Moving Mountains - Mark 11:20-24 Series

So where does Mark land on that debate? The Christian view is that God is indeed in full control of everything. He is sovereign, and predestination is a reality. However, the Bible also teaches that our actions and decisions and prayers do indeed have an impact on outcomes. How those two truths go together is a mystery. It’s a tension that we can’t fully understand.

Some of our Calvinist friends don’t want to deal with any tension—they don’t want anything that doesn’t fit easily inside their brains, so they just ignore what the Bible says about human free will and our role in determining outcomes and focus only on God’s sovereignty. So they become determinists. It doesn’t matter what we do or say, God’s going to do what he’s going to do, so those kind of people don’t pray with any passion if they pray at all, they don’t evangelize much, no real passion for much of anything except arguing against Arminians online.

Other people err on the other side. They also don’t want to deal with any tension or difficulty, and they want things to fit easily inside their heads, so they focus only on free will of man and ignore what the Bible says about God’s sovereignty and predestination. Those people don’t really pray all that hard either, because they think everything is up to them. They don’t pray much for people’s salvation because that’s out of God’s hands—it’s up to the individual.

But the biblical view of prayer takes both sides of this great mystery and brings them together. We pray hard because 1) God has absolute power to answer those prayers, and 2) our prayers have an effect on outcomes—so that things will go one way if we pray and the other way if we don’t. You can see that balance everywhere you look in the Bible.

I mentioned Mark 3:35. Jesus said you are a child of God if you do the will of God—carry it out. He didn’t say a child of God is one who sits around and waits for God’s will to happen. We don’t passively wait for it; we get out there and do it. We make it happen in our little context. There are times when God puts something in our heart and he wants us to put our head down and plow forward and get it done, and if we bog ourselves down with constant second-guessing, we will run out of steam before we get it done.

You can just flop your Bible open at random and you’ll see a passage showing that God wants us to have a submissive posture toward him and his will. But how many passages teach that we should sit around and be passive or indifferent about what happens? I can’t think of any. Just the opposite. My Bible talks about wrestling with God in prayer. I open the Scriptures and see God answered Elijah’s prayers when he prayed earnestly. (James 5:17) I see Jesus praying all night, with loud cries and tears, sweating drops of blood. I read about the persistent widow, whose request is granted only after persistent, incessant, nonstop pleading.

And it’s after a season of that kind of prayer that you see situations where the person praying comes away with a sense of certainty that the request will be granted. Like Elijah, who, after such urgent, intensive, extended pleading and earnest pleas, he finally gets up and tells Ahab, “I realize it hasn’t rained in 3 years, but you’d better hit the road right now so you don’t get stuck in the mud because of the deluge that’s about to happen.” Sometimes, only after a season of extremely intensive prayer, God responds by allowing the person to know that the prayer is granted. I talked about that in some detail in the sermon on James 5:16 titled “The Prayer of Faith.”