“Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.”
Mark 11:24 NIV
You might think this is referring to what some preach as the “health and wealth” gospel, but I think there is more to it. It shows the corrupt nature of man and our double mindedness.
Dallas Willard in his book, Renovation of the Heart explains it like this, that the heart apart from God is untrustworthy and shady. This leads to an incredible desire to try to be controlling of one’s life and circumstances based merely on what one feels rather than on what is right. This is totally obvious to God, consider these two verses, “’The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it? ‘ (Jeremiah 17:9), the prophet answers this question in the very next verse, ‘“I the Lord search the heart and examine the mind, to reward each person according to their conduct, according to what their deeds deserve.”’ (Jeremiah 17:10). In other words, we have to work hard to align our hearts with God’s will so we aren’t merely ‘going through the motions’ or ‘doing the right things for the wrong reasons’. God is easily able to see this duplicity.1
One of the ways to align our hearts with God is to spend time alone with Him in prayer, and in His word. Without hearts that want what God wants, we won’t be able to bear the fruit that God wants us to produce, Jesus says this in John 15:5:
‘ “I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing. ‘
John 15:5
In this mode of living with a heart apart from God you have doubts. Doubts about if what you are doing is right, doubts about if your choices or lifestyle will lead to the best outcome, because try as we might, no matter how much we pretend, we can’t truly trust our feelings:
‘But when you ask, you must believe and not doubt, because the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind. ‘
James 1:6 NIV
If we want a life and an eternity that is truly best for us, we have to trust God and align our hearts to His perfect will. The world and the age of postmodernism we are in tells us to ‘be true to yourself’ and that what we experience is what is real, rather than Scripture, or anything else for that matter.2 There is no greater recipe for self-destruction. We can’t trust our feelings, especially for short-term things. We have to trust that God is working for our good in all things, even when it’s not what we want.
James 1:8 points out that this duplicity makes us unstable in all we do. In order to not be double-minded and to remove doubt, we have to align our hearts with God. Again Willard points out that one of the main benefits of spiritual disciplines such as solitude (being alone with God), fasting (nourishment from God), worship (adoration) and service to others (without thinking of ourselves) — is that it surfaces the double-mindedness (duplicity) and animosity that are buried in our hearts so we can deal with them. This makes room for the Spirit to work in us and for the feelings we have that are normally obscured by circumstances and rationalizations to be understood for what they truly are: our will, not God’s will.3
If we want to do what is truly right, if we want to truly follow God’s will and not doubt when we ask God for help, we have to align our hearts, not just our actions, with God’s will.