“Prayer must be in alignment with the will of God or it’s null and void.”

A thought by Mark Batterson, (2015-10-06) from his book, If: Trading Your If Only Regrets for God's What If Possibilities (Kindle Locations 2607-2608). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. (Click on the title to go to Amazon.com to buy the book.)

We have so many false ideas about a lot of different things and we don’t know it. Reading people’s comments on Facebook or listening to talk radio shows you that to be true. Our ideas about prayer shows this too.

Mark says, “Prayer must be in alignment with the will of God or it’s null and void. It’s not like turning your back to Trevi Fountain and throwing a penny over your left shoulder. If it’s not God’s will, you’re not going to get whatever you ask for. God loves you far too much to spoil you in that way. But if it is God’s will, God will make a way. Even if it’s out of your league!”

Right before this he says, “Our prayers are limited by our lack of knowledge— we don’t know what we don’t know. That’s why I trust His intercession more than my intuition. That’s also why I often preface my prayers with a preamble: Lord, I want what you want more than I want what I want. I first heard that prayer from one of our campus pastors, Dave Schmidgall, when he and his wife were making an offer to buy their first home. That prayer is the way they put the ball back in God’s court.”

Margaret and I in the past few months were about to make a major decision. We really wanted something and thought it was something that we really needed and would be the best for us to have at this point in our lives. But we quit praying that God would work it out and started praying that he would help us to make the decision based on his wisdom and his will not our wants. We didn’t do what we thought we wanted to do, we did the wise thing and we later down the road found that getting what we wanted would have been a wrong decision, that it wasn’t what God wanted us to do at that time. If we would have forced the issue we would have been in trouble. God’s way was defiantly the best way for us.

So what is it you are praying for?

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