Gene R. Cook wrote:
I believe that many people are confident that the Lord’s will will be done and that the Lord can do anything, but they are not confident that the Lord will do it for them or that he wants to do it now.
This lack of confidence in our ability to gain access to the powers of heaven is a major reason why more of our prayers aren’t answered. In fact, as I travel around he church I often meet people who say, “My prayer wasn’t answered because it just wasn’t the will of the Lord.” But often the truth is that they just didn’t exercise enough faith; they didn’t have enough confidence in their ability to receive an answer.
It is true that we must ask according to the will of God. As John wrote: “This is the confidence that we have in him, that, if we ask anything according to his will, he hearth us: And if we know that he hears us, whatsoever we ask, we know that we have the petitions that we desired of him.” (1 John 5:14-15.)
But too often we use this as an excuse. Instead of trying to place the responsibility on the Lord when we don’t get the answers we want (“obviously it wasn’t the will of God”), we should learn to have confidence before him so that we can “come boldly unto the throne of grace: (Hebrews 4:16) and receive the desires of our hearts. ~Gene R. Cook, A Year of Powerful Prayer, (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2013), Day 184/page 203
