My Sunday Skl

Main Passage: Mark 11:22-24

22 Jesus answered them, “Have faith in God. 23 Truly I tell you, if you say to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and thrown into the sea,’ and if you do not doubt in your heart but believe that what you say will come to pass, it will be done for you. 24 “Therefore I say to you, all things for which you pray and ask, believe that you have received them, and they will be granted you.

We will break this down bit by bit.

Verse 24.

Therefore I say to you, all things for which you pray and ask, believe that you have received them, and they will be granted you.

“All things for which you pray and ask”

Inspired by Hiebert:

“pray and ask for, both present tenses, picture the practice. Pray suggests reverential communion with God as the giver of the answer. On the other hand, we have ask for, in the middle voice, which points to the personal interest of the petitioner in his request. Interestingly, at first sight, it looks like there are no limits to the requests. But let’s say now that they must be in harmony with the purpose of God. We’ll get into this though.

Inspired by Sproul:

We do have to be very careful with this verse. A whole theology based almost exclusively on this text has spread across the Christian world in our day. The word of faith movement, which just loves the idea of “name it and claim it,” tells us that all we have to do to receive something we want is to claim it as ours in Jesus’ name, and it will be ours.

Funnily, this movement is, in some ways, the Christian parallel to the New Age movement in the secular world. We have to really question who is influencing who? Are we influencing the secular world or are they influencing us?

The New Age movement teaches that by visualizing what we want to happen, we can actually change the world around us. The force that is at the bottom of the New Age thinking is really magic. If you can see it, you can become it. Manifest it. Speak it out and it will come to past. All these ideas.

Here’s the phrase: “Believe that you have received them, and they will be granted you”. This applied a sweeping assurance of the previous verse to the disciples. Received is the aorist tense, “did receive,”. Now this is important. What it does, is that it stresses that faith accepts that the petition has already been granted. Not accepting. Accepted. That’s such a big difference. Not believing that you are receiving it, as if there’s a chance you may not get it all. You’ve already received it.

Now this is a point to note down.

How can we believe with full confidence that this is something that we have received? Sometimes there are things we want to believe in, but due to its nature and size, it seems impossible. So how do we ever have 100 percent confidence?

I believe there is one full-proof solution: knowing that the petition is in God’s will, faith accepts the answer as granted, although the actual bestowal is future, “ye shall have them.” If you know that it is in God’s will, you have no reason to doubt. We doubt because we don’t know if God really wants it for us, and often that stems from not spending enough time in His presence, learning about His nature, or even listening to what He has said in the past.

Spurgeon says:

“Allow me to quote what an old preacher said upon the subject of prayer, and give it to you as a little word of advice—“Remember, the Lord will not hear thee, because of the arithmetic of thy prayers; he does not count their numbers. He will not hear thee because of the rhetoric of thy prayers; he does not care for the eloquent language in which they are conveyed. He will not listen to thee because of the geometry of thy prayers; he does not compute them by their length, or by their breadth. He will not regard thee because of the music of thy prayers; he doth not care for sweet voices, nor for harmonious periods. Neither will he look at thee because of the logic of thy prayers, or because they are well arranged. But he will hear thee, and he will measure the amount of the blessing he will give thee, according to the divinity of thy prayers. If thou canst plead the person of Christ, and if the Holy Ghost inspire thee with zeal and earnestness, the blessings which thou shalt ask, shall surely come unto thee.” Brethren, I would like to burn the whole stock of old prayers that we have been using this fifty years. That “oil that goes from vessel to vessel,”—that “horse that rushes into the battle,”—that misquoted mangled text, “where two or three are met together, thou wilt be in the midst of them, and that to bless them,” and all those other quotations which we have been manufacturing, and dislocating, and copying from man to man. I would that we came to speak to God, just out of our own hearts. It would be a grand thing for our prayer meetings.”