Praying Without Knowing His Will

YOU CAN PRAY FOR what you want before you know whether God wills it. That is this chapter's claim. Many of us believe a single verse forbids exactly this: "Now this is the confidence that we have in Him, that if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us" (1 John 5:14 NKJV). John wrote that line to hand us confidence, and it says so in its own opening breath. We read it backward, as a condition with teeth. If He hears only the prayers that match His will, we reason, what becomes of the prayers that miss it? So we set out to map His will before we dare to ask, and I have watched that search swallow the prayer whole.

We pour enormous energy into discerning, as though asking outside His will were forbidden, or as though wanting the thing anyway would call some punishment down on our heads. People read books on finding God's will, then further books on why the first books did not work. They wait for a feeling of peace, or a sign, and while they wait the request sits unprayed, sometimes for years. I knew a man who wanted to ask God for a wife. For two years he asked instead for a sign that marriage was God's will for him, because he did not dare set the real request down without clearance first.

Underneath all the seeking, one fear is doing the quiet work: the fear of rejection. We are afraid God will say no. We are more afraid still that He will be displeased we asked at all, angry, ready to condemn us for wanting something so far off His will. Much of the teaching we grew up on sharpened that fear instead of healing it. We were told that real faith names its request with precision, that vagueness betrays doubt, so the man who no longer knows what to ask concludes he has no business asking. Some of us quietly stop praying about the thing we want most, and we call the paralysis reverence.

I need to be honest here, because people expect a clergyman to have this settled. Not all my prayers are answered the way I expect. More bluntly still, I do not always know God's will, not in distress, not in my most desperate pleading. I know the two things He has told all of us: He wills my sanctification and my thanksgiving. Beyond that, I have knelt over decisions with everything in me and risen no more certain than when I knelt down. People ask me in hospital waiting rooms and after funerals why God allowed something, or what He is doing, as though clergy were handed a key to His counsels along with the title.

We are issued no such key. I have checked. And I will say one thing more, because it needs saying by someone in my position. If anyone tells you they know a Christian who knows without fail what God's will is, and whose prayers are always answered exactly as he wanted, that is a lie. I use the word on purpose. I would be the biggest liar in the world if I ever claimed such a thing for myself.

Now consider how strange the fear is, because most of God's will is already published. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind. Love your neighbor as yourself. Forgive the ones who wrong you. Tell the truth. Care for the widow and the stranger. Give thanks in everything. When Scripture speaks of His will, it speaks mostly in commands this large and this plain, and no season of any life is exempt from them. What He has left unwritten are the particulars we agonize over: which degree, which city, whether to marry. Here is the part almost nobody told us. The particulars do not have to conflict with His will, or even with one another. Two different roads can run entirely inside His commandments. Studying at one college does not contradict studying at another. Becoming a doctor does not contradict becoming an engineer.

A young man once sat across from me in genuine torment over two college acceptance letters. He was convinced that one envelope held God's will and the other a mistake he would pay for the rest of his life, and he was praying desperately to be told which was which. I asked him whether either school would keep him from loving God or from loving his neighbor. He admitted that neither would. Then choose, I told him, and go with your whole heart. God does not hide His will from His child and then grow angry when the child guesses wrong. Whichever road you take within His commandments, He is already standing on it, and there is work of His waiting there that could never have been done on the other.

God even plants His directions inside us, in our gifts and in the things we love. As a boy I could not play the game every other boy on my street could play. I was so thoroughly hopeless at it that no special revelation was needed to tell me God had no professional career there in mind for me. He is free to work a miracle, of course, but until He does, I am not building my plans on it. What I loved, and what my hands could actually do, told me more about His intentions than all my anxious asking ever did.

Some requests do fall outside the lines, and Scripture is blunt about them. If I ask God to harm the man who wronged me, I am asking Him to contradict His own Word, and that prayer He will not hear. But that fence runs along the far edge of a very large field. Everything inside it, everything that does not collide with what He has said, you may ask for, and ask for freely, without a permission slip and without waiting to feel certain. We were taught to sort God's answers into three tidy boxes, yes, no, or wait, and many of us spend our lives waiting for the answer that seemingly never comes. I have come to believe God's answer can only ever be one thing: His will. In all my years of asking I have never received another kind, and I have never met the man who has.

A leper in the Gospel of Matthew shows how to ask without knowing His will, and he does it in a single sentence. He came to Jesus and said, Lord, if You are willing, You can make me clean. He left it to Jesus whether it was His will, and he asked anyway. Notice that he did not even hold his breath between the clauses. He did not pause after "if You are willing" to wait for full knowledge of Christ's will; the surrender and the asking came out in one breath. And he did not presume that because Jesus could make him clean, Jesus therefore would. A great deal of popular preaching runs the other way. God can do this, God can do that, the preacher announces, as though whatever God can do is also what He will do. God can do anything He wants; He is God. Whether He wills it is another question entirely, and the preacher who smears the two together is making promises on God's behalf that God never made. No wonder so many people who trusted those promises are disillusioned, including some who preached them.

The opposite error is subtler, and I fear it more than the timid-ity, because it dresses up as faith. Having asked, we bind our heart to the thing we asked for and quietly rename our own desire the will of God. We decide that the outcome which looks best by every earthly measure must be the one He intends, and then, when He permits something else, we feel that He has failed us. So tell God your desire, in all its detail; He can carry the detail. Then say the words His Son taught every one of us to say: Your will be done, not mine. After that, hold the desire loosely. Let your heart be bound to God alone, and to nothing He might give or withhold. And whatever He then allows to reach you, even when it cuts, receive it as from His hand, because nothing arrives in your life that has slipped past Him unnoticed.

Then there is the middle territory, where the hardest praying happens. You ask for healing, your own or that of someone you love, and the honest truth is that you do not know His will in the matter, and you may never know it as long as you live in this world. His will may be complete healing; I have watched it arrive. His will may be that the sickness stays, for your sanctification, to work something in you that could be worked no other way. It may even be, and this is the hardest sentence in this chapter, that He intends the whole affair for the good of someone else He loves, someone watching how you carry it, and you will go to your grave without ever being shown which. What then? Here is the sentence I most want to put in your hands. Complete knowledge of God's will is not a prerequisite to prayer. Complete surrender to it is. The surrender can be whole while the knowledge is still a fragment, and God has never once demanded the second before receiving the first.

Scripture sets two voices of faith side by side, and most of our praying happens somewhere between them. A young woman is called blessed because she believed the word spoken to her would be fulfilled. Three men at the mouth of a furnace tell a king their God is able to save them, and then, in the same breath, that even if He does not, they will still not bow. Both are faith. Faith is not the absence of caution, and it is not the guarantee of a miracle. It is the courage to trust God inside the ambiguity, on that trembling border where belief stops being a theory you defend and becomes a trust you carry. Trust is not proved by answers. It is proved by presence, and you kneel anyway, unable to see which of those two your story will turn out to be.

Scripture gives us a prayer made for exactly that territory, and the Gospel of Luke shows it to us twice. The first time it belongs to ten men Jesus met on the border between Samaria and Galilee. Leprosy had thrown them together. The law kept them outside the village and at a distance from every healthy person. Among them were Jews and at least one Samaritan, peoples who would never have shared a fire. Out on that road, disease had repealed all of it. Beneath the walls we build to keep each other out, they were simply ten human beings in need of God, and their affliction had taught them what good health hides from the rest of us. When Jesus came near, they did the only thing left to men who cannot come any closer. "And they lifted up their voices and said, `Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!'" (Luke 17:13)

Notice what is missing from that cry. Everyone within earshot knew exactly what these ten wanted; their skin announced it. Yet the word healing never crosses their lips. They name no outcome and prescribe nothing. They leave the shape of the mercy entirely to Jesus, appealing to a will they did not know and trusting it anyway. And that one cry is three prayers at once. It is a prayer of submission, because a man who asks for mercy has already conceded that the answer belongs to the One he asks. It is a prayer of distress, the undisguised sound of people at the very end of themselves. And it is a prayer that brings God's deliverance, because when His mercy comes, it comes as help. Ten men prayed it, and all ten were cleansed on the road before they ever reached the priests.

Years ago a traveler complained to me about that very cry, after visiting a church in a distant country. The believers there repeated Lord, have mercy over and over in their worship, dozens of times in a single gathering, and he took the repetition as proof of a weak faith. People truly confident that God hears them, he reasoned, would say it once and move on to specifics. The ten lepers answer him; they repeated nothing else. So do the early Christians who were marched into the arenas for the name of Jesus with that same cry on their lips, when there was nothing left in the world to ask for except mercy.

When you cannot discern God's will, you never need permission to ask for mercy. Mercy is the very thing He has declared Himself to be: "The LORD is merciful and gracious, Slow to anger, and abounding in mercy" (Psalm 103:8). You can pray that cry in a hospital corridor while the doors are still swinging, at a graveside, in bad traffic, in the middle of the night when the old fear comes back. It asks no preparation and no certainty about anything except who He is.

The second prayer Jesus gave us Himself. He told a story about two men who went up to the temple to pray, a Pharisee and a tax collector, and He aimed it, not at the openly unright-eous, but at the people most confident they were standing correctly before God.

And the tax collector, standing afar off, would not so much as raise his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, "God, be merciful to me a sinner!" (Luke 18:13)

His whole prayer is seven words. He brings no list of virtues, no account of how he came to be what he is, no plan for improvement. He does not ask God to correct him, or to help him do better next time. He asks for God Himself. He asks God to cross a distance he cannot cross from his own side. A few yards away stands the Pharisee, whose prayer is correct in every detail and closed at its core. Nothing he says is false; his fasting is real, his tithes are real. But every sentence curves back toward himself, until God is acknowledged only as a witness and never as the source of the goodness. His gratitude has become a quiet form of self-ownership, and even grace gets absorbed into achievement. No matter how well or how hard we serve the Lord, the Lord never comes to owe us anything. The tax collector has stopped presenting a version of himself that might be found acceptable. He is not obsessed with his guilt; he is anchored in the truth. He simply stands there, exposed, trusting entirely in who God is, because nothing can rest any longer on who he is. And Jesus says it was this man who "went down to his house justified rather than the other" (Luke 18:14). Salvation, it turns out, begins not where we are most impressive, but where we finally fall silent.

I have prayed the Pharisee's prayer myself, minutes after a mercy. Years ago, driving to church one morning, I stopped at a red light. When it turned green I rolled into the intersection, and a van came through the cross street against its own red light at high speed. It missed me by a few feet. I sat there while my heart pounded, and within a minute I was praying. Thank God I am not that person, careless with human life, probably drunk. Then I heard it. God had just spared my life, and my first whole sentence back to Him was an inventory of another man's sins. Every time we say, Thank God I am not, and fill in the blank, we have prayed the Pharisee's prayer. The blank fills itself: the other political party, the family whose life is a wreck, the driver of the van. I had turned a rescue into a verdict on a stranger.

I keep setting these two prayers in front of people who are paralyzed over the will of God. Neither prayer requires a single scrap of information the one praying does not already have. The lepers had no idea whether Jesus willed their cleansing. The tax collector had no assurance of how he would be received; his lowered eyes say as much. Both asked anyway, and both asked in a form that cannot miss, because God's mercy toward a person who turns to Him is always according to His will. There has never been an hour in any life in which "God, be merciful to me a sinner" was the wrong prayer.

When you can name your desire, name it plainly; God honors the courage of the asking, the way a good parent honors a child's bold request even when the answer is no. The mercy cry is for the hours when the naming fails, when you cannot tell whether to ask for the door to open or for strength to stand if it stays shut. Mercy covers both. Jesus said our Father knows what we are asking before we pray a word of it. Pray it over a diagnosis, over a decision you cannot see through, over a child who is far from you in every sense of the word, over your own divided heart.

Some hours are darker still, hours when even seven words are too many. I have sat beside a hospital bed holding a hand, meaning to pray aloud for the family's sake, and found nothing in me but my own breathing. If prayer depended on our knowing what to say, such hours would be prayerless ones. Paul says otherwise, in what may be the kindest verse in all his letters:

Likewise the Spirit also helps in our weaknesses. For we do not know what we should pray for as we ought, but the Spirit Himself makes intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered. (Romans 8:26)

Read the middle clause slowly: we do not know what we should pray for as we ought. Paul sets himself down inside that we, the same Paul who had seen the risen Christ. Ignorance of what to ask is not the exception in the life of prayer; it is the ordinary weather of praying people. It is so ordinary that God has made permanent provision for it within Himself. The Spirit takes the groan you could not force into a sentence and prays it for you. And the next verse closes the circle this chapter has been drawing. He who searches hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, "because He makes intercession for the saints according to the will of God" (Romans 8:27). According to the will of God. The very thing you do not know and cannot discover, the Spirit praying inside you knows perfectly, and is praying at this moment. Your uncertainty about God's will has never once interrupted that intercession. The sigh you sighed last night over a situation too tangled for words reached the Father already translated.

One danger remains, and I know it from the inside. It arrives after the asking. You lay the request before God in the evening, surrendered, and by noon the next day you have picked it back up without ever deciding to. You pray it again, and again at night, and each time it is a little less a prayer and a little more an inspection. Slowly the request turns back into your property, a project you are managing now with God's assistance. I have caught myself doing it, closing my fist around God's hand, so to speak, and trying to steer it toward the outcome I had privately settled on, and calling the grip faith. It is nearer the opposite of faith. Faith is total reliance on the living God. Faith entrusts the whole prayer to Him and stops anxiously monitoring what He is doing or failing to do about it. An obsession with the outcome can wear faith's clothes for a long time before you learn to tell the two of them apart.

So let go of your expectations about the result, and let them go on purpose. I stumbled into a practice for this, and I hand it to you as one man's medicine, since I distrust methods. When I feel the grip starting to form, I say something like this to Him:

Lord, I am going to rest for a while from praying about this, so that I do not become a slave to the outcome I am hoping for. I have already placed it in Your hands.

Then I rest. For days, sometimes weeks, I say nothing more about the matter, though I go on meeting Him about everything else. This carries no quarrel with persistence; there are requests I have carried back to God across decades, and the returning honored Him. But there is a repetition that is really surveillance, and I had to learn the difference on my own knees. A farmer who trusts his field does not dig up the seed every third morning to see whether anything has happened to it. The seed stays in the ground, doing whatever seeds do in the dark, and the farmer sleeps. Every time I have kept that rest honestly, I have found the request still safe where I left it, and myself far freer of it.

I owe you one more piece of honesty before we go on. Some evening you will pray just like this, the desire named, the surrender real, the mercy cry still warm in your mouth, and you will feel lighter than you have felt in months. Then a week will pass, and a month. The scan will come back unchanged, the door will stay shut, the phone will not ring, and heaven, as far as your ears can tell, will say nothing at all. I know that country. I have lived in it for years at a stretch, and it took me longer to understand what God is doing there than anything else prayer has ever asked me to learn. We cannot walk around it, so we will walk into it.