For the believer who has been treating a prayer as something that already happened.
It's ten past eleven on a Tuesday night and she's looking at a page she copied out eleven years ago.
It was a phase she went through in her thirties, writing verses out longhand in a hardback book. She stopped about a year in, the way people do. The book has been in a drawer since. Tonight she was after a birth certificate and found this instead.
The page she has open is John seventeen. Her own handwriting, fountain pen, slightly too careful, the way you write when you are trying to make something look like it matters.
And she notices what her thirty-four-year-old self did with the tense. There's a little note in the margin in pencil, added later, that says he prayed this before he died.
Past tense. Done. Filed. A thing that happened in a room in Jerusalem on a Thursday night a very long time ago, which she copied out reverently and put in a drawer.
That is not what the letters say about it, and she has known the correcting verse for years without ever laying it beside this page.
The prayer you have been treating as finished is still being prayed over you. The written Word records Him asking for it out loud on the last night, and the Holy Spirit is the one making it present rather than historical.
What the Past Tense Does to a Prayer
Here's the effect of that pencil note, and it is enormous for three words.
A prayer in the past tense is a record. You read it the way you read anything from a long time ago, with respect and from a distance. The natural question becomes whether it worked, which invites you to look around at the state of the church and conclude that it did not.
That is where a great deal of quiet discouragement about the church comes from. People hold a past-tense prayer beside a present-tense mess and draw the obvious conclusion. The conclusion is wrong, because the tense was wrong before the comparison even started.
You have done this. Nearly everybody has. It isn't cynicism and it is certainly not unbelief. It's what happens when a request made two thousand years ago is filed as an event rather than as something ongoing.
Who He Was Praying For
Here's the sentence, in the part that decides the tense:
Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also which shall believe on me through their word.John 17:20 (KJV)
Read who is in scope. Not only the eleven men in the room, and He says so explicitly, which is unusual and deliberate. Also everybody who would come to believe later through what those men said.
That is a sentence about people who did not exist, written into a prayer as a named category, by somebody who intended it to keep applying long after the room emptied. It is not addressed to history. It reaches forward on purpose.
You are named in that prayer as somebody who had not been born yet. The written Word widens it beyond the room on purpose, and the Holy Spirit keeps it current rather than commemorative.
The Ink Was Never Dry
Here's what I'd carry out of that drawer if I could take a single thing away with me.
A finished document has dry ink. That's what finished means: the thing is set, it can be filed, and nothing further will be added to it by anybody.
The letter to the Hebrews says He ever lives to make intercession for us, which is a present tense and a continuing one. Whatever else that means, it means the asking did not stop when the room emptied on Thursday night.
So her careful fountain pen page is not a record of a completed request. It is a copy of something still in progress, and the pencil note in the margin is the only part of that page that is out of date.
The ink on that prayer has never dried, and the note in the margin is the only thing out of date. The written Word has Him still making intercession, and the Holy Spirit makes that a present fact rather than a doctrine about the past.
Nothing Here Says You Have Failed This Prayer
Let me be plain, because there's a version of this message that would do you real harm and I refuse to write it.
You have not failed it, and it is not the sort of thing that is available to you to fail. He asked for it, He is still asking, and a prayer of His is not waiting on your performance in any conversation you have ever had.
I am also not giving you a project. Nothing here asks you to go and mend a distance, contact anybody, or take the state of the church on as a task. That would be the same discouragement with a job attached.
You can look at the state of the church and still not be the one answering for it. The asking stays His throughout the written Word, and the Holy Spirit answers instead of appointing.
The Tense You Can Correct Tonight
Here's the turn, and it's quieter than a decision and steadier than a mood.
That pencil note was never unbelief in you. It was a natural filing error made by a careful woman of thirty four, putting a living sentence in the past tense because that is where old writing normally goes. Nobody misled you, and nobody has thought to come and correct the margin.
I'm correcting it now. He is still praying it. Not repeating it, not remembering it. Praying it, tonight, at ten past eleven, for people who came to believe through what those men said.
You are among the people being prayed for, not among the people answering. The written Word names you in it before you existed, and the Holy Spirit makes He is still praying it a present fact you can stand inside.
Declare this over yourself
You are in Christ and Christ is in you, so what follows is not a claim made out of your own authority. It is agreement, said back to God in His own words, while the Holy Spirit carries it. How He orders the rest of it is His to decide, and He answers in His own way and in His own time.
Say this once, slowly, with the book open at the new page.
One is what He asked for, and He is asking for it now. The Word of God has Him asking not for the eleven alone but for everybody who would believe through their word, so I was named in it before I existed. The Holy Spirit keeps me inside that prayer rather than in charge of answering it. The ink on it has never once dried, whatever I wrote in the margin at thirty four. I keep caring about the distance, and I hand the closing of it back to the One who is still asking. When I look at the state of the church tomorrow, I can look at it from inside a prayer that is still going.
Stories in these messages are illustrations unless marked as testimony.
John 17:20-21
This message is free, and always will be. There is nothing to unlock, nothing to subscribe to, and nothing you owe for having received it.
