Odyssey of an Albatross: Prayer Secret #2: The Will of God

Continuing the Prayer Secret Series by Michael Bradly. In Prayer Secret #1 - establishing an intimate, personal relationship with God the Father will get you into the door with Him. It will get you to the point where God will now listen and consider each of your prayer requests.

Prayer Secret #2 is the next step when approaching God with a specific prayer request. This one seems to be so easy to grasp, but many Christians keep violating this basic common sense principle. Prayer Secret #2 is making sure that your prayer request always lines up with the will of God for your life.

I have a pet saying when it comes to this principle. The saying is "Father always knows best." God always knows what is best for you in all situations - you do not! God’s knowledge and wisdom is always perfect - yours is not! God knows what all of your future will hold for you - you do not! Too many Christians are constantly asking God for things that He does not really want them to have. Here is the main Scripture verse where this basic principle is being very clearly stated:

"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) Interpretation - God hears your prayer only if the prayer request is in His will for you and your life. If it is not, then the above verse is implying that He will not hear your prayer - and thus will not grant the prayer request.

This is where each Christian has to really get a grip on any specific prayer requests they are presenting to God. If God comes back letting you know that what you are asking for is not in His perfect will for you and your life, then you have to let it go, trust that God knows best and move on. When you approach God the Father with a specific prayer request - this is very serious business. You are asking God to bring something to you that normally would not be coming your way. You are asking God to supernaturally bring or allow this request to come your way through Him.

So the first thing you have to do before approaching God on your specific prayer request is to make sure that your prayer request is in His perfect will for you and your life. There are several ways you can do this.

1. Analyze Your Prayer Request Sometimes it is quite obvious that the request is needed and in His will for you. You don’t even need to pray about whether or not it is in His will for you. The answer is already obvious and you can go ahead and shoot your prayer through. An example would be is that maybe you have just lost your job. You now have to go to God and ask Him to lead you to the next job. You already know this request is in His will for you because you need a job to survive and put food on the table. This is quite obvious, and you can now go ahead and start pressing in and praying to God that He lead you as to where He will want you to go next. Sometimes the request is not so obvious as to whether or not it is God's will for you. Maybe you are dating someone and you would really like to marry this person. However, God has not voiced His opinion on the issue yet. The way to properly handle this is to go to God and ask His perfect will on the situation - whether or not you should marry this person. If you really love this person and really want to marry him or her, the best way to word your prayer is to tell God you would really like to marry this person - but only if it be in His perfect will for you to do so. This way you are on safe ground with God in the way that you have worded the request. You have voiced your opinion on the matter - but you have also let Him know that He knows better than you do as to who you should be marrying in this life, and that you will not marry this person unless it is in His perfect will for you to do so.

2. The Holy Spirit The other way to approach this is to simply ask the Holy Spirit if you should be approaching God with the prayer request. I believe that the Holy Spirit knows most, if not all of the time, whether or not God will answer your specific prayer request. You can save yourself a lot of travailing and praying by getting the Holy Spirit’s answer before you waste your time and God’s time by praying on a certain issue. For those of you who have established a good inner connection with the Holy Spirit, the above is rather easy to do. You simply tap into Him, ask His opinion and most of the time you’ll pick it up with an "inner knowing" from Him as to whether or not you should proceed any further in approaching God with the request. For those of you who have not yet established this kind of inner connection with the Holy Spirit, you can still go ahead and ask Him, and He will somehow get through to you as to whether or not you should be praying to God on a particular issue.

Here are 3 short powerful stories that will really illustrate the importance of making sure that all of your prayer requests always line up with the perfect will of God for your life.

STORY #1 - About 10 years ago, a friend of mine told me this story and I will never forget it. One of her girlfriends had been dating a man for about two years. Everything was going great. She got to the point that she was now wanting to marry the man. She went before God and started praying, asking God if she should marry him. God came back with a one-line answer and the answer was "He is sufficient for now." This obviously was not good enough for her. She kept pressing God for an answer as to whether or not she should marry this man. God came back with no further answers every time she asked. After about 6 months of continuing to ask God for His opinion on this matter and not getting any additional answers, she decided to make her own decision and marry the man without waiting for God’s confirmation or approval. Six months into the marriage relationship, this man's dark side all of a sudden started to emerge. He started to physically abuse her. The beatings got so bad that she had no other alternative but to divorce the man for fear he was going to end up killing her. I have found from personal experience that whenever God is silent on a specific prayer request, this means to hold your position and do nothing until you receive further word from Him as to whether or not you should move in the direction that you are looking to move into.

STORY #2 - Here is another perfect example on this. Another one of my friends was dating a man for about 1 year. She too started asking God if she should marry him. She got no answer from God for at least 3 months. Again, she got impatient waiting for God to answer her. She went ahead and married the man without any leading from the Holy Spirit to do so and no confirming activity from the Lord that she should marry the man. One year into the marriage, she found out that her husband had been having an affair behind her back with one of his secretaries during the entire year that they had been married! They were divorced shortly thereafter.

Do you see what happens when you go against God's perfect will on a specific request? Total death can result.

In this case, both girls saw their marriages end up in divorce because they were not patient enough to wait for God’s answer on their specific requests! They were both praying for marriages that obviously were not in the perfect will of God for their lives. This is why I say God always knows best. God knew the one man had a dark side that was going to emerge once he married the girl. He knew the other man would not stay faithful once he got married to the second girl. Neither girl could have known these things were going to occur. But God does know all these things and what our futures will hold for us - and this is why your prayer requests have always got to be within His perfect will for your life or the consequences could be disastrous like they were in these two stories!

STORY #3 - The third story is my own personal story. About 15 years ago, I was dating a girl for about one year when she got diagnosed with cancer. The doctors told her she had a 50/50 chance of making it. She immediately started chemo and the rest of the appropriate cancer treatments. I took her to see Joyce Meyer for a healing, along with some of the other ministers in our area who were supposed to have the gift of healing operating through their ministries. None of the ministers were able to bring any type of healing to my girlfriend. I then started to try and pray myself to see if I could get God to heal her. I will never forget what happened when I did. As I approached God the Father with the request, I felt the Holy Spirit put up a shield between me and God the Father. I initially ignored the shields and continued to try and pray through to God for this request. As I started praying the appropriate words, I saw my words travel about two feet in front of my mouth and then drop straight to the ground. I could tell my words were not "hitting" God. I then felt the Holy Spirit start to literally pull back on my words as I was trying to release them to God. There was no anointing on my words. I had no wind at my back from the Holy Spirit to be approaching God with this request. I was really straining in trying to get my words to reach God the Father. After about the 5th or 6th time when trying to pray to God about this and picking up the above resistance from the Holy Spirit each time I tried to pray, I immediately stopped and asked God if I should even bother to continue to pray on this issue due to the resistance I seemed to be picking up from the Holy Spirit. I then received an immediate answer. I was given a strong knowing that God did not want to heal her and that it was His will that she be brought home to Him - and if I continued to try and pray for this healing against His will, that I would just be expending useless energy. He made it loud and clear that His mind was already made up on the issue and that I was to let it go. He then conveyed to me as to why He was not going to consider healing her. Long story short, my girlfriend was 40 years old when she came down with the cancer. 8 years prior to this, she got diagnosed with the beginning stages of emphysema. The doctors told her that if she did not quit smoking, that she would end up in a wheelchair and on an oxygen tent on a permanent basis. For whatever reason, she would not quit smoking and she continued to smoke for another 8 years. The emphysema was starting to break into the next level and she still would not quit. She then broke out with the cancer. God made it very clear to me that He gave her 8 years to clean up her act, to heed the warnings from the doctors and to quit smoking. Our bodies are a gift from God and He expects us to do the best we can with them - especially in the area of taking proper care of them. When she refused to take proper care of her body by giving up smoking, God decided He was not going to heal her and that she would have to be brought home much earlier than He would have really liked. I believe to this day that had my girlfriend quit smoking 8 years before coming down with this cancer, that there would have been a very good chance that God would have healed her of the cancer. But because she did not take proper care of her body, God had no natural desire to want to heal her when this emergency presented itself. And God gave her plenty of time to get her act together before the cancer hit - 8 years! I did not tell my girlfriend what I felt God had conveyed to me. I did not want to cause her to lose hope in the event I had not properly heard from God on this issue. She tried several other healing ministries, along with continuing all of the cancer treatments, but nothing worked. She died one year later after getting diagnosed with the cancer.

Conclusion 1. As you can see from the above three stories, you can save yourself a lot of blood, sweat and tears when praying to God if you can pick it up ahead of time whether or not your specific prayer requests should be brought before Him for His consideration. This is the beauty of the ministry of the Holy Spirit. One of His jobs is to help us in our prayer life with God the Father. The Holy Spirit will always know whether or not God will want to answer your specific prayer request. By tapping into and connecting up with the Holy Spirit on a specific prayer request, you’ll go a long way in being able to decide when to approach God in prayer and when not to.

For those of you who have not got this far in your own personal relationship with the Holy Spirit in order to be able to pick Him up and read His movements, you can still approach both Him and God the Father before you attempt to pray and just simply ask God if it is His perfect will that a specific prayer request be put before Him.

I have found that God will always come through loud and clear on this issue. Remember, God wants to establish a loving personal relationship with you - and in this personal relationship will be the benefit of being able to approach Him with your specific prayer requests.

2. God really wants to show you how to play the prayer game with Him. It is prayer that will pull down major miracles from God. You just have to learn what the ground rules are and how to play the game with Him. The Bible lays down all the ground rules that you will need to know in order to become a very effective and powerful prayer warrior. For whatever reason, God has this thing set up in that He will not move many of the times on a situation unless we first go into serious prayer with Him. The art of prayer is a powerful tool in the hands of a Spirit-filled believer. God can be moved to answer prayer no matter how dire the circumstances. You just need the knowledge on how to properly approach Him in order to get Him to move on a certain situation. I think you will find the remaining prayer secrets very interesting, as they will give you several different options and strategies in which to approach God with on your specific prayer requests. I believe with knowledge comes power. With knowledge will come the ability to know how to properly play the prayer game with the Lord.

I will leave you with one last thought. One of the benefits of having established a true personal relationship with God the Father is the ability to be able to approach Him with your specific prayer requests. Think of the consequences and the possibilities of this privilege that we now have with God the Father. God the Father has the full supernatural power to do or accomplish whatever He should so desire. The Bible says that "With God NOTHING IS IMPOSSIBLE."

God loves to answer prayers. Prayers to God can save lives, change circumstances and prevent catastrophes. The Bible says that God is looking to "show Himself strong" on behalf of those who have established a true, loving, personal relationship with Him. However, many Christians do not fully realize the power and potential they have if they would simply learn how to properly pray to God to get Him to move on certain situations.

Many people are so wrapped up in themselves and their own lives, they fail to see how their prayers to God can help someone else out who may be in a dire situation. One of the prayer secrets I will be discussing shortly is the power of intercession - the ability to stand in the gap for someone else, approach God as his advocate, and pray to God to help them out of a dire situation. Many people don’t really know how to properly approach and pray to God the Father. As a result, people are either dying early before their time is really up or they are forced to live under tragic circumstances due to no fault of their own. Accidents happen. Bad things can happen. But prayers to God the Father can either prevent the bad things from happening before they happen or change the situation for the better once the bad thing has happened. Remember, our God is in the life saving business! Our God is a God of miracles. He is just looking for true prayer warriors to pull down these miracles that He is only to anxious to release!

Think of the possibilities that we all have with this privilege that we have with God - to be able to boldly approach His throne for prayer anytime, anywhere and for any situation - to be able to save the day for someone who may be at death’s door! This is the call of the Eagle. A true Eagle of God is a "master prayer." He has learned the fine art of being able to properly and effectively pray to God in order to literally move mountains when needed. Nothing is impossible for a true Eagle of God because he knows nothing is impossible with the God he serves.

Mark my words! God will be raising up an army of Eagles in the coming years that will fly with the power and anointing of God such as the world has never seen before or will ever see again. The Bible says in the latter days just before Jesus comes back, that an army will raised up. The verse is Joel 2:2. It reads, "A day of darkness and gloominess, a day of clouds and thick darkness, like the morning clouds spread over the mountains. A people come, great and strong, the like of whom has never been; nor will there be any such after them, even for many successive generations."

The rest of the verses then go into how powerful this army will be and the exploits they will do under God’s anointing and power. For more information on this coming army - see my article titled "Prophecy from Jesus to Mary Baxter on Joel's Army to Come" under the "Prophecies" section. A woman by the name of Mary Baxter received a direct Word from Jesus about this army and who He will be calling to be a part of it. This was a very powerful Word given to this woman, and I believe there is a strong possibility that this army will be coming out of this generation!

Michael Bradley
Bible Teaching, Commentary, and Over 150 Free Articles