From the TeachingtheWord Bible Knowledgebase

Part six of a series of selections from Profiting From the Word by A. W. Pink. Read part five.

Edited by Dr. Paul M. Elliott, president of TeachingTheWord Ministries

There is nothing we truly need that God has not promised to supply, but in such a way that He will make it good and useful to us.

In our last article, Arthur Pink wrote of the need to examine our motives in prayer. He next addresses the relationship between Gods promises and the believer's prayers.

We are profited from the Scriptures when we are taught how to plead God's promises. Prayer must be in faith (Romans 10:14), or God will not hear it. Now faith has respect to God's promises (Hebrews 4:1; Romans 4:21); if, therefore, we do not understand what God stands pledged to give, we cannot pray at all. The promises of God contain the matter of prayer and define the measure of it. What God has promised, all that He has promised, and nothing else, we are to pray for. "Secret things belong unto the Lord our God" (Deuteronomy 29:29), but the declaration of His will and the revelation of His grace belong unto us, and are our rule.

There is nothing that we really stand in need of but God has promised to supply it, yet in such a way and under such limitations as will make it good and useful to us. So too there is nothing God has promised but we stand in need of it, or are some way or other concerned in it as members of the mystical body of Christ. Hence, the better we are acquainted with the Divine promises, and the more we are enabled to understand the goodness, grace and mercy prepared and proposed in them, the better equipped are we for acceptable prayer.

Some of God's promises are general rather than specific; some are conditional, others unconditional; some are fulfilled in this life, others in the world to come. Nor are we able of ourselves to discern which promise is most suited to our particular case and present emergency and need, or to appropriate by faith and rightly plead it before God. Wherefore we are expressly told, "For what man knoweth the things of a man save the spirit of man which is in him? Even so the things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God. Now we have received, not the spirit of the world but the Spirit which is of God; that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God" (1 Corinthians 2:11-12).

Next: Are You Submitting to God in Prayer?

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