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How To Pray With The Faith of A Child

Encouraging Prayer / James Banks
The Truth Network Radio
January 18, 2025 12:00 pm

How To Pray With The Faith of A Child

Encouraging Prayer / James Banks

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January 18, 2025 12:00 pm

In this episode of Encouraging Prayer, James Banks and Robby Dilmore, discuss how to with child like faith. 

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This is the Truth Network. Encouraging Prayer. God offers an open invitation for His people to talk with Him at any time about anything. On Encouraging Prayer, Dr. James Banks, author of the bestselling Prayers for Prodigals and many other books on prayer, provides weekly biblical insight to help you learn to love to pray. And now, here's James. faith of a child, and I can relate, because a lot of people think I act very childish.

I resembled that comment, right? Yeah, yeah. I'm looking forward to this because it's a topic near and dear to my heart because it makes me think of my granddaughter. And my two-year-old granddaughter has a way of asking for things that is just so endearing that it made me think about the way I pray.

And, you know, I think that there's some really sound theology behind it, but here it is. So she loves these lollipops. My wife got these organic vitamin C lollipops for her. And every once in a while, you know, she'll come and ask for one, and she calls them bebops. And so she'll go up to my wife and she'll say bebop, and then she wants to say please, so she says please, and then she includes the answer that she wants from my wife or from me in the request. And she'll say okay, and then she includes her response to a positive answer, which is yay!

The way it works out is bebop, please, okay, yay! Right, which is complete faith, like I already know what you're going to say, and then yay! I mean, really. Right, right. And that's the faith of a child.

And it's this beautiful, you know, she knows that her grandparents love her, not that we always say yes to the lollipops, but come on, they have vitamin C, so how bad can they be, right? So, you know, it got me thinking about, do I pray that way? You know, do I pray with that sense of anticipation, you know, not demanding, first of all, but please, you know, recognizing I've already received so much from God through my salvation in Jesus.

It's, you know, it's not about me, but I need to ask him reverently. And then, you know, anticipating an answer, not in a, you know, name it and claim it, I'm demanding this sort of thing, but believing that God is absolutely able to do it. And then kind of celebrating that fact at the same time, you know, because I really think that praying with the faith of a child, I mean Leilani has given us a great example, kind of boils down to that sort of approach, don't you? Oh, and I, you know, just today, actually, I was praying with a friend, dear friend, who unfortunately, she lost her first daughter about a year ago.

She is now battling with her second daughter, has one of the really worst kind of brain tumors. And her question was, is God punishing me? And fortunately, you know, and just, you know, and my wife in response to that said, of course she thinks that, everybody would think that. And I said, well, baby, you know, first John chapter four, I think it's verse 18, it says, perfect love drives out fear because fear has to do with punishment. In other words, when you realize, just like your granddaughter does, that how much he loves you, you know this does not have to do with punishment, right? And it's a difficult thing, but this is real life for all of us, right?

All the time. Underneath our prayers is a foundation of some type of belief in what God is doing. And yeah, there's that understanding, and we can't pray without that, because that's sort of the basis of faith itself. But, you know, in this instance, it has to do with, I think, the fact that sometimes we don't expect much from God when we ask. And that's one of the reasons why we don't ask much, because we've all had those experiences of asking for things that we knew were good things. As I'm sure your friend did, you know, when she was praying for the healing of her daughter, I'm sure she asked God for that.

But then it didn't happen. And so what we can do is we can take that and sort of multiply it across the whole of our asking with God. And I don't think that that's what he wants us to do. I think he wants us to keep coming back, recognizing, as Jesus said, that just as you, though you were evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, so will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him. And then the whole notion of keep on asking, keep on seeking, keep on knocking. Or, as Luke puts it when Jesus tells a parable, that they should pray and never give up. I think that never giving up is key, that we need to keep praying, and we need to recognize that it warms God's heart when we do, and especially when we pray with faith and simply celebrate who he is, a God who gives good things when we do. And, you know, not that that means that we're going to get everything that we ask for.

Of course we don't. But at the same time, in the asking, God himself meets us, you know, and that's what matters. Even if the answer is no to my granddaughter and she gets upset about it, I'm not going to spank her or chide her for that.

I'm going to pick her up and comfort her tears, because, you know, that's the loving thing to do. And that's where I believe God meets us as well, when we pray with this faith of a child. Yeah, anybody that's ever asked their child to go to bed has experienced this. Five more minutes, you know, it'll turn to 20 minutes, just five more, you know, 30 minutes, just five more minutes, you know.

And at some point you actually do have to say no. And, you know, there is that moment, but then tomorrow night we're going to go through the same routine, right? That's faith. They have faith. It's all right if I close this in prayer.

It's so good. I think if you can include those four elements, let's hear you do it. Father, we do ask you, we ask, Lord, would you allow us, would you give us that gift of faith? That faith, Father, could we have it please? Okay. Yay! Amen. You can hear more from Pastor James by visiting his website, jamesbanks.org, or by visiting Peace Church in Durham, North Carolina. May God bless you and encourage you as you pray. This is the Truth Network.
Whisper: medium.en / 2025-01-18 14:24:23 / 2025-01-18 14:27:36 / 3

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