“He that moves and acts according to a law of his own, offers a manifest wrong to God, the highest wisdom and chiefest good; disturbs the order of the world; annuls the design of the righteousness and holiness of God. The law of God is the rule of that order he would have observed in the world; he that makes another law his rule, thrusts out the order of the Creator, and establishes the disorder of the creature. But this will be more evident in the fourth thing. (4) Man would make himself the rule of God, and give laws to his Creator. We are willing God should be our benefactor, but not our ruler; we are content to admire his excellency and pay him a worship, provided he will walk by our rule. This commits a riot upon his nature; to think him to be what we ourselves would have him and wish him to be. Psal 50:21. We would amplify his mercy and contract his justice. We would have his power enlarged to supply our wants, and straitened when it goes about to revenge our crimes. We would have him wise to defeat our enemies, but not to disappoint our unworthy projects; we would have him all eye to regard our indigence, and blind, not to discern out guilt; we would have him true to his promises, regardless of his precepts, and false to his threatenings. We would form anew the nature of God according to our models, and shape a God according to our fancies, as he made us at first according to his own image; instead of owning and obeying him, we would have him obey us; instead of owning and admiring his perfections, we would have him strip himself of his infinite excellency, and clothe himself with a nature agreeable to our own. This is not only to set us self as the law of God, but to make our own imaginations the model of the nature of God.” (Stephen Charnock)
This paragraph serves as an excellent mirror for people to hold their hearts before and see what their motives and intents are in prayer. We are so used to thinking that we do God a favor when we do our religious duty of going before Him and asking Him to do things for us according to the desires of our selfish hearts. However, we don’t see anything like that in the teachings of Jesus on prayer. We are told that we are to pray according to His will (I John 5:14). We are told in John 15:7 what to do before we obtain what we ask for: “If you abide in Me, and My words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.” Yet if we are only asking for things according to our own wills and they are not aligned with His, regardless of how much we want them and how much we think of our desires as coming from Scripture, we are praying according to a law of self rather than His wisdom and rather than according to the Chief Good. It is possible, and most likely the vast majority of prayer is performed in this way, to make ourselves the one that sets out the rule and then try to get God to conform to us.
When we go to prayer we know that we want God as our benefactor, yet while we tell children that they should not whine if the parent says no, yet we whine when God does not give us the answer our selfish hearts desire. We will happily worship and pray as long as God gives us the desires of our hearts. But surely this shows us that something is wrong. It does not take a lover of God to pray to a benefactor and ask for things or to adjust circumstances so that they are favorable to me, it only takes a heart that is dead in sin and self to do that. It is easy to have pleasant and joyful affections and so think we worship God when things are going according to the desires of self. But are we so ready to worship when things are not pleasant? Are we so ready to pray for His will to be done when His will is for us to suffer? It is easy to pour out platitudes to Jesus for saying “yet not My will, but Yours be done” (Luke 22:42) in the Garden when facing the cross. It is easy to preach to others what they should do. But how hard it is to worship/pray when life is hard and the heavens seem like brass. Job bowed in worship when all things were taken away, yet we want God to do our own will instead of ours bowing to Him. True prayer involves our bowing to God and asking Him to work His will in us. True prayer involves seeking the will of God as our desire and truly seeking for His will to be done. True prayer is to come to Him with broken hearts so indeed we will not be asking Him to obey us but instead we are asking Him to work obedience to Him in us. If our hearts are not broken when we pray, and we are not seeking broken hearts in order to pray, our prayers are nothing more than an expression of the idol self and we are asking God to bow down before us. Let us not imagine that prayer is a simple little thing that can easily be performed. Self must be denied or our prayers are not to God but are to the idol of self.
God Loves... Himself 
Leave a comment