When we know and trust in Jesus Christ, we can pray confidently, expecting that God both hears us and will meet all of our needs if we pray according to his will.

Well, we are in our final two weeks of our study of First John. Ordinarily, I might say I hope you’ve enjoyed it, but, enjoy doesn’t seem quite the right word for First John. When we started this series back in April, I called this letter one of the most transformational documents in the biblical library. And I stand by that. I stand by it. You can’t read this letter thoughtfully and be the same person when you’re done. There are just too many challenging assertions, too many sobering statements about the nature of faith and the call of God. If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth. Whoever says I know him but does not keep his commandments is a liar, and the truth is not in him. Whoever says he abides in Jesus ought to walk in the same way in which he walked. Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. Whoever practices righteousness is righteous as he is righteous. Whoever makes a practice of sinning is of the devil. For the devil has been sinning from the beginning. Everyone who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him. If anyone says I love God and hates his brother, he is a liar. For he who does not love his brother, whom he has seen cannot love God, whom he has not seen.

Whoever has the Son has life. Whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life. So throughout this letter John has been sculpting, sometimes painfully, Christians. That’s what he’s doing. He’s sculpting Christians. He will not let us create a sort of false Christianity that doesn’t take seriously who Jesus is and what he did on the cross, and what His Spirit does in our hearts and how we are now to walk in righteousness. John saying the inauthentic, hypocritical, false, so-called Christian life is out there. It is available to you and I don’t want you to live it. I don’t want you to go that way. This morning, we have the beginning of the conclusion of this letter, and we know because it starts by saying why he’s written this letter. And that’s usually a pretty good indication as to the end is near in letters like this. And he wraps things up, John does, he wraps things up very confidently, despite the fact that he has presented so many challenges in this letter, it is not John’s intention to leave us in a place of fear or in a place of doubt. And that can happen with challenges sometimes. If you stack up phrases from the letter like I just did here a moment ago, you can get the impression that John wants us to be walking around constantly questioning our relationship with God. And I’ve known Christians. Maybe you are. You have this low-level, nagging discomfort about your own faith because you’re not sure if your faith is strong enough or if it’s real at all. I know people like this. They don’t rest with confidence in the grace of God and live with confidence that God is at work in them and is firmly in control of their lives. John’s challenges are meant to weed out false faith, okay? That’s what those challenges are. They’re meant to weed out false faith so we don’t fall for it, but then leave true faith with confidence. And that’s how this letter ends. Next week, we’re going to look at how to deal with sin and three very encouraging things that we know that give us confidence in our eternal life. But this morning, we’re going to look at what it means to engage in confident prayer. When we know and we trust in Jesus Christ, we can pray confidently, expecting that God both hears us and will meet all of our needs if we pray according to his will. Let me begin with a little bit of a confession here this morning, church. I find prayer to be one of the more mysterious aspects of the Christian faith. When I, when I put together the different ways that Scripture describes prayer, I am left with some ambiguity on how it exactly works.

And I put works in quotes because I’m not exactly sure how prayer accomplishes what it accomplishes. It is an essential part of Christian life. Okay. We are told that prayer is powerful. James tells us the prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working. I don’t question at all for a moment that God accomplishes great things through prayer, but it is mysterious. And some of that ambiguity is probably going to come through as I work to describe what John says about prayer this morning. So if you have your Bibles, you can open them to First John chapter five. We’re going to begin in verse 13 this morning. John starts by sharing the confidence that he wants us to have. And then he describes how prayer is part of that confidence. And once we look at that, I want to spend some time this morning considering one of the most difficult questions that comes up when we think about prayer. Let’s start in verse 13. I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, that you may know that you have eternal life. So as he has throughout this letter, John once again identifies his audience. He says his version of Little Children, right? He’s talking to believers, those who. Those who already know the Son of God. This letter is like your driver’s ed instructor. Okay. Remember. Remember that. Remember your driver’s ed instructor?

Remember that weird little car you had to drive around for your driver’s ed test, right? My instructor was named Mr. Raymond, and Mr. Raymond was also my history teacher. It was a very small town. And I got into the car and I looked over at Mr. Raymond, and I saw that Mr. Raymond also had a brake on his side of the car. In the passenger side there was a brake. My son told me that they still have this. That’s still the kind of car they drive around. And, I had full control of the car the entire time when I was riding in that car, I drove the car. But apparently, apparently, if at any point, Mr. Raymond thought that I was going to put us in the ditch or drive us off a cliff, he could put a stop to it. He could jam on the brakes and we would come to a stop. It never happened to me. I never had him brake at all. But knowing that he was also watching where I was going and could intervene at any time made me feel a bit more confident in what I was doing. That’s what this letter is to us. Okay, that’s what the letter is for. John is looking at the direction that the church could go. He’s watching them go. And these things that he’s written are that second brake that is meant to stop us from veering off the path and going the wrong way.

He says, I’m writing these things to you who believe in Jesus so that you may know you have eternal life. His goal is that we would have confidence in our belief in Jesus. That he has secured eternal life for us. It is not God’s aim that his people would move through this world with reservations and doubts about our own eternity. It’s not how he wants us to live. We should not be wringing our hands, wondering what happens when we die. That is certainly what non-believers do. That’s what happens for people who don’t know Christ. But it is not meant to be how we live our lives. Now, if your approach to God is based on your good works, let the hand wringing commence. Go ahead, because I have no idea how you could ever stand before God with confidence if you think your acceptance is based on your performance. I just don’t know how that would be for anyone. But because eternal life with God is not received through our performance, but through Christ’s performance for us, his sinless life, his substitute sacrifice for us, then there is no reason to lack confidence. See, your performance will change, his will not. His is the same. So going back to the letter, then, John says that he’s written this message to secure our confidence in our eternal life. So how exactly does the letter do that? How does this letter that we’ve been given help secure and give us confidence? Because it’s full of challenges.

It’s full of spiritual diagnostic type assertions. How do those words make us more secure? Well, let’s take just one example. Okay, so this is from First John chapter three, verse ten. You might remember when we went through this portion. By this it is evident who are the children of God and who are the children of the devil. Whoever does not practice righteousness is not of God, nor is the one who does not love his brother. So what are we supposed to do with that verse to get to a place of confidence before God and have security in our eternal life? So John wrote this so that we would have confidence. How do we get there? You see what I’m doing here? Well, first of all, John is making a distinction between lifestyles. You can see that he’s making a distinction between patterns for life. One pursues righteousness, the other doesn’t. One wants to please God, the other doesn’t. One builds up love in us for other people. The other doesn’t care about other people. It holds on to grudges and bitterness and unforgiveness. And here’s what the believer does with that, okay? Because remember, he’s writing to Christians. He’s writing to believers. If your Christianity moves you to righteousness, okay, if your faith moves you to righteousness and to adopt a pattern of life that pleases God because of his incredible grace to you in Christ, that is evidence that you truly believe. Which should give you confidence in your eternal life.

If you have a pattern of sin in your life that’s ongoing and you know it, it’s there, it’s dragging you down, you struggle with it. It’s there. John said earlier in this letter, if we confess our sins, God is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. So if your sin drives you to confession and repentance and bringing it out and bringing it before the Lord and seeking forgiveness from people that you’ve wronged, and walking once again in the light of Christ, and you’re walking in righteousness despite the fact that you fail. Praise God. That is also evidence of your true belief in Jesus. And that should give you confidence. Even when you fail, if that’s where your heart and mind go, you should have confidence. John has pumped the brakes for you, okay? He’s gotten you back on the right track. He’s given you this letter so that the gospel that we believe in is the true gospel, that it’s not some false Christianity, some false bad news out there. And that’s where confidence is rooted. If you know that you believe the true gospel, your life should be characterized with rest and joy and peace in Christ.

Before I move on to the topic of prayer, let me just say, if that doesn’t describe you, if your spiritual life, if your life with the Lord is not marked by a steady trust in Jesus, then there’s something lacking in your understanding of the gospel. There’s something wrong there. I’m not saying that you don’t know Jesus, but there’s something deficient in your relationship with God and in your understanding of grace, and that usually is where it is. It’s usually in a misunderstanding of what grace is and what it does in our lives. Christ came to set us free of fear and doubt. That doesn’t mean that we won’t struggle with our spiritual state or wonder where God is, or wrestle with evil, but it does mean that we will ultimately rest in knowing the Lord. The Psalms teach us this pattern of wrestling that ends in confidence, right? God is good. The world is hard. God has overcome. I rest in him. That’s the pattern. We see it over and over and over throughout the Psalms, and it should be the pattern that we live our lives in as well. If you are constantly in a place of doubt and fear, and I’ve known people like that, if you’re just kind of constantly wrestling, if you lack confidence and joy in the good news of Jesus, something is deficient in your understanding of the gospel. And I invite you to bring that to one of your pastors.

Come talk to one of us. We would love to talk that out with you. Or go to your shepherd community leader, your small group leader. Talk to them about it. Be honest about it. You’re wrestling with this. Go to one of your elders. We’ve got 20 odd elders in this church. We’d love to talk with you about these things. We want to help lead you to a place of confidence and rest in Christ, because that’s how you’re meant to live. All right, now listen to what our confidence in Christ should do for our communication with God. And this is the confidence that we have toward him, that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us. And if we know that he hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have the requests that we have asked of him. One of the great benefits of a Christian life is just how boldly we are invited to approach God as our Father with our requests. The way this is described in Scripture is so brazen I might use the phrase unfettered access. We are given unfettered access to God when we have Christ. We wait in no line. We ask no permission. We don’t need to get some kind of clearance. And we certainly do not need anyone besides Jesus to go to God in our behalf, right? There’s one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.

Jesus is the only advocate that we need in prayer. Why is that? Well, it’s because it’s through Jesus that we have a spot in God’s family. We are not just invited to come into God’s throne room and sort of stand at a distance from him. When you come to faith in Jesus, you come to his family. You’re adopted into his family as a son or a daughter of your Father, your Heavenly Father. And if you have kids at home, you know that they have no trouble at all coming to you and asking for things, do they? They just assume they have an audience with you as soon as they open their mouths. Dad, can I get a ride? Mom, can you do my hair? Dad, can I eat the leftover pizza? Mom, can you pick me up after practice? Right. They just ask stuff. They just come. They just ask you for things. And in a healthy home, the kids just assume that they can make their needs and their requests known to mom and dad without fear. Because parents want to know what the kids need and they want to provide it if they can. Maybe not the pizza one, actually, I want to eat the leftover pizza, but you know what I’m saying, right? Like if we can, we want to. How much more then? Right? If that’s how it works in your family where things go wrong often, how much more in the family of God does our Heavenly Father invite us to confidently approach him in everything that we need? We see this throughout Scripture.

James tells us in his letter that anybody that lacks wisdom can go to God and ask for wisdom, and he will receive it. That’s James chapter one, verse five. Jesus said to his disciples in John 15, if you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. Paul in Philippians chapter four says this do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. You see, the Psalms are filled with requests to God for strength, for enemies to be defeated, for forgiveness, for assurance. Even doubts and fears are welcomed in prayer as long as we understand that by bringing these to the Lord, they are meant to re-establish our confidence in the Lord. One of the amazing benefits of trusting in Jesus is that you can go to God boldly in prayer, and it is assured that he hears you. That’s what John is telling us here, isn’t it? You’re assured that you have been heard by God. Now I want you to notice the qualifier there. Do you see the qualifier that he offers? It says that we have confidence that God hears us when we ask anything according to his will. And this little phrase, according to his will, trips a lot of people up. And ironically, if you misunderstand this phrase, it actually robs you of your confidence when you pray instead of giving you confidence when you pray. Here’s what I mean. If you read this to mean that your prayer has to align with God’s future predictive, mysterious will, then you will be forever locked in doubt as to whether God heard your prayer. Because remember, John is not saying that we won’t get the thing that we want if it doesn’t align with God’s will. He says God won’t even hear us, meaning he will not listen to what we have to say. So if you interpret this to mean that you have to pray in alignment with God’s plans for the future, you can’t really ever have any confidence that God hears your prayers. Do you know how many places in the Bible we are told to figure out God’s future plans for us or for the world around us? Exactly zero times. No times. We are never told anywhere in the Bible, we are never told that we have to figure out what God plans to do, so that we can make sure that we do what he wants, including pray. And yet so many people, so many people are just locked into a paralysis spiritually because they’re they’reafraid to make a choice that would move them away from God’s will.

I’m sure you’ve heard this before. They’re so afraid that they’re going to move away from God’s will. I see this especially among young people. Young people who really love the Lord. Okay? They do. They love the Lord, but they got so many choices in front of them, right? As you get older, some of the choices go away. But when you’re young, you get a lot of choices that you have to make. And these young people, they love the Lord. They want to do the right thing, but they’re so scared to do something outside of God’s future will for their lives that they end up doing nothing instead of of confidence and a bold approach to life. Because of their faith in a sovereign God, they end up in this analysis paralysis, trying to predict an outcome they were never meant to know or commanded by God to find out. They say, should I take this job? Do you know what my first question back when someone says, should I take this job? I say, do you want to take this job? Do you want to do the job? Is that something you’d want to do? It’s not? Has God shown you? If it’s not that question, do you want to take this job? And they say, well, I want to, but what if that’s just me wanting the job and not God wanting it for me? Oh, I’ll tell you what, with that line of reasoning, you can talk yourself out of almost anything.

Did you know that? You can talk yourself out of almost anything and ironically, feel more spiritual while you do it. This happens a lot, by the way, with the one. Do you know the one? The one? The one person on this planet that God has for me to marry? The one! They say I want to get married, but what if he’s not the one? Listen, if you believe that God is sovereign, then that means that you believe there is one person that God has for you. Do you honestly think that a sovereign God would place the one person he has for you on the other side of the planet, where you will never meet him? Do you think that? Do you think a good and sovereign God might bring that person into your life at some point? Do you both love Jesus? Do you want to get married? Do you want to honor him with your family? Then get married. Just do it. Just get married. What do you need? A beam of light? It’s like, well, Kyle, actually there was a beam of light, but I thought that was God testing me. Look, John is telling us that in order for our prayers to be heard by God, they must align with God’s will.

But he does not say – he’s not talking about God’s future will for you. He’s referring to God’s revealed will. What he has shown us he wants us to live like. I want you to write this verse down and I want you to memorize it if you can. It’s Deuteronomy 29:29. The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law. God has given His word. He’s given his scriptures to guide us. Whatever God has not revealed, including the future, that’s for God. That’s his. That’s for him to know. But what God has revealed is intended to guide us and all of our future generations are to follow along behind us in it, right? It’s his revealed will that must shape our prayers. In other words, we should be praying for those things that are righteous and just. We should be praying for those things that align with Jesus, our King, and align with the values of the Kingdom of God. When we pray for things that align with holiness and righteousness, God-honoring things, we can know that we are heard. That’s what John’s telling us. God hears you. When we pray for things that dishonor God, we can be sure that God is not listening. He doesn’t care about those prayers. This is why we need to think deeply as Christians about what we pray for.

For instance, we don’t pray for riches. We don’t pray for riches. We pray for the humility to be good stewards of whatever God has given us. Why? Why do we pray like that? Well, it’s because God gives us what we need. But the love of money leads to all sorts of evil. The same money that could be used as a good gift for God’s glory can also be turned into a God-dishonoring idol. And if we’re asking God for tremendous wealth, there’s a pretty good chance our hearts are already idolizing it. We have to know our own hearts. That’s what John is saying to us this morning. We’ve got to know our own hearts’ motivations when it comes to our prayers. We have to ask, is what I’m praying for in alignment with God’s Word? And is it intended for God’s glory? John says when our prayers are aligned with God’s Word, not only are they heard, but we can be sure that we have received the requests that we have asked for. And this is where prayer for me gets a bit mysterious. A lot of times we request things from God that align with His Word and are motivated properly in our hearts. And God uses that prayer to accomplish exactly what we asked. I’ve asked the Lord to save friends of mine and those friends come to faith in Jesus.

I’ve prayed for things that my family needs and God always comes through, sometimes in very surprising ways. Missionaries pray for protection and they receive it. Churches pray for resources, and God comes through. In all of these things, God gets the glory and it is tremendous when you get to see God answer prayer; it is a blessing to us when we get to say, I’m sure that if you follow Jesus for any length of time, you’ve seen God answer prayer in pretty amazing ways in your life. John is telling us that we can boldly approach the Lord with confidence and be assured that we are heard, and that God will fulfill our requests when they glorify him. But here’s a question I think that is very challenging for a passage like this. What if we don’t receive the requests we ask of God? What if we don’t get what we’re asking for? There are times when we do exactly what John describes here, but for some reason we don’t see the result the way we thought we would. This is not just true of our experience, by the way. This is true of all Christians, including people in Scripture, including, in fact, Jesus himself. Jesus prays in the Garden of Gethsemane the night that he’s arrested. Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me. He’s referring to the cross, the cup of God’s wrath that’s going to be poured out. He’s saying, if there’s another way to do this, let’s do it the other way.

Nevertheless, he says, not my will, but yours be done. Did you know that right after that it says that an angel came to him and appeared when he prayed. And we think, oh, great, the angel is here to save him. Nope. It says the angel was there to strengthen him, to get him through the cross, not to take it away from him, to get him through it. Paul prayed three times that God would take away something in his life that was bothering him a lot. He called it his thorn in his flesh. We don’t know exactly what it was. Could have been some sort of a medical problem that he was dealing with, we’re not sure, but God wouldn’t take it away. Three times he prayed, he said. God wouldn’t take it away. In fact, God simply explained to Paul that the thorn was meant to show him how weak he is, so that he would recognize that he needed to be reliant on God’s strength alone. In both cases, the prayer was perfectly acceptable to God. It was heard. God even responded to the prayer. He just didn’t give Paul or even Jesus what they were requesting. Their perfectly acceptable prayer bumped up against God’s plan in a way that it could not be fulfilled in the way that they asked. And how are we to make sense of that? How are we to make sense of that in light of what John has said here about God’s response to our prayers? Well, this is where the future will of God does come in.

We are not told to figure it out. We are not told to even walk in line with it necessarily, but we are told that God has a plan. And from our limited, finite perspective, we can only be faithful with what God has told us to do. So what has God told us to do in our prayer life? Particularly when we don’t see the answers that we hope for? Well, the first thing to do is to persist in prayer. Persist. Pray for it again. Pray for it over and over again. Psalm 40, verse one says, I waited patiently for the Lord. He inclined to me and heard my cry. See, God is building steadfast dedication in us when we pray. It’s part of our discipleship. It’s part of the way we grow in Christ is to consistently go back. I trust you, God. I trust you, God. This is what I need, but I trust you, God. In Luke chapter 18, Jesus described going to God over and over again with our prayers, like a woman going and demanding justice from an unrighteous judge. And she badgered him and finally got the justice that she needed. God may be building in us a persistent prayer life. That might be the reason you’re not seeing exactly what you’re hoping for.

And it might be that eventually he will bring about what we’re asking for. But still, what if he doesn’t? What if he doesn’t? What if our good and righteous requests go to God and we never see them fulfilled as we requested them. Well, here’s where I am very hesitant to offer rock-solid theological answers, because the truth is, I don’t know. I don’t know why. I can take you through a list of different things that we can talk about that might be the reason. But the truth is, I don’t know. And according to Scripture, we can’t always know. The secret things belong to God, it says. But I will offer two things that I know to be true that help me when I bump up against this difficult topic. And the first is simply to look to the way that Jesus prayed in his perfect alignment with the Father. Okay. If you want to know how to pray, look at Jesus. He’s praying perfectly. He requests that if there is any other way to accomplish the mission other than going to the cross, let that happen. Okay. He says it right out. Please God, if there is another way to make it happen, let’s make it happen a different way. But then he immediately prays, but not my will, but yours be done. And he requests that we bring before God is by definition our will. It’s coming from us.

This is what we would like to see. We should hold our will as tentatively as Jesus held his will in his humanity. So while from our perspective, our prayer request may be perfectly aligned with God’s revealed will, it may not be aligned with God’s sovereign plan. And we have to approach prayer knowing that. Okay. I would even encourage you as you pray boldly, and you should, for the things that you believe would be good and right and God-glorifying in the world, boldly approach God with these things. But I would even encourage you to say the words, but not my will, but yours be done. And the other truth that helps me with this mystery is this. As good and wonderful as my request may be, it may not be what is best within God’s even more wonderful plan. It may not be. And we know that for those who love God, all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose. Those are the famous words of the Apostle Paul from Romans 8:28. See, like an artist who already knows in his mind what the picture will look like. God is painting his plan on the canvas of history, and his plan includes what brings him the most glory and what brings me my highest good. And if what I ask for in prayer doesn’t fit his plan, I want his plan. I want whatever he has designed. Not what I have requested. Would you pray with me now?

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