The Good, the Right, and the Difference

As I knelt to pray this morning, I found myself praying, "Not Your will, Father, but mine be done." Of course, I wasn't that overt, and had the Spirit not chided me otherwise, I would have felt perfectly justified in my prayer. You see, I wasn't praying for anything consummately selfish, or self-satisfying. Rather, I was praying "good" things, and therein lies the rub, as they say.

So often, we pray for, hope for, desire, and effect the "good" that we presume must be God's will. How many of us would have prayed for young Joseph to have gone through all that he did (Genesis 37-40), only to have it later undermined by his own statement, "you (my brothers) meant evil against me, but God meant it for good" (Gen. 50:20). How true it is that "the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express" (Romans 8:26).

Are your groanings your own? I fear mine often are. How can I pray anything less than the Lord's will as expressed in Scripture, and think that my desires and my good intentions are somehow superlative to His?

I would challenge you, then, to check yourself as you pray, and not to be so hasty to pray for the easing of pain, the eradication of tragedy, or the erasure of all that seems uncomfortable and inconvenient. Think about it: While you and I may enjoy a certain discernment between what is right and wrong, can we honestly say, in our sinful depravity, that we best know what should be done in such situations? Can we presume upon God's omni-everything, and pray assuredly for all to be well? I dare say not!

I leave you with two quotes from men brighter than I:
"Beware in your prayers, above everything else, of limiting God, not only by
unbelief, but by fancying that you know what He can do. Expect unexpected
things, ‘above all that we ask or think'" (Andrew Murray).

"We are urgent about the body; He is about the soul. We call for present
comforts; He considers our everlasting rest. And therefore when He sends not
the very things we ask, He hears us by sending greater than we can ask or think" (Richard Cecil).