Peter Adam is an esteemed pastor and Bible teacher, and Prayerfulness is a book distilled from his years of experience in guiding people to know God better and deepen their relationship with him through prayer. We think you will be encouraged by the below passage from chapter two.

Our relationship with God

From Prayerfulness by Peter Adam, pages 27–29

A God who is ‘too small’ will lead to prayers that are too small. Our big, biblical God encourages big, biblical prayers.

God is loving, patient, attentive, forgiving, powerful, purposeful, gracious, and sovereign over the whole universe. God is our loving heavenly Father who loves to hear our prayers. His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, prayed to his Father when he was on earth, and now prays for us at God’s right hand. The Holy Spirit reminds us that we are children of God, prompts us to pray to our Father, and covers our ignorance in praying.

God constantly and intimately sustains and rules the universe, just as he sustains our lives, by his great power. He is omnipresent in his glory, his power, his common grace, and his love. Nothing happens except by the power of God. He sustains the universe through Christ, and for Christ. Yet he also sustains the universe in part by using secondary causes, including different elements of volition for animate objects, including all humans. This means that he sustains and rules the universe by using Christians as secondary causes.

Sometimes we are aware that this is happening—but often we are not aware that this is happening, or at least how this is happening. He uses our lives, our examples, our everyday human activities, our gospel freedom, our confidence in him, our sacrifices, our sufferings, our endurance, our sympathy, our words, our good works, and our prayers. He uses all these things and more for his good gospel purposes, and for his glory. He is such a good housekeeper that nothing is wasted in his economy. We pray with him, sustained and energized by him, as well as praying to him.

We have direct access to the presence of God through Christ, our high priest and mediator, who shed his blood on the cross to cleanse us from our sins. We pray ‘through Christ’, and he enables our prayers and carries them to our heavenly Father. Jesus’ blood and Jesus’ presence at God’s right hand enable our direct personal access to our great God.

But there’s even more to the picture. We not only have access to God through Christ; we have direct access to God because we are in Christ, and so we live and pray in him. God is in Christ, and we are in Christ (Col 2:9–10). God our Father hears our prayer, as we have already seen, “from the mouth of his Son”.*

Christ and the Holy Spirit intercede for us, so we attach our prayers to their prayers. This means that our prayers are not disabled by our weakness, our frailty, our sin, or our lack of knowledge. On the contrary, through Jesus Christ and through the Holy Spirit, our prayers ascend to the very presence of God: “The smoke of the incense, together with the prayers of God’s people, went up before God from the angel’s hand” (Rev 8:4). God graciously uses people to achieve his good purposes in the world. His command to humans, “be fruitful and increase in number” (Gen 1:28), shows that he uses us to achieve his will, as he also uses sea creatures and birds for the same purpose (Gen 1:22). God can do things without human aid, as Genesis 1 makes clear. But he also chooses to dignify us by giving us responsibility, and by giving us the power to do what he tells us to do. So too, believers in Christ are “created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do” (Eph 2:10). As Paul writes elsewhere, “I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God has been making it grow” (1 Cor 3:6). God uses our good works, which he has prepared us to do, which he has prepared for us to do, and which he enables to be effective. So too with our prayers, as Paul tells us:

We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, about the troubles we experienced in the province of Asia. We were under great pressure, far beyond our ability to endure, so that we despaired of life itself. Indeed, we felt we had received the sentence of death. But this happened that we might not rely on ourselves but on God, who raises the dead. He has delivered us from such a deadly peril, and he will deliver us again. On him we have set our hope that he will continue to deliver us, as you help us by your prayers. Then many will give thanks on our behalf for the gracious favour granted us in answer to the prayers of many. (2 Cor 1:8–11)

We cannot force God to act; answers to prayers are not mechanical! But God calls us to pray, and kindly uses our prayers, even if we do not get what we hoped for.

*J Calvin, Theological Treatises (JKS Reid ed), The Library of Christian
Classics, vol 22, SCM, 1954, p 122.

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