Blind Prayer

I was thinking about prayer recently, and had an opportunity to talk about it with a brother in Christ a couple of Sunday's ago over lunch. In the conversation we delved into the very nature and focus of prayer itself, especially how it should be framed when praying for those who are not saved, whether they be strangers that we are witnessing to on the streets, or people in our own families who have not been redeemed.

One of the big revelations for me, and a very convicting one at that, was the fact that when we are praying for the salvation of a family member (this is not necessarily true when we are praying for a stranger) our prayers have a tendency to become focused on their salvation for our own sakes (because we love them and don't want them to go to hell). But the tendency of these prayers is to ask that God would change His plans and bring them into His plan of salvation somehow anyway. What we need to remember, as difficult as it can be, is that God NEVER EVER changes His plans. They have been established from before the very foundation of time, and He is not going to change them...that is not in His nature. We also need to remember that if He does not intend to save them, their judgment is just as much in accordance with his will and glorification as might be their salvation.

I know that that concept may be very objectionable to some of you and so I want to be sensitive. The root of that objection you may be feeling stems from a concept relating to God's sovereignty in relation to predestination and the nature of sin, something that I hope some day soon to deal with on this very blog, but that will take up a whole different post some other time.

For now, I have completely altered my method of praying for those not saved, and was incredibly humbled, though not terribly surprised, by the fact that even my attempts to pray for something I felt was in accordance with God's will was tainted by the effects of my own selfishness. I allowed greed and pride to cloud my vision of God's plan, and even asked for something that may very well be outside of God's will without any consideration to the fact. Think of that for a moment, every time I prayed for the salvation of a loved one I was insulting God Himself by asking Him to act contrary to His own nature.

Brothers and sisters, be alert lest you too fall into the same snare in your own prayer lives as I did.