“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 ask, and receive not, because ye ask amiss, that ye may consume it upon your lusts.” (James 4:2-3)
I am going to offer you what I pray for myself, I believe these things to be in the will of God for I ask for them for His glory, not for my own vainglory. They help me, or better yet I should say He helps me to better understand His in my life, how I can become profitable, as much as any man can, for the Kingdom of God, but I also offer another thing here, a warning. “For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.” (Eccl. 1:18)
The first one then would be for wisdom, a promise from James 1:5, “If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him.”
“Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom: and with all thy getting get understanding.” (Prov. 4:7)
Recall that verse in Ecclesiastes, and now read Isaiah 53:3, “He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not.” Solomon was not the wisest man to ever live my friends, our Lord Jesus Christ was. With wisdom you will understand the inverse of Matthew 5:6, “Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.” For the Lord will show you the unrighteousness of this cursed earth, and the hearts of men who are not giving God the glory. Pray for wisdom, if you want sorrow and grief, if you want frustrations and heartache, if you want to hunger and thirst for righteousness continually.
I pray for Spiritual discernment. “For this cause we also, since the day we heard it, do not cease to pray for you, and to desire that ye might be filled with the knowledge of his will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding;” (Col. 1:9) Spiritual discernment is exactly what it says, the ability to discern Spiritual matters, yet it means much more. The Lord will bless you with the ability to understand His word clearly, what He means when he speaks, in context and within the subject matter. You will be able to see the things that are not only glossed over by many, but not contemplated as important for the servant of God to be profitable. You will see false prophets for what they are, you will understand the misinterpretations that many have believed to be the truth, you will be given ears to hear and eyes to see when the Lord begins to bless you with Spiritual discernment.
Next would be for a heart that can discern between good and evil, no less than what King Solomon prayed for, what he asked the Lord for that night. The Holy Spirit will show you the good and the evil, and you will be able to tell the difference. Subtlety is Satan’s greatest advantage, and although we have the Holy Spirit within us, many still have difficulty discerning good from evil, I only need to point to the ninety plus percent of all the churches that locked their doors, asked their congregations to wear a mask and practice social distancing to prove this point. They could not recognize the evil.
I cannot emphasize this next one enough, and in its own regard it embodies the previous three mentioned, I pray to the Lord to show me truth. Not only His truths, but the truth in everything I see, everything I read, the people I meet, what I hear, and even of myself. If the Almighty does not show me truth, I will never know the truth, without Him it is impossible. The verse is true, “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” (John 8:32) Pilate said, “What is truth” in passing, almost as a reflective statement, in a way that makes me think that he was longing to know truth but thought it impossible to grasp. You cannot do that if you ask for this, it must be asked for in all humility, in the greatest of reverence, and when it is shown to you, when the Lord reveals to you any truth, it must be accepted as such, without questions.
There is one final thing I pray for myself, but not very often, for I do not feel worthy of asking the Almighty for it. It is to be conformed into the image of His Son. If you understand the hesitancy here, then there is no need to expound upon it further, if you do not understand, then you never will.
Wisdom, Spiritual discernment, a heart that can discern between good and evil, truth, and to be conformed into the image of the Son of God. This is not asking amiss, these are in the will of God, and solely for the glory of God.
