How to believe in prayer but not become deluded?

[Elena321]

I mean just say you pray for a healing of something.
A bible verse says “Have no anxiety at all, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, make your requests known to God. Philippians 4:6”
But elsewhere we are told God only heals if it’s his will.
So if you give thanksgiving believing God will heal you arn’t you deluding yourself because if he doesn’t you will receive much disappointment and feel a fool?
So I feel to give thanksgiving you can set yourself up for upset and despair if it doesn’t happen but then on the other hand if I pray Gods will be done I feel really a sense of no hope and resignation when I say that.
Any suggestions please?

 

[pianistclare]

It’s tends to go better to ask something of someone we have a relationship with.
When a person wants to have a relationship with God, then they stop viewing God as a celestial vending machine…the giver of all favors.
When the Lord knows our hearts, knows we truly desire to bend to His will, He helps us. Humility in prayer can help. That’s why we say at communion " Lord, I am not worthy, but…"
Also, remember the Scriptures that commend us to be like little children. They ask/pray in all innocence.
Be at peace…not rushing the outcomes, pray with true love, contrition, and gratitude, and see if things don’t work out really well.
God bless you!

 

[coachdennis]

I mean just say you pray for a healing of something.
A bible verse says “Have no anxiety at all, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, make your requests known to God. Philippians 4:6”
But elsewhere we are told God only heals if it’s his will.
So if you give thanksgiving believing God will heal you arn’t you deluding yourself because if he doesn’t you will receive much disappointment and feel a fool?
So I feel to give thanksgiving you can set yourself up for upset and despair if it doesn’t happen but then on the other hand if I pray Gods will be done I feel really a sense of no hope and resignation when I say that.
Any suggestions please?

A great challenge for many of us is to stop looking at prayer as either/or – either God loves me and give me what I want or he doesn’t. As Pianistclare said, it is a relationship and relationships are not either/or.

The quote you use states have no anxiety in your prayer. Yes, go to Jesus as you would to a loved one, as a parent who would comfort a child in pain. He will be there to hold you and be with you. But as we all know human parents cannot spare us or save us from all of the world’s pain. God could, but because of our limited understanding of things (which we are promised in heaven will be revealed), some prayers are not answered the way we want them to be answered.

That is where faith comes in. To pray “thy will be done” is a powerful act of faith. Those four little words are saying we do not know what the outcome will be, but we do believe he will be with us and support us and love us. It is not a prayer of resignation, but a prayer of trust.

I hope this helps you

 

[Bookcat]

I would say that it is not one would need to say give thanksgiving “that such and such is healed”…when you pray about “such and such” …for as you noted you do not know if that is the will of God here.

One gives thanksgiving “always and everywhere” as the Liturgy puts it…for all good in life. Especially for such as the true life we have in Christ.

CCC

IV. PRAYER OF THANKSGIVING

2637 Thanksgiving characterizes the prayer of the Church which, in celebrating the Eucharist, reveals and becomes more fully what she is. Indeed, in the work of salvation, Christ sets creation free from sin and death to consecrate it anew and make it return to the Father, for his glory. The thanksgiving of the members of the Body participates in that of their Head.

2638 As in the prayer of petition, every event and need can become an offering of thanksgiving. The letters of St. Paul often begin and end with thanksgiving, and the Lord Jesus is always present in it: “Give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you”; “Continue steadfastly in prayer, being watchful in it with thanksgiving.”

scborromeo.org/ccc/p4s1c1a3.htm#IV

 

[BrunoMaria]

Prayer is a different thing from what many think it is. How can anyone be disappointed when God does do fulfill any private wish. God is not a wishing well. God and His realm is our home after our probation-time on earth. To be “deluded” is ones wish is not fullfilled right away, is a terrible affront against God; for God knows what’s good for our eternal life - more than we’d ever know.

Praying and divine thoughts are very real and substantial thoughts, not thoughts about the ever so fugacious world and our comparetively little temporary problems. In fact it’s indeed terribly thoughtless to set secular things - which are in most cases subject of our prayers, above eternal things. It would be quite thoughtless. Those who who rejected divine thoughts or just had them vaguely when wanting something, might eternally see God from a very far and unbridgeable distance only, and then will then condemn their absence of real thoughts in their short time on earth. The Latin „saeculum“ was at all times a curse on this world.
Surprising that many dare to wanna live without God, as it’s God in who’s hands it all lays and God who let’s the world go around…
The „Enlightement“
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Enlightenment
highly celebrated as the beginning of real thinking, was in fact a big step backwards into the darkness of „law of Nature“ disregarding that this nature is created by God, but created to our convenience or rather molding "Dominium terrae“ Genesis 1,28: Fill the earth and subdue it! So; “Freethinkers” actually are free of thinking. They don’t even dare to think in divine terms.
Big “freethinkers” such as Immanuel Kant, Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx, or Voltaire preferred secular thinking to the real thinking God gave us. We are easily able to think, stick and live in the way the way and the line of God, which is the one and only good way. Everybody knows what, how and who God, and so "the GOOD“ is and even appreciates it all as good. Why on earth then doesn’t the „saeculum“ act like it?
Actually we even get it explained in the Lord’s Prayer Jesus gave us. When we pray YOUR WILL BE DONE, we ask God not to fulfill our will, bus God’s will. That way we can never become deluded of not fulfilled wishes we asked God for. Ad dog asks for the poisoned titbit and gladly eats it. Must we do alike?

Yours
Bruno

 

[captainrick]

Yep, if you assume God will grant everything you ask for, you are deluding yourself.

 

[BrunoMaria]

Yep, if you assume God will grant everything you ask for, you are deluding yourself.

Exactly. God never deludes us. We do, if we didn’t try hard to understand Christ’s doctrine - which is easy to understand to those who listen.

I mean just say you pray for a healing of something.
A bible verse says "Have no anxiety at all, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, make your requests known to God. Philippians 4:6“

Right. Still, as Christ told us; God knows what we are asking for, before we ask. However - it does take our loving request, our devotion to God in REAL belief. Then God will grant our request.
But as any father does - he will decide if he fulfills the beloved child’s wish or not, for he knows what’s good for the child.

Nothing bad ever came now comes from God. If illness and suffering would originate in God, then Jesus had never healed the sick. It was Satan who smite sore boils over Job.

‘Satan Smiting Job with Sore Boils‘, William Blake, c.1826 | Tate

Satan was disappointed that Hiob stuck to his trust in God, and so increased his maladies on Hiob. But Hiob was not deluded even when his children died and he lost all he had, and even his wife urged him to leave God and drop his belief.

Jesus said, that evil and sorrow must come into the world - it will as we know of The Book Hiob originate from Satan himself, or from people under Satan’s influence. See Mt 18:7 Woe to the world because of stumbling blocks! It is necessary that stumbling blocks come, but woe to the person through whom they come.

But elsewhere we are told God only heals if it’s His will.

If God in His love decides that this suffering will exalt us, as it was with Job, then God won’t take it away before the time. The Book Job teaches in this respect a lot.

So if you give thanksgiving believing God will heal you arn’t you deluding yourself because if he doesn’t you will receive much disappointment and feel a fool?

A proper fool is he, who thinks God is a good fairy like in Cinderella, who grants any shortsighted wish as normal in fairy tales. Quite a lot of desires we have indeed are shortsighted een then, when we think they are essential for our life. But our life is eternal - not just the short time we are here on probation for our real life with God in His kingdom. Therefore we pray according to Christ on the Mount of Olives: "Let your will be done, not mine“ - same as we pray daily in the Lord’s prayer: YOUR WILL BE DONE. For he who believes and trust in God does know, that our Heavenly Father only, knows what the best thing is for each of us. And when we lay our suffering into God’s hand, God grants us the strength to suffer too.

So I feel to give thanksgiving you can set yourself up for upset and despair if it doesn’t happen but then on the other hand if I pray Gods will be done I feel really a sense of no hope and resignation when I say that.

It would be no trust in God at all, if we pray in resignation. Would be same thing, as if we’d ask someone for help and add „oh I know you won’t help me anyhow, so what am I asking for…?!“
Would anyone expect any help then?

Yours
Bruno

 

[TK421]

I mean just say you pray for a healing of something.
A bible verse says “Have no anxiety at all, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, make your requests known to God. Philippians 4:6”
But elsewhere we are told God only heals if it’s his will.
So if you give thanksgiving believing God will heal you arn’t you deluding yourself because if he doesn’t you will receive much disappointment and feel a fool?
So I feel to give thanksgiving you can set yourself up for upset and despair if it doesn’t happen but then on the other hand if I pray Gods will be done I feel really a sense of no hope and resignation when I say that.
Any suggestions please?

If it was in the best interest of your sanctification, salvation, and eternal joy, you could pray for the moon to be turned into blue cheese, and Jesus would grant it. The desire for him to lavish his mercy & grace on his disciples clings to him like a clamoring, unquenchable fire. “Ask”, Jesus says, “And you will receive”.

God can, has, does, and will grant miracles of healing & other miracles according to his purpose, but God can never desire anything except your sanctification. St Augustine explains that you can ask whatever you want, but it will always be directed towards your sanctification & salvation. Or, to put it another way, God will not grant a prayer that asks - either knowingly or unknowingly - for you to cause yourself harm, or to cause another harm. St Therese of Liseaux was graced to witness everything from the Blessed Virgin smiling at her, to having visions of the horrors of hell, and yet when she prayed for deliverance from tuberculosis, the request was not received, because God had other plans for her, and she understood this and came to peace with it. God - in his love - is a delegate for us, not a representative. A representative is a mirror for his clients. Whether good or ill, a representative carries out what he is told. A delegate acts according to our best interests, not necessarily according to our wants.

 

[fred_conty]

I mean just say you pray for a healing of something.
A bible verse says “Have no anxiety at all, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, make your requests known to God. Philippians 4:6”
But elsewhere we are told God only heals if it’s his will.
So if you give thanksgiving believing God will heal you arn’t you deluding yourself because if he doesn’t you will receive much disappointment and feel a fool?
So I feel to give thanksgiving you can set yourself up for upset and despair if it doesn’t happen but then on the other hand if I pray Gods will be done I feel really a sense of no hope and resignation when I say that.
Any suggestions please?

When Jesus was in the Garden of Olives the night before he died, he prayed. Jesus is the example for all of us to follow in everything, but most of all in prayer.

In that Garden, he prayed intensly to his Father and our Father, that if his suffering could be avoided that this be done. He was hurting so much mentally that his sweat became as drops of blood when he asked his Father. Jesus was aware of what his human sufferings would be like, and asked that his Father find some other way. But unlike his baptism, when his Father was heard and spoke, his Father was silent on this occasion. Then after much anxiety he said, “Father, not my will, but thine be done.”

If we are to model ourselves in the image of Jesus, then we too must always say that the Father’s will is best even tho at the moment we may not understand why it couldn’t be our way.

When the Bible says, “…have no anxiety at all” could mean that he always hears our prayers and we shouldn’t be anxious about whether he does hear. And that we shouldn’t be anxious that he will answer our prayer, for he will always answer it in a way that will be best for us, tho we may not understand that at the time.

May God bless and keep you. May God’s face shine on you. May God be kind to you and give you peace.