How to Know God Answers Prayer

One day a Baptist minister decided to visit the horseraces. The Pastor loved horses, but being a good Christian, he didn’t believe in gambling. Before the first race, he noticed a priest down in the paddock area praying over a horse, and when they ran the first race, lo and behold, that horse won. The minister kept his eye on the priest. In the next three races, to his utter amazement, each horse that the priest had prayed over won the race.

Well the minister took all the cash he had with him and bet on the horse the priest was praying over for the next race. He figured that this wasn’t gambling; this was a sure thing. But to his utter dismay, in the next race, his horse got off to a shaky start, staggered a few yards down the track, and dropped dead !

Well this was too much for the poor minister. He went down to the paddock, found the priest, and said, “Look, I want an expanation from you. Each of the first four horses you prayed over won the race, so I bet everything I had on the next one. You prayed over him and he dropped dead. How come?

The priest just smiled and shook his head and said, “The trouble is that you’re a Baptist minister and you don’t know the difference between prayer and the last rites.”

Well the trouble with many of us is that we don’t know the difference between prayer and a lot of things. And for some of us, prayer is like the last rites - something we do when all else fails and we’re hanging on the edge of disaster.

Our passage for today in 1 John 5 is all about prayer. It is about the assurance of prayer, answers to prayer, and the application of prayer. But before we get to it, we need a little background.

Remember that John was writing to people who needed answers. They needed to know about some pretty important issues. They weren’t sure about things because there were some false teachers who were confusing them.

1. They needed to know who Jesus was. So John tells them. He says “I was there. I saw Him. I heard Him teach. I saw the miracles He did. I lived with Him for three years. I know who He is: He is the Son of God.” The false teachers were saying that Jesus was just a man who was at one time temporarily infused with the presence of God. John says “Not so. Jesus is God. And anybody who says He isn’t is a liar.”

2. Then these people needed to know what a real Christian is. The false teachers said that to be a real Christian, you needed to know all sorts of secret mysteries. And it didn’t matter how you lived your life as long as you knew these things. John says “Not so. It isn’t what you know that makes you a Christian, it is who you know. A real Christian knows Jesus Christ. And knowing Jesus does make a difference in the way you live…

• a real Christian is someone who deals seriously with the sin in his life by confessing that sin to God.

• a real Christian is someone who seeks to do God”s will every day.

• a real Christian is someone who loves God more than anyone or anything else in this world.

• a real Christian is someone who doesn’t go on sinning - making sin a habit.

• a real Christian is someone who abides with Christ.

• a real Christian is someone who loves others the way God loves us.

3. These people needed to be sure that they themselves were genuine Christians. And John told them that there were three major things that indicated whether they were or not:

1. if they had received Jesus:

1 John 5:11 And this is the testimony: God has given us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. He who has the Son has life

2. if their lives were bearing this kind of fruit, showing these kinds of characteristics.

1 John 2:6 Whoever claims to live in him must walk as Jesus did.

3. if the Holy Spirit was confirming in their hearts that they belonged to God.

1 John 4:13 We know that we live in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit.

Now we come to the subject of prayer.

• assurance in prayer

• answers to prayer

• application of prayer

I have a little black box sitting beside my computer at home. It’s called a “modem”. What this little box does is to translate what I type on my computer into little bits of sound and it can send those little bits of sound over the telephone lines to other computers. Now I have a brother in Ottawa, Canada who also has a modem beside his computer, and we’ll often send each other messages that way. It’s a lot faster than mail and it doesn’t even cost a long distance call. My brother travels a lot. He serves on the Canadian delegation to the United Nations telecommunications conference. And he can send and receive messages like this anywhere in the world.

When I type up a message to my brother and tell the modem to send it, I get a little message back on my computer screen which says: Message posted: date, time. And when he turns on his computer, he’ll get a signal that says he has a message from me waiting to be read.

Wouldn’t it be great if prayer worked liked that? Wouldn’t it be great if we could know that our prayers got to heaven and were right there on God’s computer screen for him to read? Well I have news for you. Prayer does work like that. There is a way that we can be sure that God gets our messages. It is in verse 14:

1 John 5:14 This is the confidence we have in approaching God: that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us.

What’s the key to being confident in prayer? It is to make sure that we’re praying according to God’s will. When we pray according to God’s will, we can be absolutely certain that He hears us. And the idea in that word to “hear” is really “to receive”. He receives our message.

This is perhaps the most important lesson of all we need to learn about prayer. Prayer is when we bring our will into line with God’s will. The purpose of prayer is not to get our will done in heaven, but to get God’s will done here on earth. So when we pray, we should pray about the things that God wants.

Remember what John told us one of the characteristics of the authentic Christian was - back in 2:3 and again in 3:24 and again in 5:3? It’s obedience. A real Christian places God’s will as his highest priority in life, and it shows in the way he lives. His life is characterized by obedience.

Well, a real Christian prays like he obeys… with his utmost concern for the will of God to be done in his life. When Jesus struggled alone in prayer in the Garden, as he wrestled with the terrible thought of going to the Cross the next morning, he prayed “My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will.”

How do we know what God’s will is? How do we know what we should pray about? Well, it’s the same way we know how to obey… we find God’s will in His Word. We pray like we obey. Our textbook for prayer is the Bible. Pray what’s in the Bible and you’ll know that you’re praying according to God’s will.

Men, if the Bible says to us husbands that we should love our wives like Christ loved the church, and we pray that God would help us to do that, then we’re praying according to God’s will.

If the Bible says that we should love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us, and we pray that God would help us to do that, then we’re praying according to God’s will.

If the Bible says that we should grow in grace and the knowledge of Jesus Christ, and we pray that God would help us to do that, then we’re praying according to God’s will.

The trouble with us is that too often, we think of prayer as being the means whereby we get to dictate our will to God.

A little boy in his pajamas ready for bed interrupted a family gathering in the living room. He said “I’m going up to say my prayers now. Anybody want anything?”

That’s so often our attitude: Anybody want anything? We treat heaven like a cosmic convenience store. We throw up prayers that have the greasy fingerprints of our will smeared all over them. And I think that such prayers are just shunted off to a dead letter office in heaven as being their only worthy destination. No wonder that God doesn’t answer our prayers!

The Bible says that if we pray according to God’s will he hears us. And the very next verse says…

1 John 5:15 And if we know that he hears us—whatever we ask—we know that we have what we asked of him.

Do you know what this verse is saying? This verse is saying that God has committed himself to providing us with whatever we ask for in His will.

God wants to answer our prayers, so long as we pray according to His will. And that makes sense: Since God loves us perfectly, His will for us is the best thing for us. That’s precisely what He wants for us.

If my son Philip, who is three years old, came up to me after church and asked me for the keys to the car so that he could drive home, do you think I would give them to him? Would I be a loving father if I did? You see, I know what’s best for him, and because I do, I cant let him have his way. My will for him is more perfect than his own will for himself.

This is true of our relationship with God. When we ask God to let us have our way, we’re asking for less than the best. In fact much of the time, we’re asking for things that would destroy us. That’s probably why you haven’t won the Lottery, even though you’ve prayed that you would. God isn’t going to give you something that will hurt you.

But when we pray according to His will for us, then we’re asking for the best. George Muller of Bristol was a man of God who knew a lot about prayer. He always sought to pray according to God’s will. Muller ran an orphanage and there were many times that the money ran short. But he always just made it a matter of prayer. He didn’t go around advertizing that he needed donations. He didn’t make any tearful crisis appeals for funds. His motto was “God’s work done God’s way will never lack God’s supply.” In other words, if it were God’s will for that orphanage to stay open, God would see to it that it did. Muller knew the importance of praying according to God’s will. He said “Prayer is not overcoming God’s reluctance, it is laying hold of His willingness.”

Well, we’ve looked at assurance in prayer and answers to prayer, let’s look briefly at an example of prayer applied.

1 John 5:16-17 If anyone sees his brother commit a sin that does not lead to death, he should pray and God will give him life. I refer to those whose sin does not lead to death. There is a sin that leads to death. I am not saying that he should pray about that. All wrongdoing is sin, and there is sin that does not lead to death.

These are two of the most difficult verses in the Bible to understand. What is this sin that leads to death? Is John referring here to the fact that sometimes Christians sin so grievously that God takes their lives? That does happen. Remember Annanias and Sapphirra in Acts 5. They lied to the church and to the Holy Spirit about a donation they were making and God called both of them home. They dropped dead on the spot. And then there’s the passage in 1 Corinthians 11 where Paul says that because the church there had abused the Lord’s supper, observing it in a careless and sinful way,

1 Corinthians 11:30 That is why many among you are weak and sick, and a number of you have fallen asleep.

But I don’t think that’s the kind of sin that John is talking about here. I believe that he is talking about non-Christians here when he refers to this sin that leads to death. And I believe that the death is spiritual death - being cut off from God.

Notice first of all that he says that it is your brother - in other words, a fellow believer - who may commit a sin that does not lead to death. Christians can and do sin. But that sin does not cut them off from God. Their fellowship with God may be broken, but their relationship with God can never be broken. The Prodigal Son didn’t stop being his father’s son even though he was a prodigal.

When we see our brother sin, we must pray for him, and God will bring him back, and restore him. He’s like a swimmer who is drowning and needs to be rescued and have life breathed back into him again.

But notice that John is very careful when he talks about the sin unto death. He says “There is a sin that leads to death.” Notice what he didn’t say. He didn’t say “When you see your brother commit a sin that leads to death.” He just said “There is a sin that leads to death.” Now I could be wrong, but I think that John means here that Christians are not the ones who commit that sin, because of what that sin is.

Remember, we have to understand this verse in the context of this whole epistle. John has been writing to Christians who have been plagued by false teachers. They were in the church, although thank God most of them had left by the time John wrote this. These false teachers had been masquerading as Christians, and pretending to be Christians, even though they were teaching the most abominable lies about Jesus Christ. I think that these are the people John is referring to as committing this sin that leads to death.

Their sin was that they had rejected Christ, actively and willingly, and they had given themselves to anything and everything that would oppose the truth. Their doctrine was false and their lives were wicked. And John says, “I am not saying you should pray for these people.” God has given such people over to their wickedness, and they are beyond hope because they have chosen to reject and oppose the only one who can save them, Jesus Christ.

In that sense, they had committed the unpardonable sin: they had turned their back on Jesus Christ. They are the people who are described in …

Hebrews 6:4-6 It is impossible for those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, who have shared in the Holy Spirit, who have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the coming age, if they fall away, to be brought back to repentance, because to their loss they are crucifying the Son of God all over again and subjecting him to public disgrace.

John says “Don’t pray for them. But pray for your brother when he sins. His sin is not unto death.”

We must as Christians concern ourselves with the spiritual well-being of our brothers and sisters in Christ. Yet much of the time, we exercise little concern at all, or at best, our concern comes in the form of concern for physical well-being. Please don’t misunderstand me. I am not saying that we shouldn’t pray about one another’s physical health. But if that’s all we do - if our prayer sheets are filled up with petitions for Uncle Lester’s ingrown toenail, or Mrs. Freeble’s appendectomy, then we’re not praying aright. We’ve got to be praying for the family whose teenage son is rebelling against the Lord. We’ve got to be interceding for the wife who’s husband walked out on her. We’ve got to be praying for the two board members who just can’t seem to get along.

Perhaps we hesitate to pray about things like this because we think it is none of our business. But it is our business. We are a body - the Body of Christ - and when one part of the body hurts, we all hurt. Imagine if you cut your hand and your feet said “Well we’re not going to take that hand to the First Aid Kit in the medicine cabinet because it isn’t our business!

We’ve got to pray for each other when we sin, for this is praying according to God’s will. When John was looking for an example of how to pray according to God’s will, the Holy Spirit led him here. Pray for your brother when he sins. He needs you to. And you need to. And God wants us to.