Let there be light God proclaimed as recorded in that first chapter of Genesis. John has told us that God is love so letting light burst forth is love in action. As we all know God is an eternal being outside time and thus found in every now. In our spirits we hear Him say let there be light in every now manifested in us as desires, wants and willing.
Praying is responding to His love-drive and cooperating with Him in manifesting His love-will in everything. Prayer is not us calling Him into action as He somehow needs to be persuaded to intervene on our behalf. No, prayer is simply moving in harmony with His initiative to let light dispel darkness. In faith we recognize God pressing us through in love and perfection towards His gracious ends concerning His creation.
When that inner urge drives us towards praying for a person we, from our position, 'randomly' meet on a street it often seems to us that we are persuading God into revealing Himself to that person. Our prayer will then lack the convincing and sure faith that what we prayed will actually happen. But when we recognize that we are merely responding to God's love-drive in us we can pray with conviction.
Our greatest challenge is perhaps that we do not perceive ourselves as reliable and trustworthy sons in regards to our desires and willings. Both our prayer life and those actions we a desire towards will suffer when that is our outlook. The thing is that we cannot by our own powers become reliable sons. God has made us reliable sons in Christ owing to the fact that He is our life.
To make righteous judgments is to see beyond appearances and trust our spirit union with God and that everything in us is an outworking of His self-for-others love nature. We are made joint heirs with His Son. This is not something we will become, but already are. A co-heir is a reliable and responsible person. This is something we progressively come to know as we go from glory to glory.
A crucial aim for God in His dealings with us is to reveal this tremendous fact to us. How does He do that? It is by letting our own attempts at becoming something we already are fail miserably. It is by taking us through a season where our vanity is made into nothing and our imagined self-reliance is exposed as an illusion. At the bottom utterly helpless we are finally in a position to acknowledge what He has already done for us in Christ.
Far too often we pray with a conviction that our prayers merely are meeting some selfish ends, and as a consequence our prayers do not accomplish much. However, the branch-vine relationship means that we are conduits manifesting God in our daily living. He takes the initiative and we respond. Faith is receiving and faith is recognizing what we have received. Let us make righteous judgments concerning ourselves and trust ourselves as God trusts us.
Jesus final word to us in this context is: You can do nothing without me. That gives us a platform to pray boldly and with conviction in all matters expecting to see our prayers answered in glory. To step out of our mistaken identity as selfish and that we are not reliable sons is another facet of that obedience of faith to which Paul refers.
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