God Accomplishing His Purpose

'A serious error concerning  prayer prevails in our common understanding, which is to say, that we often think of prayer as an outlet for expressing what we need-- as our cry to God for help. We do not see that prayer is the asking of God to fulfill HIS needs. We ought to understand that God's original thought is certainly not letting the believers achieve their own aims through prayer, rather it is God accomplishing His purpose through the prayers of the believers. This is not meant to imply that Christians should never ask the Lord to supply their needs. It is only meant to indicate how we need to first understand the meaning and principles of prayer.'   Watchman Nee- Let Us Pray

Jas_4:3  Ye ask, and receive not, because ye ask amiss, that ye may consume it upon your lusts.

We can't fool ourselves by using that word - lust to mean something it doesn't. You say you aren't lustful because you are using that word to only refer to a sexual lust, not lust in anything else.

Lust

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

'Lust is a strong emotion or feeling. The lust can take any form such as the lust for sex, lust for expensive objects (extravagance) or the lust for power. It can take such mundane forms as the lust for food as distinct from the need for food. Lust is a psychological force producing intense wanting for an object, or circumstance fulfilling the emotion'

We ask but we don't receive and we don't receive because we aren't praying as God would have us pray, we are praying for our own desires. And yes, some of those desires might be seemingly self-less like when we ask for help with a sick child, but our desire first and foremost must be for God's will to be done. For His plan to be worked out. We can't expect God's plan to be ours, we just don't know things as He does. The suffering of the innocent is unfathomable to us. Yet, God suffered that in His only begotten Son and He suffers it in every single innocent that hurts. The agony is felt by God and it wasn't His design that pain exist. That it does and must be ended with such finality that it never ever rises again is the ultimate end goal of all of it. We can't understand but through faith we must believe God's allowances, God's suffering is for an ultimate goal that we can scarcely comprehend.

How many choose to suffer short term for long term goals? Seriously. On a level that isn't eternal, how many people will endure hardship as they work towards a goal?  We can understand the idea of suffering short term, with the hope of something better. It is the long term, seemingly endless suffering that will often bring people to despair. If a goal seems to only get further away, some will give up suffering and the ultimate goal they were striving for. We have to believe that SALVATION, eternal salvation without any end at all whatsoever- the amazing, almost incomprehensible life promised by God's only Son, Jesus Christ to us all is a REAL, very REAL ultimate goal.

If I promised you ten million dollars if you suffer in a laborious job day in and day out for ten years would you choose to suffer? I'm willing to believe that a lot of people would choose to suffer because they'd be anticipating the end of that suffering and their guaranteed reward.

God's will.  God wanting to use us to fulfill his will.  Will we allow this? Will we pray to fulfil His will and not our own? Will we allow God to answer our prayers in His way, not our own?

More on this tomorrow by the grace and will of our LORD and SAVIOR- JESUS CHRIST.