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Dr. Dale Matthews' Prayer Prescription

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(CBN News) - Dr. Dale Matthews, author of The Faith Factor and a physician who practices in Washington, D.C., not only respects modern medical approaches, but he also believes in the power of praying to God. Matthews recently spoke with CBN News Science and Medical Reporter Gailon Totheroh at length about this topic of prayer and healing. What follows is a short, five-minute segment of Dr. Matthews’ thoughts from the interview.

Dr. Dale Matthews. What God has proposed in His Word is that He says, ‘Don’t be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, present your requests to God. And the peace of God that passes all understanding will guard your heart and mind in Christ Jesus.’ So, what God has proposed is that in everything we should pray. Now, that’s not easy to do, but, nonetheless, that is what God has proposed -- that we should pray about everything. The act of praying itself, the act of giving over our problems to God, will assist in the healing process.

Gailon Totheroh: That’s kind of two-fold. We do it [pray] because it is asked of us, and we realize that God is good. Are those the two sides of the coin, so to speak?

Matthews: Sure. Jesus came, as the Scripture says. In the old days, God spoke through many ways and many prophets, as it says in Hebrews, but in the latter days, He has spoken to us through His Son. And His Son is the exact representation of His being, or as Paul writes in Colossians, ‘All the fullness of the Deity resides in him.’ So, by examining the life of Jesus and by examining what Jesus says, we can get principles on how to live.

Jesus didn’t need to pray. He was God, yet He prayed on a regular basis and taught His disciples how to pray. He spent nights in prayer, went off by Himself to the mountaintop to pray. He prayed before He had major decisions, such as which of the disciples to choose. So He models prayer for us.

I think the best model for prayer is found in the Garden of Gethsemane, when Jesus faces the biggest suffering that He has experienced, the most difficult period in His own life. And He turns to God in prayer. His Gethsemane prayer: ‘Abba, Father, all things are possible for you. Take this cup from me. Yet not my will, but thine be done.’

There are a number of principles. God is our Father and we can turn to God in prayer. As Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount, an earthly father is not going to give his son a snake if he asked for a piece of bread. So ‘if you who are evil know how to give good gifts to your children, so much more will God give to His children.’ So, ‘Abba, Father,’ God is a father. ‘All things are possible for you’ -- that’s the statement of faith. And it is very important to have faith, to believe that God can do anything. Jesus says, ‘If you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer.’ So faith is an important aspect of prayer.

Then Jesus asks, ‘Take this cup from me.’ That’s one of these Trinitarian mysteries. Here, God the Son asks God the Father to take away the cup of suffering. That prayer was not answered because God the Father said that God the Son must go through this suffering to complete God’s plan. But it can be helpful to people who say that prayer doesn’t work. I tell them, ‘Well, sometimes it doesn’t seem to work in our human way of understanding.’

Jesus’ prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane was not answered – that part of it was not answered -- because it was subject to a higher principle, which is the final principle of the prayer. Jesus Himself says, ‘Not my will, but thine be done.’ That’s really the ultimate purpose of prayer. The purpose of prayer is not to change God’s mind, but it is to align ourselves with God’s will.

Totheroh: And, certainly, there is no harm in our asking. He illicits our asking. He just wants us to be able to respond to His answer, even if His answer is no.

Matthews: We are to ask in faith. ‘Ask and it will be given to you. Seek and you will find. Knock and the door will be opened unto you.’ You should ask in faith. As the book of James says, ‘You don’t get because you don’t ask.’ We need to ask in faith and believe that God is going to answer our prayers. But we also have to ask in accordance with God’s will. It’s not, ‘Lord, why don’t you buy me a Mercedes-Benz, as the old song goes, but ‘Lord, not my will but thine be done. I align myself to Your will. Lord, I do request these things, but more importantly, I request that I be aligned with Your will.’