God is not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance… The heartbeat of God is seen in this passion of his – to see no one perish but to see all come to repentance. If we can have the goodness of the Lord established as a cornerstone of thought or cornerstone of theology, it will set the boundaries for what we will tolerate and what we will not tolerate; what we will entertain and what we will reject. It’s important, because as things get more heated and more difficult, and it’s obvious that there is great calamity in the world, it’s a brilliant opportunity for those who have faith in God, those who have their hope in the Lord, that joyful anticipation of good, it’s a brilliant opportunity to show what the Lord has given to us.
Here’s these two realms, these are in the desire of the Lord. One is absolutely going to happen. The other is actually contingent upon your role. Those two definitions of the will of God are actually found in two Greek words describing the will of God. I won’t bore you with the words, but it comes down to this. There is the will of God, found in Scripture that is absolute, immovable, we adjust us to it. It is unchangeable. A good example: Jesus is coming back. You can vote yes, you can vote no. You can have a theology that is in favour, a theology that he has already come back and he lives in the heart of his people, it doesn’t matter what you believe, it’s going to happen. You don’t get to vote. It’s absolute, rock solid, locked in stone going to happen.
But the second one is what is his desire. It is what he wants to happen on the earth but because he follows the protocol he set – the protocol he set was that he put Man in charge of a planet; Man gave the keys over to the serpent; Jesus became a man, took the keys back; gave them back to Man and reassigned us. The position is clear – a partnership with the Lord that is illustrated through prayer. Prayer is not to persuade him.
To beg God to heal someone is to assume we have more mercy than he does. – Randy Clark
We don’t need to persuade him of human need – he was persuaded – that’s what brought Jesus to earth. What we do in persistent prayer is we learn to be changed and conformed into a people that can live with the answer without it destroying us. Persistent prayer shapes us. It shapes our heart, it shapes our value of the king and his kingdom. It’s something that conforms us. The purpose of persistence in prayer is because there are realities out there that we don’t yet understand or know how to dismantle and the persistence in prayer positions us and in a sense qualifies us to dismantle these realities that hover the calamities and difficulties of earth.
- Bill Johnson
Revealing God 13 March 2011 – Bethel Church, Redding California