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Hezekiah’s Prayer

Hezekiah’s Prayer is Part 2 of the Kings of All Creation series (Josiah’s Sanctification is the first part). This book teaches us about prayer from the life of King Hezekiah, who brought two key prayers before the Lord.

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Here is an excerpt from Hezekiah’s Prayer

Learning Objectives

Prayer is at once a simple task which a person new to Christ utters without deep understanding of what it really is or does, while at the same time is also so complicated that a lifelong study on prayer still fails to give us total understanding of what it is or how it works.

This little book is a primer to get us started with some basics on prayer. Our intention is to start with the easiest of prayers, “God, be merciful to me, the sinner! (Luke 18:13)” and conclude the book understanding what a life of prayer can mean for Christians as we walk our lives daily before God.

I have called upon You, for You will answer me, O God; Incline Your ear to me, hear my speech. (Psalm 17:6)

To Be Heard in Prayer

The first book in this series, Josiah’s Sanctificationi, taught us the importance of being sanctified and how we can achieve being like Christ in our Christian walk. Sanctification generally precedes our prayers because without sanctification in the life of a believer, God will not hear us:

If I regard wickedness in my heart, The Lord will not hear. (Psalm 66:18)

To understand this concept completely, we need to start with a few principles. First, a person who is not yet a Christian who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved:

And it will come about that whoever calls on the name of the Lord will be delivered (Joel 2:32; Acts 2:21, Romans 10:13)

This initial prayer, said with faith and belief, ushers us into the kingdom of heaven. Without this prayer, we cannot be saved, and a sinner who has just confessed their need for Christ is hardly sanctified. Like the thief on the cross crucified with our Lord, once we see the depth of our sin and call on Jesus for salvation, such a prayer saves us:

One of the criminals who were hanged there was hurling abuse at Him, saying, “Are You not the Christ? Save Yourself and us!” But the other answered, and rebuking him said, “Do you not even fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? And we indeed are suffering justly, for we are receiving what we deserve for our deeds; but this man has done nothing wrong.” And he was saying, “Jesus, remember me when You come in Your kingdom!” And He said to him, “Truly I say to you, today you shall be with Me in Paradise (Luke 23:39-43).”

Once we are saved, we have the command from Christ to begin walking with God. We will not discuss that matter in great detail here since that was the thesis of the first book in this series. When we accept the title of ‘Christian’ we are thus commanded to walk in a manner worthy of His name:

So this I say, and affirm together with the Lord, that you walk no longer just as the Gentiles also walk, in the futility of their mind (Ephesians 4:17).

If we are constantly living our life outside His will and teaching, we are not even doing the simple first things He calls us to do. Our calls on Him will go unanswered:

Then they will call on me, but I will not answer; They will seek me diligently but they will not find me, Because they hated knowledge And did not choose the fear of the Lord. (Proverbs 1:28-29)

The important first learning objective to be heard in prayer is to be sanctified by studying the Scriptures and hiding the Word in our hearts that we may not sin against God (Psalm 119:11).

Prayer, Change, Us, and God

As we embark on our study of prayer, we need to ask to what end we are praying. Can our prayers change the path of an immutable God? Are our prayers more about bringing our will in alignment with His will? If God knows all things already, why are we praying at all? I hope to answer these questions now.

One of the attributes of God described in theology is His immutability. This word literally means unchangeable, or without variance. The doctrine means God is the same yesterday, today, and forever as extracted from Hebrews 13:8 among other verses in the Bible. The question before us now is whether our prayers can change an unchangeable God.

This difficult answer is not entirely settled in the world of Christendom, but I will do my best to answer the questions based on my understanding after weighing many arguments on the subject from many different theologians.

First, God is never informed of anything we need, even as we pray (1 John 3:20). There is no thing in this world He does not already know, yet He still commands us to come to Him in prayer (Ephesians 6:18), even when we do not know how to pray in a given situation (Romans 8:26). We can only assume He calls for us to pray as a test. Are we going to be obedient to bring even the most difficult tasks to His attention in prayer?

C.S. Lewis writes an illustrative scene about prayer and God’s sovereignty in The Magician’s Nephewii. Digger, Polly, and Fledge stop to camp on the way to the garden to pluck the fruit at Aslan’s request. As they stop, Digger and Polly announced their hunger and say they should have asked Aslan for food to take on the journey. Digger says the great lion should have known they needed food, but Fledge rebukes him saying that Aslan is probably a person who likes to be asked for things, even though he already knows what is needed.

God knows what we need but when we withhold the request, he withholds our needs as a generality. This means that somewhere in the mystery of God’s sovereignty He makes ready what we need and delivers it upon our requests. I do not think God’s mind is changed, even in the situation we will see later when Hezekiah receives a different answer from God about his illness before and after his prayers.

Taken together, we cannot change God’s mind, but somewhere in the mystery of our faith we are given our desires that are in alignment with His will. This is what our prayer is for God: He wants us to ask for what He already knows we need, as a test of our obedience. So our prayers do not change God, they test us if we respond to His commands. Or put another way, prayer is about changing us by bringing our desires into alignment with God’s will.

Prayer and Worship

Our ultimate purpose is to worship God. We worship Him when we study our Scriptures, when we attend a church service or another gathering of believers to study the Word, when we sing praises, and as it relates to this book, we worship God when we pray.

Worship is to have fellowship with God, and we have no better direct fellowship than when we talk to Him. Prayer is a two way conversation, not just us listing off a lot of requests to make our lives better and happier as if we were perched on Santa’s lap awaiting the promises of Christmas. Instead, prayer is spending time with God, communicating, conversing, and waiting. While we do not generally audibly hear Him speaking back to us, we sense His providence in our life, and we feel His love as we continue on, knowing He has heard us.

When we approach prayer as a part of our worship, we are less concerned with our own desires and more concerned in spending time with Him. Our prayers can take the form of supplication, which is what we would call ‘prayer requests’, but there is a lot more to having a divine conversation than Him giving us things. In fact, when we think of our own personal, earthly desires for our worldly pleasures, that is the type of prayer He will not answer:

You ask and do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, so that you may spend it on your pleasures (James 4:3).

To contrast this, worship occurs when we draw near to Him and seek to please God in our life. The natural consequence of fellowship is exultation in the glory of God:

Draw near to God and He will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners; and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Be miserable and mourn and weep; let your laughter be turned into mourning and your joy to gloom. Humble yourselves in the presence of the Lord, and He will exalt you (James 4:8-10).

When we approach the throne of God with a humble heart, seeking to please Him and to talk with Him, He exalts us beyond what we could imagine. To experience such closeness, start viewing prayer as a time to spend with God in conversation rather than going to Him to get your needs met.

Be Humble in Prayer

The final learning objective is to be humble in our prayers. It is very clear from many scriptures that pride is an offense to God, for even Satan was banished from heaven for being prideful in his attempt to usurp God (Isaiah 14:12-15).

Perhaps the best scripture about our need for being humble comes from the parable Jesus tells regarding the Pharisee and a tax collector praying in the temple (Luke 18:10-14):

Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood and was praying this to himself: ‘God, I thank You that I am not like other people: swindlers, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I pay tithes of all that I get.’ But the tax collector, standing some distance away, was even unwilling to lift up his eyes to heaven, but was beating his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, the sinner!’ I tell you, this man went to his house justified rather than the other; for everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but he who humbles himself will be exalted.

The ultimate point of this parable is we can have everything looking correct in our life in terms of perfect tithing, perfect church attendance, and all the other things that come with being a ‘good Christian person’ but if we do not approach God with the humility He asks us for, He looks away (Matthew 23:12).

The humility required in prayer is akin to the love required in the church service (1 Corinthians 13:3). While we may have everything the world looks at in line with the Bible, God is the one who truly knows our heart, so our chief objective is to be humble as we approach the throne of God.

Prayer and The Word

We have already mentioned that prayer to receive our own desires is not honored by God, but can we ask for absolutely anything? Jesus suggests we can:

Truly I say to you, if you have faith and do not doubt, you will not only do what was done to the fig tree, but even if you say to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and cast into the sea,’ it will happen. And all things you ask in prayer, believing, you will receive (Matthew 21:21-22).

Some have taken this verse to justify many of the faulty theologies including the health and wealth, name it and claim it gospels, but this expression is one of Jesus’s oft-used hyperbole. This particular section was dealing with unity. An examination of prayer shows us that we cannot move our local mountain with prayers, and that was not the point Jesus was making. His point was one of faith and obedience to the Word. In other words, when we pray, we must take out prayers to God based on what He has promised in His Word. Thus, we must pray the Word back to God and prepare our prayers as those which are aligned with God’s promises.

Chapter Summary

Our learning objectives for this chapter are to start with sanctification before we expect to have a deep prayer life with God. This means we are working hard to live for God before we desire to have Him give us things we ask for. Next, to understand why we pray, we need to consider that prayer is not about us getting what we want for our worldly pleasures, it is about bringing our will into alignment with God’s will. Third, we must approach prayer seeking to honor God in worship. Such prayer is not our one-sided begging of God, so consider prayer as both a conversation and a means of worship. Next, God must be approached with a humble heart. If we place our pride behind us and seek God fully, we will be heard in prayer, God will draw near to us, and we will receive His blessing. And finally, our prayers should reflect the Word God has given us in the Bible. Seeking things He has not promised is generally outside of His will.

iJosiah’s Sanctification, Thomas Murosky, 2019, Our Walk in Christ Publishing

iiThe Magician’s Nephew, C.S. Lewis, 1955, The Bodley Head

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