Verse of the day · October 10
What does "according to his will" mean in 1 John 5:14?
You may not press a claim on God. What he has willed, you may ask as often as you like.
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And this is the confidence that we have in him, that, if we ask any thing according to his will, he heareth us:
1 John 5:14
There is a promise in this sentence — that God hears a man when he prays — and there is a clause sitting inside it that looks like the place the promise gets taken back. If we ask any thing according to his will. John is nearly done writing his letter when he sets the two of them down together. One sentence earlier he tells his readers that he has written what he has written so that people who believe on the name of the Son of God may know that they have eternal life. The confidence in the sentence that follows comes off that knowledge. And this is the confidence that we have in him. The word behind confidence covers both getting in and speaking up: liberty of access, liberty of speech, and the nerve to use it.
Two questions are folded into that clause: to ask according to God's will is to ask for what agrees with it, and to ask in a way that agrees with it. What a man asks for is not measured against God's hidden intentions. His purposes and decrees are unknown, and where one of them has been made known it is not to be prayed against, because it can never be made void. God had declared that the Israelites in the wilderness were not going to enter Canaan, and Moses was not to pray against it; God had declared that he had rejected Saul from the kingdom, and Samuel was not to pray against that. Not everything declared is barred from prayer, though. God has said beforehand, in prophecy, some of what he means to do — the glory of his church is one of those things — and we should pray that he would hasten it in his own time, and we are sure of being heard.
What the clause is actually about is the will God has revealed, and the revealed will turns out to be an inventory. Every grace is laid up in Christ and every spiritual blessing is with him. The covenant of grace has been settled in every part of it, its mercies are certain, and great and precious promises stand inside it — and all of that is stored up for the use of God's people. Ask for any grace, or any supply of grace, or any mercy lying in Christ or in the covenant or in one of the promises, and so far as the thing asked for goes it is already according to the will of God, and a man may be assured of having it sooner or later. God's word is a revelation of his will in the things that concern a man's salvation, and everything he has promised there we are justified in expecting. Faith and prayer are not there to advance claims on God boldly; what we find promised, that we may plead. The difference between the two is whether God promised it first.
Then there is how a man comes, and it is not a technique. He comes in Christ's name, mentions his righteousness, asks for his sake. He asks in faith, in earnest, honestly; with reverence, with humility, in submission to God's will — and he keeps asking. And he is not left to it alone: the Spirit teaches him inwardly, and it is the Spirit in him who asks according to the will of God. He is not always a good judge of what is best for him; he never perceives it as clearly as his Maker does, and in many things he might be wholly mistaken.
Set against all that freedom is a limit, and it is the proper and necessary limitation in all prayer. God has not promised to grant anything contrary to his will, and it would not be right of him to do it. That is what the limit shuts out. What it leaves in is wider than a man would guess: many things are known to be in accordance with his will, when they are sought in a proper manner — among them the forgiveness of sins, comfort in trial, deliverance from the evils that beset us, and salvation at the last — a range of subjects of petition wide enough to gratify the largest wishes of prayer. Then the limit narrows again at three tests, which God applies rather than the man. One is what he sees to be best for us, which is the judgment we are not always good at. One is what it would be consistent for him to give: a man cannot ask him to hand out a blessing in violation of the laws he himself ordained. Better that an idle man have no harvest, though he prayed for one, than that God should break the rule by which a harvest rewards work and put a miracle in a lazy man's hands. And one is the good of the whole, in which the asker's own interests are counted along with everybody else's. In a family a child might ask for a favour whose granting would cut across what the others are owed, and a just father would of course keep it back.
The particular thing asked for may not be granted. A prayer can be right in what it asks and right in the way it is asked and the thing still not be given, and the reason will be on God's side, in his own wisdom, and not a fault in the asking. None of those three tests turns on the asking either, and that is the thing to hold on to when nothing comes. The prayer is not disregarded, and sooner or later there is a real answer to it; the confidence for that rests on the faithfulness of God, who has said he hears. But a real answer does not always take the same shape, and God chooses which one. Sometimes the thing itself comes, only late: delayed and then granted, and a delay can run months, or years. A delay may be there to try the man's faith; or his own condition may not yet be one in which having the thing would be best for him, so an affliction he has prayed about is not lifted yet; or granting it at once would not fit the arrangements God has made for other people. And sometimes the thing itself does not come at all, and what is given instead is the thing most for his good. Either way he is heard in God's time, though not always in his own, and in God's way, which is always best even when it is not the way he had in mind.
What the man has straight away, every time, is the hearing. To know that a petition has been heard and accepted is as good as knowing it is answered. Before the mercy asked for is ever handed over he is as sure of having it, in God's own time and way, as if he had it in his hand already. God cannot deny himself. Not one prayer offered in faith, according to his will, is lost; and when the thing asked for comes to pass he can recognise it as what his praying obtained, rather than as something that fell out by chance.
No man could hope for good who thought his own wishes a better guide than the will of God, and so a promise to prayer bounded and limited by that will is among the most desirable arrangements there are. Inside those limits it is true beyond a question that he does hear and answer prayer. The asking exists in the first place because we do not yet have what we hope for, and it comes out of faith; prayers that ask only what agrees with God's will cannot be useless. What was promised may be pleaded, and pleaded hard, and pleaded again. So the clause that reads like the catch is where the certainty was all along: what a man asks for, if God promised it, is already what God wills, and he knew that before he opened his mouth.
Drawn from Matthew Henry, John Gill, the Jamieson-Fausset-Brown commentary, Adam Clarke, Albert Barnes and the Geneva Bible notes. How these teachings are made