Mark 11:22-25 — 22 And Jesus answered them, “Have faith in God. 23 Truly, I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and thrown into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says will come to pass, it will be done for him. 24 Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours. 25 And whenever you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against anyone, so that your Father also who is in heaven may forgive you your trespasses.
Based on what Jesus has been teaching in Mark 11:22-25, there’s obviously a way that our prayers can lack faith and purity, but there’s also a way our prayers can lack the right content, meaning our prayers are not lining up with God’s will. Why do we not constantly ask God to do his will in our prayers? Here are a few reasons:
A. We are naive or ignorant as to God’s design for prayer; that God won’t accomplish his predetermined plan apart from prayer;
B. We have skewed priorities thinking that our comfort is more important than Gods will. Our prayers tend to be consumed with accomplishing our will and not used to conform our will to Gods will;
C. We are living in entitlement assuming that because we are such good people God automatically owes us the blessings of his Word;
D. We are fatalistic, thinking that since God is completely sovereign over every detail of our lives, what’s the point of prayer?
E. We are unbelieving and do not as of yet have a relationship with God through Christ.
We must realize that we need far more help from God to obey him in our circumstances than we need our circumstances to change. Nevertheless, we can have complete confidence that God will always glorify his name and supply us what we need to do his will. So, if our prayer content is mainly centered on the temporal things of life, then our prayer life needs a major overhaul in order to possess the power of God in our lives. The main takeaway from this text is clear—A fruitful life is one which possess faith and confident, dependent prayer. Do your prayers require divine, spiritual power to be accomplished? If not, we lack faith and the result is fruitlessness. So let’s be in the habit of pleading with God to do in us what only he can do.