I’ve recently discovered a profound truth about prayer. I had an experience where I prayed for a friend, claiming Mark 11:24, which says, “Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.” Although this seems simplistic, I truly believed that my prayers would be (and had been) answered, but they weren’t.
However, I was then struck by the profound truth that we must be true to applying particular Scriptures passages only as God intended. For example, we cannot necessarily take God’s words to Israel in the Old Testament and apply them to ourselves.
Likewise, I realized that I could not call upon this verse in Mark for direct application to myself. Although it is sometimes quite difficult to tell, this verse applies to the earthly reign of Jesus Christ during the millennium–not to Christians in this age of grace.
Instead, for us Christians, it is more appropriate to look to James 4:2-4, which says, “You do not have, because you do not ask God. When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures.”
Our prayers today will not necessarily be answered just because we can somehow believe, or imagine, that they are. Instead, we must ask God with pure motives. This is quite difficult, even for the most honest among us. I believe this is why the best answers I’ve seen to my own prayers have concerned people that I hardly know; i.e., acquaintances, or “a friend of a friend,” instead of my own personal friends.
For example, even though I’m not praying for myself, I can selfishly benefit if my friend is healed. If so, I will continue to have that friend in this life, and I won’t have to suffer the loneliness which would be accompanied by losing him. In other words, even through my prayer for him, I can selfishly be praying for myself, if my motives are impure.
This is an example of knowing how to discern God’s words and apply them appropriately–to our temporal lives of today; to life in the earthly kingdom of Christ; or to eternity.