Text: ‘Now this is the confidence that we have in Him, that if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us. And if we know that He hears us, whatever we ask, we know that we have the petitions that we have asked of Him’ – 1 John 5:14-15 Thought: ‘Now this is the confidence that we have in Him’. Is that our experience? Praying with the confidence that it will be heard and answered? Jesus said, ‘If you ask anything in My name, I will do it’ – John 14:14.’Until now you have asked nothing in My name. Ask, and you will receive, that your joy may be full’ – John 16:24. What more encouragement do we need? So why is prayer all too often last on a Christian’s list of priorities? In Part 1, we looked at: 1. The Need to Pray 2. The Neglect of Prayer 3. A New Prayer Now to conclude this teaching on Answered Prayer, consider the following: 4. The ‘Now’ of Praying Faith declares “I have it now” even if there is a delay before the answer comes. Moving into our new home, there was no phone line installed. So we placed the order on January 14th but were told...
Learn MoreText: ‘Now this is the confidence that we have in Him, that if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us. And if we know that He hears us, whatever we ask, we know that we have the petitions that we have asked of Him’ – 1 John 5:14-15 Thought: ‘Now this is the confidence that we have in Him’. Is that our experience? Praying with the confidence that it will be heard and answered? Jesus said, ‘If you ask anything in My name, I will do it’ – John 14:14.’Until now you have asked nothing in My name. Ask, and you will receive, that your joy may be full’ – John 16:24. What more encouragement do we need? So why is prayer all too often last on a Christian’s list of priorities? 1. The Need to Pray A ministers’ conference was discussing how much time should be spent in prayer each day. A famous evangelist astounded everyone by stating that he rarely spent thirty minutes in prayer. Then he added, “I rarely let thirty minutes go by without praying. That was the secret of his success, bringing God into every aspect of his life. The Bible instructs Christians to pray regularly; for Kings and ruling...
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Text: ‘Therefore do not be unwise, but understand what the will of the Lord is’ – Ephesians 5:16. Thought: My father indicated that after he died everything was to be sold and divided equally amongst his seven children. That was his promise to us. However, after his death, we all wanted to be sure his promise held true because a will can always be changed while a person is still alive. The inept solicitor firstly sent us a copy of someone else’s will. That was bad enough as a breach of confidence, but it had no real interest to us as our names were not written in it. Then he sent us two pages instead of three. Again this was frustrating as we needed to know everything Dad had instructed. At last we got a full copy of the will and could clearly see how we were beneficiaries. The Book of Ephesians records six times the words, ‘His will’. Each one helps to give us a fuller meaning as to the rights and privileges we have in Christ. 1. By the will of God – 1:1 Paul’s past, like ours would surely disqualify us from doing anything for God. Yet God’s grace transforms us from sinners into saints, equipped...
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Text: God is not a man, so He does not lie. He is not human, so He does not change His mind. Has He ever spoken and failed to act? Has He ever promised and not carried it through? – Numbers 23:19 NLT. Thought: At long last we are settling into our new home after the sale of our previous house took nearly 12 months to complete. We had been let down by the promises of a prospective buyer who couldn’t deliver on what they had said. Now there was the small matter of having a phone line and Broadband installed. Our initial order with a network provider was met with an installation date for 5 weeks later! No amount of negotiation could bring it forward. It was frustrating sitting in the car on a cold, wet, windy day trying to pick up a WiFi signal in order to deal with urgent emails. We just had to wait! As that day neared, emails and texts began to arrive, “The engineer is coming”. Sure enough, on the set day he arrived but he was quickly gone, announcing there was a fault on the line and he did not have the equipment to rectify it. He left promising that it would...
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Text: ‘Seeing then that we have a great High Priest … Jesus the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession. For we do not have a High Priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but was in all points tempted as we are, yet without sin. Let us therefore come boldly to the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy and find grace to help in time of need’ – Hebrews 4:14-16 Thought: Jesus was tempted and tested in all points. Thankfully we don’t have to go through such a severe testing, for he did it on our behalf. However, every Christian will face tests, trials and tragedies. Some are God-designed to show off his grace and our faith. Others are engineered by the devil to bring about our downfall but God can intervene as Joseph could testify, ‘You meant evil against me, but God meant it for good’ – Gen 50:20. The book of Daniel illustrates this clearly. Talk about living life on the edge! Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach and Abed-Nego it seems, were always within a hairbreadth of death. Firstly they had been taken prisoner to Babylon, although they could so easily have been killed in the siege of Jerusalem. Life goes well for a...
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