The Believer is Different

I often find that the most complex and profound concepts in Scripture can be boiled down to simple statements.  Jesus did this when He said that the Law and the Prophets can be summed up in the call to Love God with all your heart and to love your neighbor as yourself (Matthew 22:37-40).  Obviously we can see the Divine wisdom of the Second Person of the Trinity in operation here as Jesus is taking the 39 books of the Old Testament and encapsulating them in 2 sentences.  He of course isn't negating the other themes of the faithfulness and guidance of God towards His chosen people in the Old Testament but is rather condensing the overarching narrative into what God means to produce in the human heart.  And that is love.  Both for Him and for our neighbors.

A similar thing could be said about the believer himself.  There are many things that could be mentioned about an individual who has faith in Jesus.  For example we understand that anyone who has true faith in Jesus has that faith because God chose them from before the foundation of the world and then used His Word on the lips of His servants to bring them to Himself (Ephesians 1:4-5).  The individual who has this faith has been born again and now is able to see the Kingdom of God (John 3:3).  The Holy Spirit has actually taken residence in that person's heart (Ephesians 1:13-14, 1 Corinthians 6:17) to bring conviction (John 16:8-11), further a deep-seated belief in the Gospel (Romans 15:13), create Godly character (Galatians 5:22-23) and enable them to manifest the power of God (1 Corinthians 2:4, 1 Corinthians 12, Romans 15:18-19).

More could be said about the believer than even what I wrote above but they can all be reduced to a single phrase - The believer is different.  The individual who has true faith in God is a markedly different person than one who does not.  This seems obvious but it has some pretty compelling implications.

Direct Access to God

The first of those is that we have unbridled access to God.  Romans 5:1 declares that the believer, who is justified by faith, now has peace with God.  This means that while in the past our sin had separated us from Him that we have now been reconciled to God (2 Corinthians 5:18-21).  And not only are we able to have a relationship but we are able to go into the depths of encounter with the Creator of the Universe and the Sustainer of Existence.  Hebrews 6:19 says that we are now able to enter within the veil - indicating that the most intimate access that one can have with God is available to any believer who would pursue Him in prayer.

Ask Whatever you Wish

The second is that we are the favorites of the most powerful Being in all of the cosmos.  We can imagine what it would be like to be the best friend of the richest man on the earth.  If we told him about some problem that we deeply cared about then it would be likely that he would use his resources to fix it.  If that would be true of a Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk how much more true would it be of God?  Jesus says in John 15:7 "If you abide in Me, and My words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you."  And such is really the truth without any caveats or explanations.  

Simple faith in the plain meaning of this along with many other verses like it (Matthew 17:20, Matthew 21:21, Mark 11:22, Luke 17:6, John 14:12-14, John 16:23-24) is the only way to approach promises of this nature.  I take issue with a version of Christianity that removes the Biblical promises regarding prayer because it wants to shield people from disappointment.  I disagree with this profoundly because it reduces Christianity down to just a set of future promises rather than a present reality and makes God more distant than He proclaims Himself to be in His Word.  As such the true pursuit of the believer is to tarry in prayer for Holy Spirit to give us the faith in God for a particular situation that brings about the answer¹.

Can't Enjoy Sin Anymore

The third is that the believer has had their conscience renewed (2 Corinthians 5:17) and is being daily empowered to overcome sin (Romans 6:14).  Kris Valloton has said that as a believer "we can still sin but we just can't enjoy it like we did when we were in the world".  The reason for this is that now that Holy Spirit lives inside of us that when we do something that offends Him we feel it.  The mysterious link between our spirit and the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 6:17) will often manifest in our conscience as we feel bad for doing something that we used to do all the time and not think twice about.

So to sum it up if you have faith in Jesus then you are weird.  Or perhaps maybe the word "peculiar" (1 Peter 2:9 - KJV) is more fitting.  But nonetheless we are different because we have been chosen by God, brought to faith by Him and as such stand out as light (Matthew 5:14) in the midst of darkness and as lilies in the midst of thorns (Song of Solomon 2:2).

Lord help us to see how much You have blessed us. 

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¹Dealing with disappointment is a difficult hurdle to deal with in the journey in growing in prayer.  I hope that in arguing for a simple interpretation of God's promises regarding prayer that I don't seem to be avoiding the issue of disappointment and unanswered prayers.  I have dealt with some myself and they are difficult things that I have to give to the Lord but as far as I can tell there are 3 reasons why prayers aren't answered. 

1) We ask with wrong motives and are asking for something that is not God's Will (see James 4:3).  Its important on this point that I state that I reject a notion of the Will of God as only being known after something happened.  For example if I break my leg tomorrow then that was the Will of God, if I win the lottery the next week then that was the Will of God and if I'm robbed the week after then that too was the Will of God.  I reject this because it makes it so that prayer is meaningless.  If God is going to do whatever He wills anyway then there is no point to pray.  Prayer gets reduced to an exercise of personal discipline that is meant to impact the individual rather than what the Bible declares it which is the simple approach of the individual to God to change the world.  Rather the Will of God is seen in the Lord's Prayer (Matthew 6:10) where God Wills everything that currently exists in Heaven to manifest itself on earth.  As such things like sickness, depression, unbelief, sin, being oppressed by demons are all not in the Will of God and when God's Kingdom manifests those things are destroyed.  Thus to pray according to the Will of God is to pray for those things. 

2) There is delay and God is calling us to perservere (Luke 18:1) 

3) We didn't pray with faith (Mark 11:24).  

In addition to these 3 Bill Johnson (who I greatly admire) says that he refuses to provide an explanation for something that God isn't explaining.  In other words if you prayed for something that you know to be His Will, prayed with perserverance and prayed in faith and it still didn't happen then the best answer is to say "I don't know why it didn't happen but I still know that God answers every prayer I pray in faith".  This is an incredibly difficult thing to do if it pertained to something you deeply cared about and as such I think its good to be honest with God about how this disappointment makes us feel.  But at some point we would need to be able to get past that hurdle and learn to live in the mystery of the fact that something didn't happen without giving an explanation as to why it didn't happen and not allowing it to change our simple faith in Scripture - which is that God answers the prayer of His people.  I pray that if I face a disappointment like this that God will help me to give it to Him and that He would restore a simple faith in His Word back to my heart.