Word of Salvation – Vol.11 No.41 – October 1965
How To Ask God For Heavenly Wisdom
Rev. F. Channing on James 1:6-8
Scripture Reading: 1Kings 17:1-6; James 5:13-18
Psalter Hymnal: 302:1,2,3; 61:1,2,3 (After Law); 108:1,2,5,6; 422:5; 172:6
Beloved Congregation in our Lord Jesus Christ,
James is writing this Epistle to Jewish Christians who had been driven out of their homeland by the persecution of Christians in Palestine. These scattered-out Jewish Christians had been driven out into the surrounding countries of the Mediterranean area. They had been scattered out amidst all kinds of trials and persecutions. The fact of them having fled from the persecution of the Church of Palestine did not make them immune to the persecution of the Church in other places. Many of these scattered out people were living in poverty in their new homelands… others still possessing some wealth lived in fear of losing it… of having it taken from them by force. This was one of the punishments of being discovered as a Christian. And still further, these scattered-out people were always faced with the mighty power of Rome. Now just in the verses preceding our text of today, James has told these scattered-out people… these tried and tempted people… “COUNT ALL YOUR TRIALS AND TEMPTATIONS AS BLESSINGS sent from the loving hand of your Heavenly Father, for the perfecting of your faith.” “But”, said James, “if you lack wisdom and lack understanding to view all your trials and temptations like that, then ask God for the wisdom and the understanding that you need.”
But now in our text James deals with the problem, that sometimes we have when we DO ask God for such wisdom…wisdom which James says, “The Lord gives freely and openhandedly to all who ask.” But sometimes when WE ask our prayer is unanswered! WHY? Sometimes there comes trouble in our lives, or sorrow in our families, perhaps it is sometimes a time of trial for the congregation, or a personal time of trial, and we say, “We will ask God to show us the ‘why’ of this trouble and trial.”
But God remains silent! Why?
James, writing under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, tells us that behind this silence of God, and behind these unanswered prayers is the fact that there are two ways in which a Christian can pray. James sets out these ways in our text…
- A Christian can pray in faith.
- A Christian can pray with a double mind.
Now the first thing that we should note is this… James is speaking to professing Christians. It is already presupposed that these people to whom James was writing were really what they claimed to be… Bond-slaves of Jesus Christ and of God! That is how James addresses these people in the 2nd verse of this chapter. In verse one he describes himself as a bond-slave of Jesus Christ and God, and then he says… “My brethren… my brother bond- slaves in Christ and God!” These people were people who were no longer slaves of sin! The apostle Paul writing to the bond-slaves of Jesus Christ at Rome said, “Know ye not that to whom ye yield yourselves servants to obey, his servants ye are to whom ye obey; whether of sin unto death, or of obedience unto righteousness? But God be thanked that ye were the servants of sin, but ye have obeyed from the heart that form of doctrine which was delivered unto you”. Now that is the type of people to whom the Holy Spirit addresses these words about how to pray for heavenly wisdom.
Paul writing to the Ephesians said… “You were dead in sin; in time past you did walk according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience; you also in time past had your way of living in lust, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, even as others… but… now in Christ Jesus ye who were sometimes far off are made nigh by the blood of Christ!”
These were the type of people to whom James addresses these words… they were people who lived in fellowship with Jesus Christ and God. That is the first thing we should note!
These are the only type of people who can pray in faith. Only people who have been brought nigh to God by the blood of Jesus Christ can pray in faith!
Now what does it mean to “pray in faith” …and to “ask in faith?” James uses this same term later on in his epistle, and he says, “The prayer of faith shall save the sick”, and there in chapter 5 he uses the example of Elijah praying for drought, and there came drought! And again Elijah prayed for rain…. and it did rain! Now again and again, each one of us, we have prayed for some certain thing… We have prayed for understanding of some certain trial or temptation, and yet God has been silent…. and He has been silent because of this very reason…. we have not prayed in faith!
Dear brothers and sisters, we must understand this word of God, proclaimed to us in our text, if we shall ever learn to pray a prayer of faith! What are we to have faith in…? Are we to have faith that because we are so good, therefore God will answer our prayer? Of course not! There is never a time when we are so good that we merit anything from God. Even as the Scripture says, “there are none that doeth good, no not one.” There is never a time when we can present our works, or our obedience to the Lord as the ground of why He should answer our prayers. Perhaps if we look at Elijah and his prayer of faith, we then shall understand the type of prayer that God hears and God does answer!
Elijah’s prayer was a prayer that was grounded and built upon the clear revelation of God. Elijah’s prayer was not just a sudden fancy of Elijah’s heart, that he would pray for a drought! Elijah’s prayer was not just a sudden fancy to bring confusion and loss to disobedient Israel! Elijah prayed for the very thing that God had promised would come, if Israel turned away from the service of the Lord!
We read in Deuteronomy Chapter 11:16,17, “Take heed to yourselves that your heart be not deceived, and ye turn aside, and serve other Gods and worship them; And then the Lord’s wrath be kindled against you, and he shut up the heaven, and there be no rain, and that the land yield not her fruit.” That is just what had happened. Israel other had turned away from the worship of God… and had turned to other gods… gods of wood and stone, and gods of their own imagination. And Elijah saw this. And Elijah knew this Word of the Lord. He built his prayer of faith upon what God had said. That is just what our Heidelberg Catechism says, in Lord’s Day 7, “What is true faith?” “True faith is a sure knowledge whereby I hold for truth all that God has revealed to us..!” And where has He revealed it? “In his word!” And also “true faith is a firm confidence which the Holy Spirit works in my heart.” That is true faith. So the prayer of faith is nothing less than asking God for the very things He has promised in His Word!
Why are you, beloved congregation, urged time and time again from this pulpit to be a Bible reading and Bible studying people? Because only as you read and study the Word of God will you know what God has promised to give in answer to the prayer of faith! Only when you are a Bible reading and Bible studying people will you even know how to pray, and what to pray for!
That was the prayer of faith uttered by Elijah whom James describes as a man of like passions as us! That means that Elijah was no superman. He was sinful… he was afflicted with like passions and temptations and trials of life as we are. If we take time to analyse the prayer which Jesus Christ gave as a pattern for all prayer… what we call the Lord’s Prayer… we will find that the Lord Jesus commands us to pray for those things which God has revealed. He will give to those that ask, and seek and knock!
We pray… “Hallowed be Thy Name!” and we read in Leviticus 22:32 that the Lord says, “Neither shall ye profane My holy Name; but I will be hallowed among the children of Israel.”
We pray… “Thy Kingdom come…!” and the book of Revelation clearly portrays for us how that Kingdom shall come, despite opposition, despite man’s sin and rebellion. The last words of the Bible say the prayer of faith… “Come quickly Lord Jesus…!” and the promise of God is, “Surely I come quickly.”
We pray… “Thy will be done…!” and we can read in Psalm 2 that God’s will is done… He has set His king to reign… He shall laugh when ungodly men think they can obstruct the doing of His sovereign will.
We pray… “give daily bread …forgive our sins …lead us not into temptation,” and His Word declares that He will not give a stone when we ask for bread, and if we confess our sins He is just and faithful to forgive, and He promises us His Word as a Lamp for our feet and a light for our path! The prayer of faith is actually taking God at His Word and asking the Lord to fulfil His promise. And because it is God Who has promised, we can believe and have firm confidence that He will do so, not on the ground of our merits, but because of the merits of Jesus Christ our Saviour!
Now that is the place where some of us get into trouble. And it is this type of trouble that James pictures for us in our text. He says that we are to ask for wisdom to understand our trials and temptations… to understand the fact that our burdens and crosses of life are for our perfecting! And James says that we are to ask for the wisdom that God promises to give… but we are to ask for it “without wavering. “Not a single thing wavering,” is how James actually wrote it. Now this word wavering means… that we are not to separate one thing from another! And this is just what we do so often! This is why our prayers remain unanswered!
We separate the possible things from the humanly impossible things. It is not difficult to ask for bread and to believe we will get it because we can do something about getting our bread on our tables… that can be humanly done, or so we think! But to pray, “Thy Kingdom come” “Thy will be done” in me… rule over me more and more …cause me to serve thee more and more… break the power of this sin and that sin in my life…! When we begin to pray like that, then we begin to waver, and we begin to say, “I hope God will answer… I’m not sure… but Oh, I do surely hope!”
When you young people begin to pray that the Lord will lead you to the right partner for your life… His choice for you… do you pray the prayer of faith, or do you waver? Or when you folks have to pray to understand the trial or the sorrow… and you pray for wisdom to understand it and use it rightly… do you pray the prayer of faith, or do you begin to waver? “Maybe God will answer! Maybe He will not answer!” That firm confidence in God’s word is no longer there! You know, dear brothers and sisters, it is not God’s Word which is at fault. God clearly says “sin shall not have dominion over you”! God clearly says, that He will guide us in every pathway of life if we trust Him and lean not unto our own understanding.
God clearly says that He will give us wisdom that we need to see every trial and temptation as a blessing. He clearly says that He will do these things if we ask in faith… nothing wavering… not counting anything too difficult or too hard for the Lord, but counting all things possible with God. God’s Word and God’s promise is not at fault, but it is our wavering!
.This person whom James describes as one who wavers… this person is like a wave of the sea that is driven first one way… then the other… rushing first this way… then that… rising high in one moment… crashing down in another moment.
This is just the same type of person that Paul describes in Ephesians 4:14, “That we henceforth be no more children tossed to and fro and carried about by every wind of doctrine…!”
This type of person just has not got their feet firmly established on God’s word, and all sorts of teachings blow them about, and they are deceived by all sorts of unbiblical teachings.
You see dear congregation, again and again we are brought back to the Bible. It must be the foundation of our faith! It must be the foundation of our prayer of faith! And also we find as we study the Bible, that it must be the foundation of our life of faith!
Now such a man or woman as is described by James… one who is wavering, and is driven and tossed about, “He shall receive nothing that he asks for from the Lord!” Why?
Because at heart this man, or this woman, is a person with two souls. That is what that word “double-minded” means. They have two souls. David the Psalmist speaks of this type of person in·Psalm 12 where he says, that the men speak with flattering lips and with a double heart. You see James is describing a man or a woman who asks for one thing, but who in his heart wants another. James describes young people who ask God to choose for them their partner in life, and then immediately that young person set about doing and going their own way… the way they wanted to anyway!
That man or the woman who prays… “Thy Kingdom come in me, and in the world, and rule over Thy Church more and more”… and then goes on in rebellion against the Lord in their personal life… and stirs up trouble in the church and does nothing about carrying the Gospel into the world… or the person who prays “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass against us, but who does not in their heart forgive their brother and sister in Christ of their trespasses… such people are double souled people!
They mouth words that they really don’t mean. They want to appear religious… and yet at heart they are not wanting Christ to be set upon the throne of their hearts.
Now let us go back to the source of all this trouble. Let us go back to the source of all this being tossed and driven by every wind. The source of the trouble is that these people neither know nor believe with all their hearts the Word of God… and the promises of God which we have written for us in the Bible. The authority in their lives is not: “Thus saith the Lord…!” and therefore they cannot say, “I will not fear though the mountains crash into the sea, and though the sea roar, and the nation of the world go astray”. The authority in their live is some other thing… their own reasoning… their own abilities…! That is the cause!
But what is the remedy? Can you change yourself from a worrying, fretting soul, to one who can cast all their cares on the Lord? Can you change yourself to be one who stands firmly on the promises of God? You are daily in trials? You are daily in temptations? And you do not understand how these trials and temptations can possibly be blessings for you?
Then ask of God for the heavenly wisdom to see them as blessings… but ask in faith… nothing wavering… and don’t be doubleminded? Cry out that the Spirit of God will give you, in grace, and not on account of any merit of your own… that the Spirit of God will give you, faith to take God at His Word. Cry out that the Spirit of God will change you, and will illuminate you to understand God’s Word as you read it… to see God’s promises to you..! Yes! Cry out: “Holy Spirit open thou mine eyes that I may behold wondrous things out of Thy Law! Cry out… and the Lord promises, “Before they call I will answer!”
Next time you pray, beloved brother and sister in Christ, how about asking yourself, “Is this a prayer of faith…? Is this a prayer of a single heart…? Is this a prayer with a single desire…?” If it is, be assured on the authority of God’s sure promise… the Lord will answer your prayer,
You shall receive, when you ask…
Each door shall be opened, when you knock…
You shall find, when you seek…
according as God Himself, who cannot lie, has promised.
Amen.