How do you pray God’s will—without trying to control the outcome? In this episode, we break down what Scripture actually teaches about the will of God and how to pray in alignment with His truth and character. Learn the difference between bold, biblical prayer and self-centered or “manifesting” language, and discover how God’s will is revealed through His Word—not guesswork. If you’re a woman seeking clarity, confidence, and depth in your prayer life, this teaching will help you pray with boldness, humility, and trust. In this episode, we examine:
✓ What is the will of God? (Romans 12:2, 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18, Micah 6:8)
✓ How to discern God’s will through a renewed mind
✓ The difference between praying boldly and praying selfishly
✓ Why God doesn’t always give us a “blueprint” for decisions
✓ How to pray freely without fear of getting it “wrong”
✓ Biblical prayer vs. manifestation theology
— 📚 RESOURCES MENTIONED: — Every Woman A Theologian website: https://phyliciamasonheimer.com — Verse-by-verse Bible studies:
- Amos & Micah: https://tsfqr.com/Amos
- 1-3 John: https://tsfqr.com/13john
- Galatians: https://tsfqr.com/Galatians
- Revelation: https://tsfqr.com/Rev
- Leviticus: https://tsfqr.com/Leviticus
— Books:
- Every Woman a Theologian: https://tsfqr.com/EWATbook
- Every Home a Foundation: https://tsfqr.com/Every-home
- Stop Calling Me Beautiful: https://tsfqr.com/Beautiful
- Kids’ Resources: https://tsfqr.com/EWATkids
📧 QUESTIONS? Email: phylicia@phyliciamasonheimer.com
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Transcription
We’re treating God like a genie. And again, we’re back to the checklist. We’re back to impersonal prayer. If prayer feels dry to you, my guess is there’s something going on theologically that is keeping you from intimacy with God. Welcome back to Verity Podcast, friends. I’m Phylicia Masonheimer, your host, and we are in episode 3 of our prayer series. I have been so encouraged by how much you have enjoyed the last 2 episodes of this series where we talked about praying to the saints and deliverance prayer. And now we’re going to talk about something that I know so many of you want to hear about, and that is how do we pray God’s will? I have been in so many different church settings and Bible studies where this has come up where we’re asking the question, how do I pray boldly and specifically, passionately? How do I pray in the power of the Spirit but also pray the will of God? And for some people, it actually causes a kind of spiritual paralysis that keeps us from freely praying and praying, like I said before, boldly, because we fear that we’re not praying God’s will.
So we’re going to look at what scripture says about the will of God, and then we’re going to talk about what it looks like to pray God’s will and what it looks like to not pray God’s will. So I hope this episode is helpful to you in your own walk with the Lord as you are seeking after him, as you are seeking to pray in accordance with his Spirit. As usual, we would love it if you subscribe to our YouTube channel if you subscribe to our podcast in iTunes. Verity Podcast is the podcast for my ministry, Every Woman a Theologian, and this is just one branch of what we do. We love to create verse-by-verse Bible studies, multi-sensory Bible studies, and books and resources for discipling your kids, whatever you need to go deeper into scripture. So thank you for following along, and we would love to resource you at phyliciamasonheimer.com. All right, let’s dive into understanding the will of God and how we are to pray that will. I have a collection of scriptures here.
At Verity, we always want to start there, and we’re going to look at these and kind of talk through them, and then we will move into how to actually use the principles we learn from scripture on this topic to pray God’s will effectively. The one of the verses that immediately comes to mind whenever we talk about the will of God is Romans 12:2, one of my favorites. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect. Right out of the gate here, we find out 3 things about the will of God: that it is good, it is acceptable, it is perfect. Anything that is in line with the will of God is going to line up with these 3 things—good, acceptable, and perfect. But to discern the will of God, we first need to have a transformed mind, a renewed mind, not a mind that’s conformed to the world, but a mind that is conformed to Christ. So the difference between these two words is, um, to conform to something is to shape yourself around it. It’s kind of like if you have kids or nieces and nephews who play with Play-Doh and you’re forcing Play-Doh into a mold, the Play-Doh is conforming to that mold, right? But the word ‘transform’ has something else in view.
The word ‘transform’ is the same word that’s the root of our word metamorphosis. It’s from the Greek, and it means metamorphosis, and the first thing that my mind thinks of when I hear that word is the transformation of a caterpillar into a butterfly. Every summer, my kids and I collect monarch caterpillars. So here in Northern Michigan, there are milkweed plants everywhere, and that is what monarch caterpillars feed on. And so we go out and we hunt through the milkweed to find these little tiny caterpillars, these striped monarch caterpillars, and then we can put them in a jar with a stick and some milkweed leaves, and they’ll eat the milkweed, and then they will build their chrysalis in which they transform into a butterfly. And over the years that we’ve done this, sometimes you have a chrysalis that falls off of a twig or it doesn’t make it. And, you know, being homeschoolers, we’re kind of curious, like, how does it transform into this butterfly? And if you dissect a chrysalis, it does not look like a butterfly. Like, it doesn’t.
It’s just this absolute mystery of how it transforms from the caterpillar almost dissolving into something that then rebuilds into the beauty of a monarch caterpillar. It’s incredible. This is metamorphosis. So similarly, we as human beings, when we put our trust in Christ, we are not to be like Play-Doh in the mold of the world. We’re not to be inside the world’s ideas and worldview on who we should be and how we should think and how we should interact. With the world, but that we are to be transformed by the renewing of our minds, aligning our minds with Scripture, with what God has revealed about himself in history. We are then transformed from who we used to be to something completely different. We are transformed from the old self, the old person we were before Christ, to a person who looks a lot like Christ.
By the power of the Holy Spirit. And when we do that, when that happens through salvation and through walking out our faith every day, we are able to discern the will of God. We’re able to understand what is good, acceptable, and perfect. We’re told in scripture that, you know, someone who does not know Christ, the scriptures and the Christian life, it’s folly to them. They don’t think that it’s even worth considering because The, the, the thoughts of their mind, it’s darkened. They don’t have that ability to comprehend the goodness of God because they are not willing to submit themselves to the Spirit’s call. And so they don’t experience that transformed, renewed mind that can discern the will of God. So before we ever get to praying the will of God, we’ve determined that to even pray the will of God, you first have to be transformed, and then you need to recognize what it is.
It’s good and acceptable and perfect. The will of God is not going to be bad and unacceptable and imperfect. It’s always going to be aligned with who he is. The second verse is 1 Thessalonians 5:16, 17, and 18. This is a verse my mom had me memorize when I was a kid from her little stack of yellow memory verse cards. Rejoice always, pray continually, give thanks in all circumstances, for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus. Did you catch that? This is literally outlining what the will of God is. Rejoice always, pray continually, give thanks in all circumstances.
This is the will of God. So we know it’s what is good, acceptable, and perfect. Now we also know that it’s to rejoice, to pray, and to give thanks always. And it’s so interesting that he’s laid it right out for us, because so often in Christian spaces we say, I just want to know the will of God, I just want to know the will of God. What we mean is, I want God to tell me exactly who to marry, exactly what job to take, exactly what opportunity to say yes to. I want it all laid out, like I want it just laid out on a blueprint for me to follow. And yes, that would be quite easy, but God doesn’t often work in those super specific ways. Sometimes he does, but more often than not, especially in the Bible, he speaks of the will of God in these extremely broad principles, these guiding principles that can tell you, look, there might be many opportunities, but they’re always going to be good, acceptable, and perfect And you’re going to know which opportunities to take when you are rejoicing and praying and giving thanks continually, when that is your lifestyle.
So we’re seeing something being built here throughout the whole of right now, the New Testament, that’s telling us about the will of God. 1 Peter 2:15 says, this is the will of God, that by doing good you should put silence to the ignorance of foolish people. So again, giving us a principle about the will of God, saying that in this setting, if you choose to do good, and what he means by that is to do the good things the Holy Spirit calls you to do, live as a Christian should live, bear the fruit of the Spirit, then you will silence the ignorance of foolish people. 1 Peter is a section of the Word that I studied a lot postpartum back in the fall, and in studying this book, he talks a lot about persecution and talks a lot about false teachers. So in context, he’s saying if you want to silence the ignorant accusations of foolish people who are persecuting you, who are lying about you, who are slandering you, do good. This is the will of God, that you do good, and eventually their sin will be found out. They will be exposed for who they are. John 7:17, this is Jesus speaking.
This is in the Gospels. He says, “If anyone’s will is to do God’s will, he will know whether a teaching is from God or whether I’m speaking on my own authority.” So in context here, this is Jesus speaking to the crowds, including the Jewish leaders, and he is saying, look, if you want to know if a teaching is from God or whether I am not from God, I’m not speaking on God’s authority, if your will is to do God’s will, you will know. Basically, if your heart is aligned with God’s, if you have been transformed by the renewing of your mind, you will be able to discern— going back to Romans— whether a teaching is from God or not. And Jesus often said in the Gospels when he would talk to people, let he who has ears, let him hear. He would say this, and what it meant was those who are willing to receive what I’m saying, let them receive it. And those who don’t want to receive it, they can walk away. He said this repeatedly. And so here he’s saying this in a different way where he’s basically saying if your heart is to do God’s will, then you’ll be able to discern whether a teaching is from God or not.
Mark 3:35 is also Jesus talking, and this is when, um, Jesus has his, his mother, uh, Mary, and his brothers and sisters come to get him because he’s ministering and there’s kind of chaos surrounding his ministry at the time. And they stand outside the house where he’s ministering, and someone comes to him and says, hey Lord, your, your mother and your, your family’s here. They’re outside waiting for you. And he says, whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister. And mother. And he’s illustrating a point here that the family of Christ is anyone who does the will of God. What is the will of God? Well, so far we’ve seen it is doing what is good and acceptable and perfect according to scripture. It is giving thanks and rejoicing and praying continually.
It’s by doing good and doing the good works of the Spirit. It’s by discerning And now we’re going to hop back into the Old Testament. We’re going to go all the way back to Micah 6:8. And Jesus, he knew the Old Testament. He was obviously, from an earthly perspective and a human perspective, he was trained in this because as a young boy he would have gone to Torah school. But in addition to this, he inspired this as God, so he knows what the Old Testament says about himself. Micah 6:8 says, God, he has told you, O man, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? What is God’s will for you but to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God? This is a beautiful verse, one of my favorites.
I have it hanging in my house. But this particular passage is telling you, look, God’s will for you is to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with God. This is what he wants from you. And the last verse I have is Hebrews 13:20-21, which says, now may the God of peace who brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus, the great shepherd of the sheep, by the blood of the eternal covenant, equip you with everything good that you may do his will, working in us that which is pleasing in his sight, through Jesus Christ, to whom be glory forever and ever. Amen. So this is like a benediction at the end of Hebrews, and here he’s saying that he’s asking the Lord, he’s praying that the God of peace through Jesus Christ, through his blood covenant, would give the readers of the letter everything they need to do his will. And by doing this, they would be— worked in them would be the things that are pleasing in his sight. So this really aligns with what we saw in the first 3 verses: Romans 12, 1 Thessalonians 5, and 1 Peter 2.
That the will of God will lead to what is good, acceptable, and perfect, that it will lead to giving thanks, praying continually, rejoicing always, and it will lead to doing good. Same concepts are reiterated here in Hebrews and also in Micah. I want to start with these scriptures because I want to give you a picture of what the will of God is about. So often we look at the will of God as this evasive kind of entity, almost separate from God himself, that if we could just find it, we could just grab onto it, we could get this like map of how to live our lives. And if that’s what you’re looking for, I’m sorry to tell you that you, you were not going to find that. Because what we are called to as Christians is day-by-day relationship with God, day-by-day reliance on him, asking him to lead us the next little step, asking him to show us how to be faithful where we are. And he absolutely speaks personally and will give you the wisdom to make decisions, to choose who to date or when to break up, how to find a job and what job to take, how to discern your family size, how to discern schooling choices for kids. All of those things he gives the wisdom to do, but he’s not going to just give you this cut-and-dried map that you can follow.
That is not what finding the will of God is. And I think because we view it in this really strict, um, dry way instead of the dynamic of relationship, we actually struggle to pray for things because we think, well, I can’t pray for the strength to homeschool because homeschooling might not be God’s will for me, so I can’t pray it. I can’t pray for God to show me if this guy I’m dating is my future husband because I don’t know if that’s God’s will for me to get married. I can’t pray to ask God to bring me a spouse because what if it’s not God’s will that I get married? You know, these are examples of things that we might not— we struggle to even voice them despite the fact that God already knows what’s in our hearts. It keeps people from praying boldly, specifically, personally with the Lord because it’s like you’re withholding a part of yourself from him because you think it’s not God’s will And yet he already knows everything that’s in your heart. And it, it, there’s no outcome out of that kind of prayer life, but a block between you and God. And if you’re feeling that, I just want to tell you, I hope by the end of this episode that the Lord just frees, frees you from that, removes that block that’s in your relationship with him. Because I truly think the theology we have around praying God’s will is keeping people from that beautiful free prayer relationship that you can have with him.
Because we’re just, we just won’t pray. Instead, we just think about things, and we think that we’re keeping it from him. We’re not giving it, we’re not giving it to him because we’re afraid he’s judging us for what we might pray for. Meanwhile, he knows everything we’re thinking. Oh, it keeps us from the beauty of a strong prayer life with the Lord. So let’s look at what the word, and at least in the New Testament, the word for will of God means purpose, decree, determination, commands, or precepts. So it is— God’s will is what God wishes to be done, and it’s God’s commands. So his articulated commands, the things that he has already said in the Bible.
So I took a stab at paraphrasing this based on a study that I did of the Greek word. Here’s how I would describe God’s will: the things God desires for us that he has articulated through scripture in the Old Testament law and reaffirmed and expressed by Jesus. The principles and precepts his people are to live by for flourishing in this world and the next. Notice that I said principles and precepts, not exact checklists of things that we have to do. And why is that? Because the will of God must be attainable for all Christians in every cultural setting, in every era, every demographic, because that’s what we know. If you’re following Christ, you’re supposed to be fulfilling God’s will. It’s going to look a little bit different in some ways if you live in South Africa versus if you live in California in the United States. So we know God’s will must be attainable, but how that specifically plays out life to life is going to be reliant on specifically walking through in a discerning, prayerful, God-seeking way.
So with this definition of God’s will, that these are the things God desires for us that he’s already articulated, the principles we’re to live by for flourishing in this world and the next, why do we pray God’s will? Why is it so important that we pray God’s will. I have heard in some Bible studies, youth groups, etc., people say that when you pray, you have to say “if you will it” after everything, or God might not answer. Same kind of thing with praying in Jesus’ name. If you don’t pray in Jesus’ name, it’s kind of like this magical, like, clincher statement that will allow what you prayed to happen. And what the problem with these things is that we’re kind of creating these formulas, like if I don’t stamp my prayer exactly right, God won’t listen, or God won’t hear it, or he won’t do what I want. We’re treating God like a genie, and again, we’re removing the relational element or walking away from the relational element, and we’re back to the checklist. We’re back to impersonal prayer. If prayer feels dry to you, my guess is there’s something going on theologically that is keeping you from intimacy with God.
There’s something you believe about him and about prayer that is affecting this, and that’s why we’re doing this series, because we’re going to dismantle that. We pray God’s will, not to try to guess at or determine a specific outcome, but to align our hearts with the principles of his truth and his character. We pray in alignment with his heart and in submission to his commandments. We pray in alignment with his heart and in submission to his commandments. Here’s why this is so important. There’s a specific passage, I think it’s in Peter, I don’t have it pulled up in front of me, where the apostle writes that men who mistreat their wives will not have their prayers heard by God. And this is a great example of what I’m saying here, that when we pray God’s will, we’re praying in alignment with his heart and in submission to his commandments. If someone is living in abject rebellion against God, they’re completely like walking away from God, then is God just happily answering their prayers? Scripture tells us that he’s not.
Now, what this makes people do is they start to panic and they think, well, God, God won’t listen to me unless I’m perfect all the time. No, that’s not what’s being said. There is a clear difference between a person who is a flawed, sinful person— all of us— praying to God in humility, admitting their wrongdoing, and walking daily with him, versus someone living in a lifestyle of sin claiming that they are in Christ and then praying prayers as if God will hear them. That person has a hardened heart. This other person has a soft heart. Even in their sin and in their failure, they’re, they’re coming to the Lord in humility. They’re walking with him daily. They’re not assuming that, oh, God’s going to do whatever I ask him to do because I have nothing to ever repent of or nothing that I’m doing wrong.
So a person with a hardened heart who’s living in sin and is asking God to do things for him, this person should be aware that God will turn his face away. He will not receive prayers from someone who is in rebellion and abject pride, thinks that they can mistreat other people, especially a spouse, and be fine. But God always turns toward the humble. He always turns towards those who are seeking him from a genuine heart. His face is towards them, and we’re going to look at that in a second. So the question is, is there a right way to pray God’s will? How do we figure out what it is to pray his will so that we pray right? That’s often the question. How do I— I’m afraid of praying wrongly. And I want to just encourage you to let go of this idea that there’s a very strict way that you must pray.
When we look at the Lord’s Prayer, which is where Jesus gave us an example, he said, this is how you should pray. He wasn’t saying you only should pray in this script of the Lord’s Prayer, like, this is these exact words, this is what you repeat over and over. He was giving a model of prayer. Our Father who art in heaven, holy is your name, thy kingdom come, Thy will be done. So there’s that humility element. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, not my kingdom come. On earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread.
Give us the provision we need. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. So you— what Jesus is showing through the Lord’s Prayer is that he’s ushering you step by step through the posture of heart that someone who wants to do God’s will would use when praying. Lord, holy are you. You are greater than me. Holy are you, and may your kingdom come, not my little kingdoms. Provide for me out of your abundance. It’s a prayer of dependence.
It’s a prayer of humility, and it goes back to that heart that first desires that God’s will would be done as it prays for the specific things that we as humans need. So before we get into the specifics of praying God’s will, I’m going to give you just a nice list of things that characterize praying God’s will. I want to first look at what it looks like to not pray God’s will, because we can look at that and go, okay, This is what we want to avoid when we are praying. And I’ve already kind of touched on this. If you’re mistreating somebody, actively mistreating someone, living in unrepentant sin, and that the scriptures have said this is, this is sin. You, you know it, you’re aware of it, and you’re doing nothing about it. Then God will resist you. He will resist you.
He resists the proud, and the proud are those who think they have nothing to repent of. So let’s look at what it would look like to be failing to pray God’s will. Number 1, the first example I want to use is prosperity gospel prayers, like the prayer of Jabez type thing. God, I command or I declare that I’ll be wealthy and financially blessed. Well, the way we know that this is out of alignment with God’s principles, which is the basis of praying God’s will, that we know 1 Timothy 6:10 says the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil. Ecclesiastes 5:10, whoever loves money will never have enough. Matthew 6:24, no one can serve two masters. In this kind of prayer, this person is praying their will to be done, not God’s will to be done.
They’re using God as a vehicle to their own ends. See, money is not bad in and of itself, and Christians being wealthy is not even wrong. If they’re stewarding their wealth in a humble and generous way. But using God to get wealth or saying that wealth is evidence of God’s favor is out of alignment with what scripture reveals. So if somebody’s doing this, this would be an example of not praying God’s will. Yes, they’re praying specifically and they’re praying really boldly with their declarations or their commands, but what they’re doing is they’re twisting what scripture says about money and about God’s will. Another example would be commanding or declaring in God’s name. So this is very different than praying specifically and boldly, which I have told you all is so, so important.
So often we pray these very vague prayers and then we wonder why we, one, never see God’s answers because we’re just speaking in these just generalities. So our eyes aren’t open to those answers, but we also are lacking intimacy with God because we aren’t actually bringing everything, bringing all of our anxieties, all of our cares to him. We’re withholding stuff from him and we’re just praying what we believe is safe or what he wants to hear. So we should pray specifically. We should pray boldly, bravely, praying scriptural truths boldly as promises, the ones that are there. We can pray for those with an attitude of humility and openness. But declaring or commanding things in God’s name is— can quickly become almost like Christian manifesting, where our prayer is centered on personal desires, not on God’s goodness. Now, I want to be clear.
Sometimes when you’re praying specifically and boldly, you are praying for things that you actually want. But the marker of, of a prayer that is in line with God’s will is humility. It is open-handedness, saying, God, I am begging you for this. I’m asking you for this, yet not my will but yours be done. The model that we have for this is Jesus himself in the Garden of Gethsemane. Father, take this cup from me, but not my will, but yours be done. And he had to drink the cup. He had to go to the cross, but because he did that, he did God’s will, and all of us have the privilege of praying to God and being heard because of what he did.
An example in my own life— let me talk a bit about this in my testimony video from the previous podcast series— is praying for healing from secondary infertility. Those who’ve walked through infertility of any kind know that you can get to this very apathetic place where you’re kind of measuring your life in 2-week increments, and you’re taking these tests and they come back negative, and you start to just think this is just how it’s going to be. Sometimes focusing just on the physical, like, I’m just going to change this and eat differently and do an elimination diet and take this medicine and all of these things to just try to fix the problem. And I realized at some point in my journey that I had actually stopped praying for healing from infertility. I’d actually stopped even asking God to give us a baby. I wasn’t even asking for it. I wasn’t even praying for it. I was just completely operating in, in my human, physical, material world, and I was doing things that, you know, were healthy, to try to help the problem, but I was not seeking the Lord about it anymore.
And I started praying specifically again. I started actually praying specifically. And you know what it did is it’s not that, oh, I prayed certain words or I prayed it at a certain time or I found the formula so that my infertility was healed. No, I brought it to the Lord and he built back an intimacy in our relationship that had been lost by me distancing myself from him in the pain of recurrent miscarriages. And whatever your situation is, I just want to encourage you that praying specifically over something you desire is not only not wrong, it can be done from a position of humility and a position like Christ of not my will but yours be done. God, I’m going to tell you what I will do, what I want, what I desire. I’m going to keep asking. I’m going to keep knocking, which is the actual Greek phrasing of knock and the door will be opened.
It keeps knocking and the door will be opened. That’s the phrasing that Jesus used. I’m going to keep knocking, and I pray that you answer me, even if the answer is no. And that’s what happened during our miscarriages, we prayed that those babies would not die all the way up to the end. We had people praying with us that they would not, and the answer was no. And I don’t know why. I don’t know why I prayed and I asked, and the answer was no then, but the answer was yes for Oliveira., and that’s something that I probably won’t know until I’m at heaven’s gate. And that’s the part of our relationship with God that requires humility.
That’s the part that requires recognizing his sovereignty in prayer, recognizing that he is God and that we are not. So we don’t declare and command things in God’s name as if we can manifest them. There has to be humility and openness to God’s working. While also praying specifically and, and asking and knocking. And not just one time, keep knocking, he says. Be the person who continues to faithfully bring it to God. And here’s the thing, we absolutely can and should pray for our desires and our needs because God loves to hear this. Psalm 50:15, call on me on the day of trouble.
Jeremiah 33:3, call to me, I will answer you. Romans 10:13, whoever calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. Psalm 86:5, you abound— he abounds in love to those who call on him. Psalm 55:17, he hears those who call on him. God wants to answer you, but the problem is that when we’re trying to pray God’s will, we think that one, God has this strict determinist narrow will. He has some soulmate out there for us, and you can’t pray about getting married because he might not want you to be married, or this guy might not be the guy he has for you. The truth is that, again, the principles in scripture about God’s will are quite broad. They are telling us these, these principles, these, these wide precepts that say, are you dating somebody good and acceptable and perfect, or are you dating an unbeliever? Scripture tells you not to be in an intimate relationship with an unbeliever.
Do not yoke yourself to that person. So if you are dating an unbeliever and you’re praying, God, please, please, please reveal to me, is this my husband? He’s already said he’s not, not in his current state. And so, you know, it’s not that you aren’t hearing back from God, it’s that God has already answered you and you don’t like the answer. If you are praying, Lord, I just, I just need, I just need more money and protect me from being found out for embezzling, No, he’s, he’s not going to do that because the answer has been revealed. But if you are praying specifically, Lord, I humbly, I humbly need wisdom, or I humbly need, I need an opportunity, I need provision, whatever it is, you pray specifically and you can say, not my will but yours be done, and still continue to pray about the same thing and yet be open to his answer, however it may look. When we pray specifically, not out of this fear that we can find this super narrow secret path that God’s, like, got this narrow path you have to find— when we pray specifically, our eyes are opened to God’s movements, to how he’s working, and we start to see the ways God is answering, the profoundly beautiful ways that he answers, the personal ways he answers, And not always on the big things. Sometimes some things are still in progress, but he’s answering these other smaller things over here. And that’s why I so encourage writing down your prayers, writing out your prayers so you can see a record of what you’ve been praying for and how God has been answering you.
So we don’t pray to God’s will by declaring or commanding our will. But we also know that we don’t need to be afraid of praying specifically and boldly because God desires us to call on him, and he says he will answer us. So as we get towards the end of this episode, how do we pray God’s will? Just if I had to write a list, here’s how you pray God’s will. Here’s what I would say. Number 1, know the scriptures. That’s where God’s will is first revealed. It’s what we started with. We have these principles of what his will looks like.
You gotta know what the Bible says. You have to be in it. Secondly, know the context and the principles. What are the principles about God’s will? Well, go back to the beginning of this episode. You can listen back through where we talk about rejoicing and giving thanks and praying continually, things that are good, acceptable, perfect, doing good, discerning the teaching that is right and true. And then third, pray his truth. Pray his truth. We’re going to have an upcoming episode on how to pray scripture.
It is so powerful. It is my favorite thing to do and teach. I’ve learned so much from my friend Jodi Berndt on this. She has her book Praying the Scriptures Over Your Children, which I absolutely love. Um, she has one on praying the scriptures for your marriage, but I will teach you how to actually write your own scripture-based prayers. This is how you pray the truth. Fourth, pray with God’s character in mind. If you are praying and you think, well, I have to pray a certain formula in order to be in alignment with God’s will, that tells me something about how you perceive God.
It tells me that you think of God as withholding, stingy, hard to reach, distant. That’s not who he is. It’s not who he is. I would encourage you to look up every single instance in scripture about the love of God this week. Look them all up. Read them all and see if that changes how you view him. Fifth, pray with boldness. Pray with boldness.
What I mean by this is don’t pray safe prayers. Notice that in Gethsemane, Jesus knows he’s going to the cross. He knows that he is— he was born for this. He knows that all of his ministry has pointed towards this, and yet he specifically prays and boldly prays. Take this cup from me. He prayed for something that was impossible. In order to redeem mankind, in order to do what he came to do, he had to drink the cup. He still prayed about it.
He still asked God for it. And God did not take the cup from him, but he gave him the strength to drink it. And I think that’s something that we need to remember when we’re praying boldly, specifically. It’s not like God is a slot machine and, and you, you put something in and it’s just spinning away and he’ll spit something out and maybe you’ll win a million dollars. That’s not what this is about. This is about relationship. And so that means that we pray specifically and boldly, knowing full well that he knows better than us. And that if he says no, he has answered us, and there’s a reason why that was the answer.
And if he says yes, we can point people to his glory just as much as we could if he said no. And in my own story, this was true. Our miscarriages actually brought so many people to a deeper relationship with God, something I never imagined, never could have thought would happen. And when I think about how I felt in that moment, I can picture myself in the moments when we lost those babies. I just think I never would have thought that God could work through this situation in the way that he did. So pray with boldness, even if the answer is no. And lastly, pray in submission. And this is again characterized in the person of Jesus because He had a posture that said, and his words said, not my will but yours be done.
And that’s what the Lord’s Prayer says as well. Not my kingdom, but your kingdom on earth as it is in heaven. And this is how we approach praying the will of God without giving into a self-centric approach or giving into a distant, doubting approach to prayer. We get to pray freely, boldly, specifically. We pray scripture. We pray with his heart in mind. We don’t worry about saying the right things to make sure that they align with, you know, the special magical will of God’s words. We simply pray from a posture of humility.
And we ask even if the answer isn’t what we hoped. And through that, we are brought to a deeper intimacy with God beyond anything that we could have imagined. I hope this episode was helpful to you. I hope this frees you to not be so careful in what you’re praying, to not have a checklist of things that you need to make sure to say, or you don’t tell God certain things as if He doesn’t already know. He wants to hear from you. His face is turned towards you. Never forget that.