CHARLO, New Brunswick, July 28, 2023 – Jesus tells us: “Ye have not because ye ask not”. It’s his polite way of saying that we’re praying for the wrong things or not praying when we should be or perhaps not even praying at all.

And yet, my oh my, how some Christians love to pray! They’re like the Pharisees standing at the front of the temple or on the street corners, making sure that everyone sees and hears their holiness. That’s not to say there’s anything wrong with prayer – it’s the most powerful force in the universe and our direct line to God and Jesus. But many Christians, for all their prayers, might just as well not be praying because they pray the wrong way.

That is to say, they’re praying for the wrong things.

For instance, instead of praying for God to give them the strength to endure whatever God permits them to endure, they pray to find a way to avoid their tests and punishments. What they’re essentially doing is praying to God to counteract his own justice.

Now, that’s a strange thing for Christians to do – to pray against God’s perfect justice! I’m not sure why people do that, other than they don’t know that they’re doing it or they see others praying that way and simply follow their lead. Certainly, like Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane, we can ask God if there’s some wriggle room in his Grand Scheme Of Things that would allow us not to suffer so much, but we also need to end our prayers with “not what I want, but what you want”, as Jesus famously did. Ultimately, we need to fully align our prayers with God’s will, so that instead of trying to avoid taking our knocks (whether as punishment or as tests), we head into battle fully armed with God’s Spirit.

And we should pray the same for others. When we pray for them to avoid their tests and punishments, we’re not helping them. These are not charitable prayers, to help people avoid what they need to go through. In fact, such prayers serve the devil’s purposes, not God’s. We need to pray that people have the strength to endure whatever God needs them to endure and to come out the other side victorious.

Every test and punishment that we overcome through patient endurance makes us spiritually stronger and better able to help ourselves and others. More importantly, everything we successfully endure brings us closer to God and Jesus and closer to Home. The only test that Jesus taught us to pray to avoid is the test of the Tribulation. This is something that we can with God’s full blessings pray to avoid.

So the next time someone asks you to pray for them, pray for what they’ve asked for, but also pray that God will give them the strength to endure whatever they have to endure and come out victorious and stronger in the end. And if you pray to God on your own behalf, pray the same thing – not to avoid the tests and punishments that are coming your way, but for the strength and grace to endure them.

This should always be our prayer – to align our will with God’s and to have his supernatural strength to “endure to the end”. If we make this our guiding prayer, I guarantee you that God will immediately answer it with a loud and resounding “DONE!”