NOTICE: Store prices and specials on the Banner of Truth UK site are not available for orders shipped to North America. Please use the Banner of Truth USA site .

Section navigation

How Can Prayer be Heard?

Category Articles
Date April 27, 2007

It is everyone’s duty to pray. Yet there is a serious difficulty: how can a holy God answer the petitions of a guilty sinner? So Isaiah was directed to tell rebellious Israel: “Your iniquities have separated between you and your God, and your sins have hid His face from you, that He will not hear” (Isa. 59:2). It was as if their prayers could not reach heaven because a mountain of sin was standing between them and their God and it was hiding God’s face from them – so that He could not show them favour. If they were to take their sins seriously, they would have to ask how their prayers could possibly ever be heard.

It should be clear that no one in any generation has any right to the least blessing from God. As fallen in Adam, we are all sinners; we are all rebels against our Creator. We get some light on the solution to this difficulty when we read of Abraham coming to “a mountain on the east of Bethel”; he “pitched his tent” there and “builded an altar unto the Lord, and called upon the name of the Lord” (Gen. 12:8). This suggests to us that Abraham recognised his need of a sacrifice before he could pray with a hope of being heard; he saw it as the way God had appointed so that sin might be forgiven and sinners have access to God. While the Old Testament sacrifices could not actually take away sin, they were God’s appointed way to be reconciled to Him. The believing offerer was seeing in the sacrifice a God-appointed substitute for himself and, by faith, was laying hold on the divine provision, to be made in the fullness of time, whereby sin could truly be put away.

Similarly it is only on the basis of a sacrifice, appointed by God and accepted by Him, that a sinner can be heard today. But we are in a far better position than Abraham. The Son of God came into the world and took our nature so that He might have an offering which actually would take away sin. He has offered that sacrifice; He has thus opened a way for sinners to approach God. Prayer is heard, for He is the Mediator. We are to pray “for Jesus’ sake” – that is, we are to present our petitions while looking by faith to the One who died for sinners and is now at the right hand of the Father making continual intercession. There was no reason for Abraham to restrain prayer before God; guilty though he was, a way of access to God had been revealed to him. More emphatically, there is no reason for us, in this New Testament age, to restrain prayer before God; a clearer and more perfect way of access has been revealed to us – through Jesus Christ, the exalted Saviour.

Yet when God’s children feel their unworthiness, are they justified in restraining prayer? Most certainly not; it is important for them to remember that they are “accepted in the Beloved”, not in themselves. The fact is that they can never be worthy of God’s gifts. Surely David had every right to be conscious of his unworthiness when in unbelief he fled to the Philistines because of his fear that he would “perish one day by the hand of Saul”. Yet he could record to the glory of God: “This poor man cried, and the Lord heard him, and saved him out of all his troubles” (Psa. 34:6). Even when an unworthy distrust of God’s goodness made him flee among the heathen, David’s prayers were heard.

God’s children have to learn more and more that none of their prayers are heard because they are worthy – whether they are in their best state or their worst. They will always be unworthy; it is Christ who is worthy – altogether worthy. So let them come boldly to the throne of grace, not looking to themselves – not even to a worthiness that they might yet develop – but to Christ, “who is even at the right hand of God”, to make continual intercession for them (Rom. 8:34) in spite of their sins and unworthiness.

Think of Paul approaching Athens with a view to speaking there for his Master. We can well believe that he gave special time to prayer on his way there and, no doubt, as he walked along the way, his heart was rising up again and again in prayer to God for a blessing on what he might be led to say. And he was heard, though the results of his preaching in Athens were much less than in many other places. But why was he heard? Certainly not for the sake of his worthiness, his godliness, or his faithfulness. He was heard because the great Intercessor in heaven expressed His will, before the Father, that Dionysius the Areopagite and a woman named Damaris should believe, and others besides.

Similarly on the Day of Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit was poured out in such power that 3000 individuals were brought into the kingdom of God, it was in answer to prayer. The disciples had “continued with one accord in prayer and supplication” in the upper room in Jerusalem since Jesus had ascended to heaven. Why were their prayers answered? Not because of the disciples’ holiness, earnestness or unity. It was because the exalted Saviour had taken their petitions and – to the extent it pleased Him to do so – had presented them to the Father as His own will. He had done so on the ground that He had died for each of the 3000, had kept the law as their Substitute, and so had merited a full salvation for them. And the time had now come for them to be drawn into the kingdom of God to enjoy all the blessings which Christ had purchased for them.

Believers pray for sanctification, perseverance in grace, and the supply of all their needs. They will be heard because Christ’s intercession for them will continue; He will express His will in heaven that, in accordance with the provisions of the covenant of grace, these blessings be granted. Then, at the time appointed, He will say, “Father, I will that they also, whom thou hast given Me, be with Me where I am; that they may behold My glory” (John 17:24). And He will be heard. At their death, they will be brought to heaven; they will, as to their souls, be made perfect in holiness; and when Christ will come the second time, He will reunite body and soul. Then their salvation will be complete. It will be the final answer to all the prayers they sent up from this world to heaven, for Christ’s sake. And they will see that what He purchased for them was a complete salvation ““ altogether beyond what they could ask or think. But let us remind ourselves that these prayers are heard only because they were presented before the Father by the great Intercessor.

What encouragement then they have to pray! Robert Traill expressed this in a remarkable way. Christ, he believed, had set His love on him, and so had sent the Holy Spirit to work faith in his heart; he therefore had a right to exercise that faith in asking for every good thing that was in the divine purpose for him. “If faith in Christ be the work of His love,” to use Traill’s own words, “how warrantably may I look, by that faith, for all the good that this love purposeth, promiseth and prayeth for to me!”1 But how much the children of God lose by underestimating the authority of the warrant that is theirs to look by faith for all the good that Christ in His love has promised them!

Yet where does this leave those who are still unconverted, or fear that they are still unconverted? One matter should be clear: all, however sinful, however far away from God, are duty bound to pray. But how dare an unholy sinner approach the infinitely holy God in prayer? The sinner is to come on the basis of the finished work of Christ, which is freely set before him in the gospel. When Christ says to the sinner: “Come unto Me”, He is directing the sinner to look to Him, to believe in Him. The sinner therefore is to come boldly to the throne of grace with his eye on the Mediator – that is, believing in Christ as the One who offered Himself up as the one effective sacrifice so that the ungodly might be reconciled to God. Christ Himself assures sinners that, however far away from God they may feel, “whosoever believeth in Him” will “not perish, but have everlasting life” (John 3:16). No one has any right to stay away from the throne of grace; neither has anyone the right to stay away from Christ. His calls to us have infinite authority.

Notes

  1. In the first of sixteen ‘Sermons Concerning the Lord’s Prayer in John 17:24’, The Works of Robert Traill, Vol. 2, (1810; repr. Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1975), p. 21. This four-volume setting was reprinted by the Trust in two volumes, now out of print.

Taken with permission from the editorial of the Free Presbyterian Magazine, April 2007.

www.fpchurch.org.uk

Latest Articles

Finished!: A Message for Easter 28 March 2024

Think about someone being selected and sent to do an especially difficult job. Some major crisis has arisen, or some massive problem needs to be tackled, and it requires the knowledge, the experience, the skill-set, the leadership that they so remarkably possess. It was like that with Jesus. Entrusted to him by God the Father […]

Every Christian a Publisher! 27 February 2024

The following article appeared in Issue 291 of the Banner Magazine, dated December 1987. ‘The Lord gave the word; great was the company of those that published it’ (Psalm 68.11) THE NEED FOR TRUTH I would like to speak to you today about the importance of the use of liter­ature in the church, for evangelism, […]