Rabbi Schneider — According To His Will
Beloved ones, I'm excited today about the series that we're beginning. It's called According to His Will. You see, the Bible tells us in the Book of John that if we ask anything according to the Father's will, that he will hear us and answer us.
But often times people struggle to know exactly what the will of God is. So what we're gonna do during this series is we're gonna look into the pages of Scripture from both the Old and New Testaments to look at prayers of men and women that really knew God.
And we're gonna see how God heard their prayers and answered them. And by examining the prayers, beloved, of the Biblical heroes and the patriarchs of the faith, and see how their prayers move God's heart and how their prayers reflected God's nature and will, it's gonna help us and teach us how to pray Biblically.
You see, whenever I pray according to Scripture, I have great confidence when I come to God. And the reason is, is because I know that I'm praying according to his will. And the Scriptures says once again if we pray anything according to his will he hears us.
So this is gonna be an exciting and an important series. I think it's really gonna breed confidence in many of our lives to pray with more passion, to pray with more expectation, to know that our prayers are being heard and to know that God, hallelujah, is answering our prayers.
So with that introduction, I want to take a few steps back and I want to talk first of all about the origin of prayer. I want to bring up a couple Hebrew names for prayer, and then we're gonna move forward to actually examine the prayers of the Biblical patriarchs and heroes of our faith.
The most common and traditional Hebrew word for prayer is the word Tefilah, Tefilah. And it has to do, beloved one, with putting oneself in proper alignment between them self and God. In other words, Tefilah, the Hebrew word for prayer has much to do with putting ourselves in a right posture before a holy God.
It has to do with knowing how to walk with him in a way that he can bless us. For example, when you see the Orthodox Jewish people praying at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, you'll see them swaying often times back and forth.
The reason that they're swaying back and forth comes from a Hebrew word by the name of Davening. And it has to do with the fact that Scripture teaches us that the Spirit of the Lord within man is like a flame within man.