolutely, that we are witnesses. We know it's God's will that we are to pray for this person, that we are to intercede on behalf of this person. That we know absolutely. We never have to wonder about that. But we cannot know whether it's God's program to save that person.
And so we beseech the Lord, and we ask, if it is God's will, could it be possible that this person might be saved? Because, after all, God can save that person. There's nobody that could remain unsaved if God decides to save them. The Bible is very clear about that. But we don't know what God's will is.
We simply know that God has commanded us to faithfully witness, to faithfully pray, and to patiently wait upon the Lord to act. But whether the Lord will act in a specific case or not, we won't know until that person dies. And even then we might not know, because there is always the possibility of a death bed conversion, even though there has been no outward sign before that time.
And so this is the nature of our prayers when we pray to God on behalf of those who are unsaved. I empathize with this question, and I'd like to give a very personal testimony concerning this. I don't ordinarily do this, but there was a time in my life when I convinced myself, as I was reading the Bible, that it was God's will to save people, it was God who was motivating me to witness to someone, and so on. And therefore, if I really felt a heavy burden for someone, then definitely I could believe that God was going to bring salvation, that there was any question I was really reasoning this out without really understanding everything the Bible offers.
And so I became involved with this person whom I met, an elderly lady, whom I met in a hospital when a loved one of my own was ill. And I began to witness to her and to her husband. I began to pray for her. And I made a real effort, a real effort, to bring the Gospel to this family. There followed many many many visits, and much much prayer. I can never remember when I was more interested in seeing a person saved. I really was challenged by this.
And I was quite convinced that God was going to save. This lady eventually ended up in a mental institution, and I began to visit her there as I was able to, because she had begun to become somewhat senile. And this was in the days before there were nursing homes. And so frequently such patients ended up in a mental institution.
I began to visit her there, as I was able to. And again, I continued to pray deliberately and faithfully for her. Then one time I visited with her, and her mind was gone. In the meanwhile, before this occurred, there had been not the slightest opening, not the slightest indication at any time that there was any awareness of what the true Gospel was. The blindness continued as black as it had been from the beginning.
And when I met with her this last time and found that her mind had gone, that she was still living but she was a vegetable, insofar as her mind was concerned, I was truly in a state of shock for a little while. I couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe it. Here was a person who had not died, and yet there was no possibility of salvation.
Now I don't believe in learning doctrine from experience. That is not the way that we find what God teaches, because experience is very frail. It's very faulty. It's possible, in the closing moments of this person's mental ability, while she still had mental ability, that she might have been saved. All the evidence is to the contrary, however.
But I must say that, having gone through this, I was forced to reexamine Scripture very very carefully, and then I realized that God is sovereign. Now God had put me through a very wonderful exercise, of being concerned about someone, of having compassion for someone, of faithfully being a witness, even though it did not result in salvation. Now that I thank God for. But also, through this all, God brought me to study the Scriptures more carefully.
And so when I pray, and I think when any believer prays, for someone who is unsaved (and we all do this), we pray, we beseech the Lord, we claim whatever promises we can from God's Word, but we cannot know, absolutely certain, that God will save, because we don't know what God's ultimate program is. That is part of God's hidden will, His hidden counsel.