Imperial Valley Christian Center

If you only read what the Bible had to say about prayer, i.e. without commentary, or tradition, you would, undoubtedly, conclude that God wants to answer our prayers. You would conclude that prayer is in fact, a sure thing, a certainty. You would conclude that answered prayer was guaranteed. Here, try it and you'll see what I mean, Matthew 7:7-8, Psalms 91:14-15, Matthew 21:22, Matthew 18:19, John 16:24, 1 John 3:22, 1 John 5:14.

And yet we seem to have great difficulty getting our prayers answered. Then, when we fail to receive the answer, in order make ourselves feel better about our lack of results, we invent all manner of theological or philosophical explanations for our prayer failures.

You can't know God's will.
You just never know what God will do.
It must not be God's will.
God is sovereign so it's wrong for us to try and hold him to his promises.
The promises related to prayer just apply to spiritual things.
God always answers but sometimes his answer is no.
God always answers but in his own time.

But none of these answers satisfies. And none of them provide what we really want, i.e. the asked for thing.

Why aren't our prayers answered?

Before moving on to the next point I'm taking this program to review what I've been teaching for the past several months. That's pretty good I think, distilling 18 months of teaching into 28 minutes. Here's the outline of that 18 months of teaching:

1. Before Jesus came Satan was the king of the world. The world, mankind were under his dominion. The Bible sometimes calls Satan's kingdom the reign of death or the power of darkness.

2. Jesus came with the good news that the time was fulfilled, the reign of God, the Kingdom of God, the

Here's more on Jesus reigning through the Church. As I was teaching this same series in Spanish, for our Spanish broadcasts, I came to understand it better myself. Here I discuss how the prayers in Ephesians 1, prayers Paul prayed for the church at Ephesus, are actually prayers that the Ephesians might come to know what God has created them, and us, and all Christians, to be.

The prayer is, I'm pretty sure, a Hebrew parallelism, i.e. Paul repeats the same idea in different ways. When we read it in English we tend to think he's talking about three different things. Here's the prayer and I've numbered the three items which I believe are parallels.

Ephesians 1:16-23
16 Cease not to give thanks for you, making mention of you in my prayers;
17 That the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give unto you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of him: 18 The eyes of your understanding being enlightened; that ye may know

Here Paul is praying for the Ephesians, (It applies to us as well though.), to know something. Why doesn't he just tell us what he wants us to know? Why doesn't he just explain it to us? Well in some sense he is telling us, but he doesn't want us to know it with our intellect but in heart, our spirit. He wants us to receive a revelation of it. He wants us to KNOW IT.

What is it he want us to know:

1. what is the hope of his calling, and

2. what the riches of the glory of his inheritance in the saints, 19 And

3. what is the exceeding greatness of his power to us-ward who believe,

When we read this in English we tend to think that he is talking about three separate things. When however, we understand that Hebrew is full of parallelisms like this, in other words the same idea repeated in different ways for emphasis, it occurs to us that this might be one of those. And I think it is. Paul is repeating the same idea in three different ways. He wants us to get it.

In the first clause he prays for us to know what God has called us to be. What the hope, the purpose, the end state, of his calling us is? Then he prays for us to know what is his inheritance in the saints. Not what our inheritance is but what is his inheritance. "His" means God's. What do we become to God as the result of our becoming saints? What ever it is it involves a lot of glory. "…the riches of the glory," Paul says. Whatever it is that we become to God, it is a very, very, very, glorious thing. Finally he prays that we would know, "what is the exceeding greatness of his power to usward who believe."

The first thousand time I read this I thought he was talking about the power that God makes available to us