“Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.” (Phil 4:6-7)
Since the battle is fought in prayer, it stan4 ds to reason that the enemy spares no resource when it comes to keeping us defeated and deflated with our prayer lives. We need to be aware of the schemes he uses to keep us foolishly forfeiting His functional help and amazing grace. Of course condemnation and unworthiness are amongst the top fiery darts that prevent us from boldly approaching His throne of grace. We are forgetful that to approach God “in Jesus name” is to come based on His track record, not ours. To pray in His name is to say we are standing in all that He is. It means we are acting in His behalf with Himself in us while we are doing it! It means that we are agreeing with our adversary Satan about our unworthiness to stand before His throne. It’s like saying, “I know my record. But I am not here by myself. I am in Jesus and He is in me…we are one! I am here in His name because of His worthiness, purity, and record. Now get behind me, I have business to do.” (J. Taylor 1977) Another reason we may feel unable to pray may be because before approaching Him we have forgotten to honestly communicate, confess, repent, and forgive ourselves and others of our “faults, slips, false steps, offenses, and sins.” (Jas. 5:16 AMP) First John 3:21 says, “If our hearts do not condemn us, we have confidence before God and receive from him anything we ask, because we obey his commands and do what pleases him.”
Many times we don’t pray because we are afraid of being disappointed. Past prayer “failures” from approaching Him with things such as double-mindedness, fear of man, a lack of abiding with Him, and wrong motives may be keeping us in a timid and rejected state—not coram Deo! But when we live with child-like abandonment before His face, God intends for this verse to be our regular experience: “This is the confidence we have in approaching God: that if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us. And if we know that He hears us—whatever we ask—we know that we have what we asked of Him.” (1 Jn. 5:14-15)
Adapted from the Coram Deo Secret
http://www.marisarickerson.com/coram-deo.html
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