God's Will Revealed

Charles Spurgeon said, "When your will is God's will, you will have your will." Spurgeon understood that our will should submit to God's will. Prayer says to God,"Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven" (Matthew 6:10).

God's will is revealed in the Bible. Holy Scripture is God's revealed will."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 he hears us, whatever we ask, we know that we have the petitions that we have asked of Him"(1 John 5:14-15).

God's will is revealed as good, acceptable, and perfect (Romans 12:2). Trying to manipulate God in prayer to have it our way is a blasphemous thought. Seeking a formula in prayer to always get what we want becomes sin. It misses the mark concerning God's good will. 

Effective prayer is not about our will. It's about God's revealed will. As Spurgeon said,"When your will is God's will, you will have your will."True prayer submits to God's good, acceptable, and perfect will. That's the key to effective prayer.

God's revealed will is God's glory (1 Corinthians 10:31). He does all things to the praise of his glory (Ephesians 1:6, 12, 14). When our will becomes God's will, we desire the glory of God above all else (John 11:40). Pray to God's glory in all things. 

What Is Living Faith?

Living faith is active and not passive. Living faith works. It does God's will and obeys God's word in the Bible. Living faith is God working through us. God can do anything that He chooses to do without us. However, God has chosen to work through us. Living by faith does more than talk. "As the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is dead also" (James 2:26).

Don't think that faith does nothing, and depends upon God to do everything. The Bible teaches that we are laborers together with God (1 Corinthians 3:9). It is God's will for faith to work through us. You may put a glove on your hand to do the work before you. The glove does not do the work alone, neither can it. The hand works through the glove. So, living faith is God working through us.

Dead faith says, "There is nothing that we can do. What will be, will be. Nothing we can do will make any difference." Living faith says otherwise, "I will do the word of God. He has put it in my heart. He is working through me to the praise of his glory. I am a doer of the word." The Bible says, "But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves" (James 1:22).

Maybe you are in a place where you are asking God to do something about it. To the contrary, you could pray this way. "God, what would you have me to do?" Faith does the word of God. It rises up to do something about it. Living faith is God working in you to do his will (Philippians 2:12-13).

One Sacrifice for Sins

In Bible days, when men entered into covenant, they made promises to each other sworn with an oath. Then, they sacrificed an animal. It was a blood covenant. The animal was cut in half. The men walked between the two halves. Symbolically they were saying, if I keep not my promises, may I be slain as this animal.

Jesus was crucified as the sacrifice of the everlasting covenant. He was the covenant sacrifice at the cross. When Jesus died, the veil of the Temple was torn in half, from the top to the bottom (Matthew 27:51). The glory of God departed from the Temple. The old covenant was finished. The new covenant had come (Hebrews 10:9). The resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ proved it. We enter the everlasting covenant by faith in the Gospel of Christ.

"But this Man, after He had offered one sacrifice for sins forever, sat down at the right hand of God" (Hebrews 10:12). A sacrifice is one who dies in the place of others. There is one and only one covenant sacrifice for our sins. Jesus Christ was crucified to take away all our sins (1 John 1:7).

The Old Testament sacrifices were never final. They were offered again and again, year after year (Hebrews 10:11). They pointed toward the one and only sacrifice that takes away sin. They pointed to Christ crucified as the one sacrifice forever. When Jesus was crucified, he said, "It is finished"(John 19:30). The old covenant was finished. The new and everlasting covenant is forever!