Principle 3

The third principle is the promises are the expression of God’s will. God never promises something that was not his will. It’s very important to understand that. Suppose I have a young son and I say to him, “Now,if you sweep the garage out and put everything in order there and do a good job, I’ll give you a dollar.” So my son goes in, sweeps the garage out, does a good job and everything’s beautiful. He comes back and says, “Dad, I want my dollar.” What would you think of me if I said, “I never meant to give you the dollar. It wasn’t my will.” I mean, you’d write me off as a failure as a father, as an unreliable and undependable person. So it is with the promises of God. We never can come to God at any time having met the conditions and expect God to say, “I didn’t really mean to give it to you. I was just leading you on.” It’s obvious that when we look at it, God doesn’t act that way. The promises that God gives are the expression of what he wants to do.

When we know God’s will we pray with confidence. Turn to 1 John 5:14–15:

“This is the confidence that we have in Him . . .”

That’s in God. The word translated “confidence” there means freedom of speech. It was a very important word in the political background of the Greek people. One of the things that they fought for in democracy was freedom of speech which is, of course, very familiar to American democracy. This word means basically freedom of speech. This is the absolute freedom we have to say what we believe about God. This is the confidence that we have in him. I point that out because I think that confidence needs to be expressed in what you say. If you don’t say it, you don’t have it.

“This is the confidence that we have in him, that if we ask any thing according to his will, he heareth us; and if we know that he hear us, whatsoever we ask, we know that we have the petitions that we desired of him.”

Notice once we know we’re asking for something according to the will of God, we know we have it. Not we’re going to have it but we have it. Mark 11:24, Jesus says:

“Therefore I say unto you whatsoever things ye desire, when ye pray believe that ye receive them . . .”

When? I didn’t hear you. When we pray.

“. . . and ye shall have them.”

One thing is present, another is future. The receiving is present, the actual experiential working out of what we have received is often future. But if we don’t receive now we won’t have then. One of the great keys to successful petitioning is receiving when we pray. “Therefore I say unto you whatsoever things ye desire, when ye pray . . . The King James says “believe that you receive” but the Greek says “believe that ye receive them and it shall be given unto you.”

And here John says if we ask anything according to his will we know that he hears us. And if we know he hears, whatsoever we ask we know that we have the petitions that we desired of him. One of the devil’s favorite tactics is to get us to put off to some future moment the thing that we ought to appropriate now.

In my book Faith to Live By I illustrate this with a story that’s always been very vivid to me. As a young man about 20, a student at Cambridge University, the university gave me a grant to go to Greece because I was studying Greek philosophy and culture to look at the monuments and the statues and all those things. I went with another friend of mine who is the son of the vice chancellor of Cambridge University, a close friend of mine. We stayed in a hotel in Athens. After about three days I got tired of ruins, antiquities an all the rest and decided I’d seen enough of them. So, we had a good time in Greece!

Every day when we walked out of our hotel there was a little group of shoe blacks on he sidewalk waiting to polish our shoes. If you’ve never been in the Middle East or the Mediterranean countries you won’t understand this. But in those countries shoe blacks are determined. I mean, they are going to polish your shoes whether you want it or not. It’s even worse in Cairo. So, they’d say, “Shine your shoes?” or “Polish your shoes?” or whatever it is. We would say in Greek no, "ookh!". When you say no in Greek you say "ookh!" and you throw your head back at the same time. They polished our shoes anyhow. So this wasn’t working.

One morning my friend thought up a scheme and when we got out of the hotel door and the shoe blacks approached us and said, “Polish your shoes?” he said "aurion". How many of you can guess what "aurion" is? Tomorrow, that’s right. And that took them off their guard. We got by the without having our shoes polished because they didn’t quite know, do we or don’t we?

I think many, many times when you’re on your way to appropriate God’s blessings the devil says "aurion", tomorrow. You just hesitate for a moment and you don’t appropriate. The scripture says what is the accepted time? Now. People say today is the accepted time. It doesn’t say that. It says now is the accepted time. Now is the day of salvation. God lives in eternal now. When you need God it’s never yesterday and never tomorrow, he never says “I was” and he never says “I will be,” he always says “I am.”

The third principle is God’s promises are the expression of his will.