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Transcript 340B — Praying in Jesus' Name
HC: Good evening. Welcome to Open Forum.
CALLER: I'm in a prayer group, and I didn't agree with the instructor, but we were asking him how to pray, and he said it was more important to pray in Jesus' name than it was to pray in His will. And I don't agree with that. And I just wanted you to talk a little bit about that.
HC: The question is raised, when we pray, are we to pray in Jesus' will or in Jesus' name? Let's analyze what the Bible says about this.
Actually, Christ said, "If you ask anything in My name, it will be given unto you." Now what did He mean by that? It is by virtue of what Christ has done for us by going to the cross that we have access to the Father. It is on His authority that we can go to the Father. We do not go to the Father because of any merit in ourselves, because of any right that we have. We do not have an essential right to come before God, because in ourselves we ought to be sent to hell for our sins.
But on the authority that Christ has given us we dare come to the Father. In fact, we are told to come boldly to the throne of grace. We're told to pray without ceasing. So in every prayer we ought to be thinking, we are coming in the name of Christ or on the authority of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Now we also must pray in the will of Christ. We do not go to Christ asking God just to give us the desires of our heart, whatever they are, without any regard for God's will. Our will is tainted by sin. Our will is not altogether trustworthy. We don't have the big picture. God does.
Because we are saved, we trust implicitly in God. We know that He will always do what is best for us. We have the joy and the privilege of going to God and unburdening ourselves, telling Him all the desires of our heart. But having said all this, we also recognize that maybe we've asked for things that wouldn't be good for us at all, even though we think at the moment in our minds that they might be good. And so we want to make sure, "But Lord, your will be done. You know what is best. We would never want accidentally or incidentally to superimpose our will on your will. We rest with you."
So actually, it isn't one or the other. We ought to be praying in the will of Christ, and we ought to be praying in the name of Christ. In the name of Christ it is on His authority we dare to come to the Father. In the will of Christ it is that we are indicating our total trust in everything that God does.
CALLER: Thank you.