When we Pray to God we can Pray in Confidence! (John 11)

If you remember when we began  talking about John chapter 11 I told you this really starts out as a prayer.  The sisters of Lazarus send a message to Christ saying your friend is sick come quickly.  This may not sound like a prayer but it is, you see they unlike us today, had Christ the person walking with them, all the people that asked Christ to heal, were asking  God in the flesh.  We don’t have that same type of ability because Christ is alive but He is living with God the Father in Heaven.  In essence we speak to God through the Holy Sprite.  Paul tells us in Romans 8, “Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes^{ } with sighs too deep for words.(vs26)  Is that not great to know that when we pray to God not only does he hear it but His spirit knows what we need in our weakness when we do not even know how to pray.  We see this in Chapter eleven of John.

We see Martha going out to greet Christ as He comes, her first words to Him are, “Now Martha said to Jesus, “Lord, if You had been here, my brother would not have died. ^ But even now I know that whatever You ask of God, God will give You.”(21-22)  I love Martha’s immediate response, if you had been here only sooner.  If you had acted sooner, if you would only done this, had you acted when I came to you.  Are these not the same reactions we have sometimes when we pray?  We look and see the physical world around and forget that God created it all, we forget that there is a spiritual world out there.  We pray with little confidence, because we fail to understand that our God is bigger than what are eyes can see.  We begin to listen to the voices around that say, your God is not strong enough.  It reminds me of a King that ruled Judah named Hezekiah.  Hezekiah was a Godly King and he loved God, one day the Assyrians came by and they wanted to take over Judah.  So the commander of the Assyrian troops sent messages to the people of Judah saying you cannot put faith in your God for no one can deliver you from us, give up.  To make a long story short God defeated the Assyrian Army, you can read all about it in 2^nd Chronicles chapter 32.

Do you notice the second phrase that Martha says to Christ, “But even now I know that whatever You ask of God, God will give You.”  We who have been in the church for our whole lives and have heard hundreds of messages on this chapter may have forgotten those words. They are words of encouragement though.  So many times we pray to God, and in the back of our minds if we are truly being honest with ourselves we are saying, what if God can’t do it?  We have to stop praying that way, we need to begin to think what happens when God answers this prayer with a yes.  How much is going to change when God begins to work in our lives because instead of praying small weak prayers we are praying for God to do mighty miracles in our churches.  All of the sudden that person you have been praying for to come to Church shows up and accepts Christ, and now you are worried because you realize they know some really embarrassing stories about you, and you are praying for something else in their life.