A note on the Scripture in this study: every verse is printed WHOLE. The words set in ordinary type are the ones this lesson leans on and emphasizes . . . the words in italics are the rest of the verse, printed so that nothing is ever handed to you as a fragment with the remainder missing.
Part One settled that prayer works . . . this part has to answer the question that comes right behind it . . . and it is the honest question, the one a thinking man asks on the way home.
If God already knows what I need before I ask . . . and if He has already settled what He intends to do . . . then what on earth is my asking adding to it?
I have heard that question put a dozen ways. Sometimes it comes out as a complaint. More often it comes out as a quiet EXCUSE for not praying much – because if the thing was going to happen anyway, then a man can sleep in.
And the Bible does not dodge it. God answers it Himself, out of His own mouth, in one verse in Ezekiel . . . and it is not the answer most people expect.
GOD SAYS IT IN HIS OWN WORDS
Now to get the weight of this verse - we have to see what God had just finished promising . . . read the six verses that come before it – because God is not making a small promise here. He is promising to gather a scattered nation, wash them clean, take out the stony heart, put His own Spirit inside them, and settle them in their land as His own people:
Ezekiel 36:24 — “For I will take you from among the heathen, and gather you out of all countries, and will bring you into your own land.”
Ezekiel 36:25 — “Then will I sprinkle clean water upon you, and ye shall be clean: from all your filthiness, and from all your idols, will I cleanse you.”
Ezekiel 36:26 — “A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh.”
Ezekiel 36:27 — “And I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes, and ye shall keep my judgments, and do them.”
Ezekiel 36:28 — “And ye shall dwell in the land that I gave to your fathers; and ye shall be my people, and I will be your God.”
I will. I will. I will. Seven times over in those verses . . . there is not one thing in that list that a man could do for himself, and not one thing in it that hangs on anybody being good enough . . . it is settled . . . it is promised . . . and it is God doing every bit of it.
And then comes the verse this whole lesson is built on:
Ezekiel 36:37 — “Thus saith the Lord GOD; I will yet for this be enquired of by the house of Israel, to do it for them; I will increase them with men like a flock.”
Read that slow. I will yet for this be enquired of. God has just promised the thing – and then He says that He will be ASKED for it before He does it.
That is the whole answer, and it came out of God's own mouth . . . the asking is not something we tack onto God's plan from the outside . . . the asking is IN the plan. God appointed the end . . . and God appointed the road that gets there . . . and praying is a piece of the road.
✍️ AUTHOR'S NOTE
Prayer does not change God’s plan – the idea is that Prayer IS God’s plan… Prayer does not change God – but prayer DOES change what happens… For example consider God announcing JUDGEMENT against Sodom and Gomorrah…
Genesis 18:23 — “And Abraham drew near, and said, Wilt thou also destroy the righteous with the wicked?”
Genesis 18:24 — “Peradventure there be fifty righteous within the city: wilt thou also destroy and not spare the place for the fifty righteous that are therein?”
Genesis 18:25 — “That be far from thee to do after this manner, to slay the righteous with the wicked: and that the righteous should be as the wicked, that be far from thee: Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?”
Genesis 18:26 — “And the LORD said, If I find in Sodom fifty righteous within the city, then I will spare all the place for their sakes.”
The idea here is that – God had already pronounced judgement – He did the same thing to the city of Nineveh in the days of Jonah… Nineveh was spared – Sodom and Gomorrah was not… So – what was the difference – Nineveh REPENTED – Sodom and Gomorrah DID NOT repent… Prayer for mercy was tied directly to the repentance of Nineveh… and when God “repented” of the evil He intended to do unto them – God did not change His definition of right and wrong – but what God DID do – as a direct result of Nineveh’s prayer of repentance - was to choose mercy instead of judgement. So – the path to MERCY – was through the prayer of repentance… while the path to JUDGEMENT was through a refusal to pray a prayer of repentance… Now if all of this was “set in stone” before hand – then what this teaches us is three things 1) that prayer does not change God – but it can change WHAT HAPPENS and 2) Prayer is part of God’s PLAN 3) we see by example the purpose that prayer serves… Prayer is the natural result of repentance – and repentance is the natural result of FAITH – and without faith we cannot please God… So – to please God is for us to experience mercy instead of judgment… Sodom and Gomorrah refused to repent – refused to pray – had no faith and as a result they experienced judgment which COULD have been changed to mercy. Nineveh on the other hand chose to repent – chose to pray – put FAITH in God and as a result they experienced MERCY when they could have experienced judgment… — C.T.
THIS IS NOT STRANGE — GOD DOES EVERYTHING THIS WAY
Now somebody will say that sounds like a game . . . it is not a game, and it is not even unusual . . . because God has run this world that way from the beginning, and we live inside that arrangement every single day without thinking twice about it.
God feeds every man on this earth. And He does it through a plow, and a seed, and a rain, and a harvest, and a man who gets up and goes to work. God ordained that you would eat . . . and He ordained the field you would eat out of.
God gives a man his health – and He gives it through sleep and food and a doctor. God saves souls – and He does it through a preacher and a Bible and somebody's witness. Paul asked the question flat out: how shall they “hear” without a preacher?
Nobody stands in the field and says, well, if God intends for me to have a crop then I do not need to plant . . . we understand it perfectly out there in the field . . . but we only get confused about it when we come inside and start talking about “prayer”...
God ordains the end. God also ordains the means . . . and the praying is the means which brings about THE END which God had determined…
The clearest picture of it in the Bible
Elijah is the best example there is, and James already handed him to us back in Part One . . . so let us go read the account itself, because the order of it is the lesson.
Three and a half years of drought, and then God speaks:
1 Kings 18:1 — “And it came to pass after many days, that the word of the LORD came to Elijah in the third year, saying, Go, shew thyself unto Ahab; and I will send rain upon the earth.”
So - the rain is settled. God said it. Elijah has it straight from the mouth of God, BEFORE one drop ever falls – and I will send rain upon the earth. Now watch what the man does with a promise he already has in his hand:
1 Kings 18:42 — “So Ahab went up to eat and to drink. And Elijah went up to the top of Carmel; and he cast himself down upon the earth, and put his face between his knees,”
He goes up on the mountain and puts his face between his knees. He already had the promise . . . and he prayed anyway . . . not because he doubted it – he prayed BECAUSE of the promise. The promise is what gave him something to ask for.
1 Kings 18:43 — “And said to his servant, Go up now, look toward the sea. And he went up, and looked, and said, There is nothing. And he said, Go again seven times.”
Six times that boy came back with nothing. And Elijah sent him again.
1 Kings 18:44 — “And it came to pass at the seventh time, that he said, Behold, there ariseth a little cloud out of the sea, like a man's hand. And he said, Go up, say unto Ahab, Prepare thy chariot, and get thee down, that the rain stop thee not.”
A cloud the size of a man's hand . . . that is the first thing God gave him after seven trips up that hill . . . and Elijah knew exactly what he was looking at, because he sent word to Ahab to hitch up before the sky had even darkened.
Now here is what I want us to see. The rain was promised, and the rain was prayed for, and both of those are in the same chapter. Elijah did not treat God's promise as a reason to quit praying. He treated it as the reason to start PRAYING.
📖 FROM THE PULPIT
As a young man – while still in high-school – I prayed for God to call me to preach… I understand that The Bible says – “This is a true saying, If a man desire the office of a bishop, he desireth a good work” (I Timothy 3:1) teaching us – that God puts ‘the desire’ in a man’s heart… but my point here is that THE DESIRE was present a long time before THE CALL… I knew that I wanted to be a preacher before I graduated high-school – I knew I wanted to be a preacher before I became an engineer – I knew I wanted to be a preacher before I married… but the call came several years AFTER I recognized the desire… Like Elijah – I knew what God had promised (to rain His blessings upon my life) – but that promise is what gave reason to keep going to Him in prayer – that promise is what motivated me to keep watching that cloud… — C.T.
AND THE OTHER SIDE OF IT — WHAT NOT ASKING COSTS
If the asking is the appointed means, then leaving the asking out has a cost. And James says it in the most straight forward sentence in the New Testament on this subject:
James 4:2 — “Ye lust, and have not: ye kill, and desire to have, and cannot obtain: ye fight and war, yet ye have not, because ye ask not.”
Ye have not, because ye ask not. Not because God is stingy . . . not because the thing was not His will . . . not because they were not good enough. They have not, because they ask not.
And look at what they were doing instead. Lusting. Fighting. Warring. Scheming to get it some other kind of way . . . that is a picture of a man working himself half to death going AROUND the front door . . . when the door was standing there unlocked the whole time.
The Lord put the same thing the other way around, in a more positive way:
Matthew 7:7 — “Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you:”
Matthew 7:8 — “For every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened.”
Every one of those is a command with a promise hung on the back of it. And every one of them starts with something WE do.
THE MAIL IN THE PO BOX
Here is the way I understand it best.
Down at the post office there is a box with your name on it, and the mail in that box is yours . . . it was addressed to you, it was paid for, and it was delivered. Nobody is going to take it back . . . but it will sit in that box until somebody walks down there and OPENS it.
The mail being yours is not the same thing as the mail being in your hand.
That is prayer. God has purposed the blessing – it is addressed, it is paid for, and it is already in the box . . . and then He says, I will yet for this be enquired of. Come get it.
And it does not shame a man to go get his own mail . . . the going does not earn the letter . . . but the letter stays in the box until he decides to go...
Simple truth: God appointed the blessing . . . and God appointed the asking . . . and He did not appoint one of them WITHOUT the other.
NOW LET ME GUARD THIS
Two ditches here, and both of them will wreck a man.
The first ditch is thinking my praying MAKES God “do something”. It does not. God is not moved off His purpose by anything I say – and Part Three is going to take that up all by itself, because it deserves the room… My praying does not add power to God… My praying is God's appointed way of handing me what He already purposed to give.
The second ditch is thinking my praying does not matter. And that one is just as wrong, and a good deal MORE COMMON – because it sounds humble . . . it is not humble. God said He would be enquired of. To decide that the asking makes no difference is to argue with a verse where God is telling us how He “does business”...
So we hold both. God is sovereign, and He appointed the asking . . . those two have never once been in a fight, except in our heads.
BEFORE YOU LEAVE
The question we started with was, if God has ALREADY made up His mind, what is my praying doing? And the answer is that praying is not something we do to change God's mind . . . it is something God appointed as the way His mind gets carried out.
A man who understands that will pray more, not less . . . because now the praying is not a long shot – it is the road. And God is the one who built the road.
Ye have not, because ye ask not. That is the saddest sentence in the whole study, and it is the easiest one to fix.
TRY IT THIS WEEK
One thing this week, and it is a small thing...
Take something God has already plainly promised in His word – not something you are hoping for, something He has already SAID. Wisdom, if any man lack it. Forgiveness, if we confess. Strength in the day of trouble… you get the idea…
Then ask Him for it anyway, by name, out loud . . . not because you doubt the promise . . . but because Elijah had the promise too, and he still put his face between his knees and prayed…
NEXT — Part Three: Do I Change God's Mind? The Bible says God is not a man that he should repent . . . and then it turns around and says that the LORD repented of the evil which he thought to do. Both of those are in the same book . . . we are going to take that apart word by word.
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