Take a few seconds, and think about what you need, right now. Go ahead I’ll wait…
Got it? You may have at some point shared this need with someone. Perhaps a Christian brother or sister. Someone who claims to be a believer in Jesus, and they may have given you this advice, or something similar to this: Oh, just keep praying, just keep pressing in. Just keep at it. You’ll get your answer! Remember that God already knows!
It sounds like good advice, and I’m sure that such advice is given with the very best of innocent intentions, but what does it actually mean? And also, what picture is this advice really painting of God? Well, in this study today, we’re going to explore that, and what it really means when Jesus said that the Father in Heaven, your Father, already knows what you need.
If you’ve been reading the Bible for any length of time, you may be familiar with the words of Proverbs 4:23, which counsels us to be diligent to guard our heart, because the “issues of life” flow from it. And this has been interpreted to mean many different things… but if we aren’t sure what it means then we also can’t be sure if our heart is guarded properly!
Thankfully, the scriptures do not leave us guessing about how to guard our heart, and the benefits of doing so; and as we examine this today, we can see that it is not only simpler to guard our heart than we might think at first, but also incredibly beneficial for us to do so.