Prayer is not for the purpose of getting God to help us, the purpose of prayer is to get us in line with what God is about to do. Prayer is God’s invitation to enter His throne room so He can spread His agenda over our hearts. To see this in action, there is nothing better than to observe the prayer life of Jesus.
At the center of Jesus’s prayer life was the fact that He sought the Father’s purposes, activities, and His heart. Jesus sought the Father’s heart not just for information, but for personal instruction as well. In Hebrew 5:7 we read that when Jesus prayed to His Father in the days of His flesh, He “was heard because of His reverence toward God (His godly fear, His piety).” Other translations say, “because of His reverent submission”; and “because of His reverence.”
This passage makes it clear that Jesus was heard because of the submissive attitude of His heart toward the Father; He had already completely given His life to the Father’s will. God always reads the heart when we pray and He always knows our relationship with Him as we pray, and He responds to us according to that relationship!
The heart of the Son was to learn His assignment from the Father and to reverently surrender to it. He had set His heart to obey even before He prayed. Jesus entered prayer with godly fear and reverent submission toward God’s will with a sense of divine accountability and this submissive heart deserved the ear of the Father to the Son! Luke 22:41 “He knelt down and prayed!”
What is your attitude as you come to God in prayer? Do you find yourself arguing with the Lord when God gives you an assignment? Does ‘self’ raise up in you to rebel when you hear the word submit? If so, then do not expect God to hear your prayer or answer your prayers. God does not give a large assignment or a challenging assignment to someone that has a heart that is not submissive. God knows us and He has already determined the answer even before we pray!
Have you resolved that no matter what God reveals to you and requests you to do through prayer, that your answer will be an unqualified ‘YES’ even before He shows you what it is? This is exactly what we see in Jesus’ reverent submission. The Father knew this and was always ready to hear and answer the prayers of the Son. For Jesus, prayer was not just simply talking to the Father, it involved a deep, abiding sense of reverent submission to the Father. Therefore, every time Jesus entered the Father’s presence, the Father opened the Son’s understanding to what the Father was doing, so that Jesus the Son could immediately adjust His life to it, and the Father could continue to accomplish His purposes for the world through Him.
Through His prayer life, Jesus always knew that Father’s intentions. The prayers of Jesus released His life to the Father’s will! We will look at some of the evidence of this in the next lesson!