Prayer and the Fourth Dimension

The following is taken from Norman Grubb's book God Unlimited:

". . . this reigning Christ ('far above all principalities and powers' of evil) of whom we are a part, is the enthroned Christ just where we are, in ourselves, in our circumstances, in our situations of need and apparent satanic mastery. And why does He thus reign and we with Him? Because He is wholly occupied, in the person of His Spirit, in making His saving grace now known to the world by the members of His body--ourselves--and in 'adding to the church daily such as should be saved,' and 'always causing us to triumph' in Himself, as He makes manifest by us 'the saviour of His knowledge in every place . . . in them that are saved and in them that perish.' There is our praying ground. Not as suppliants in the sense of great distance from Him, of separation from Him, of uncertainty of His will and of a liberal answer; but prayer is seen to be a sharing of His mind on a situation, and our tongues being His mouthpiece in speaking the word of faith.

"We are plainly told in Rom. 8:26, 27 that prayer issues from God in our hearts, and not just from our hearts. It is He praying in us. He tells us what to pray for in our ignorance, which means that we have no business to remain ignorant. The verse says, 'the Spirit Himself maketh intercession for us,' just because 'we know not what to pray for as we ought'; and that does not mean that He is praying for our personal needs on our behalf, but that He is inspiring us to pray for the things and people we ought to pray for; we don't know what they are, but He does, and makes these intercessory prayers in and through us 'according to the will of God.'

"But we may still be asking, How does He make us know what are prayers according to the will of God? The answer is by what He stirs our hearts to desire and ask. We need not be afraid of our 'natural' desires. As we have already said, we are new men in Christ, and no longer the old man. As Christ lives in us, therefore, He is living the exact normal life we are living: it is actually He living it, running the business, doing our job, managing the home, cooking the food, looking after the children, active in our church fellowship. In the course of our lives constant need, problems, challenges, frustrations are arising, and in our hearts are longings for deliverances, guidance, supply, the salvation of others, and so on. Those desires are the groanings of the Spirit in us! Somehow we have got such a religious idea of prayer and approach to God, that we hardly dare think that our normal desires are His desires in us. But that is just what they are. They must be if it is Christ living our normal lives in us. You see we have to get back again and again to this heavenly, this 'fourth dimension' reality, that He and we are one person [1 Cor. 6:17; 1 John 4:17]. All falls into place when we get the habit of recognizing this, which the Bible calls the walk of faith.

"While we are on this point, we had better also face the inevitable question:  but what about the times I do pray, hoping and maybe believing it is the will of God, but don't get what I pray for?  Am I short in faith, or what?  There are such times, sometimes concerning physical healing, when people have had the most absolute assurance of healing, and have declared it; yet the one prayed for has died, or not been delivered.  The answer is:  prayers is to a Person, faith is in that Person.  The ultimate of prayer is not that God does a certain thing at a certain time in a certain way.  I don't mean by that that we cannot ask Him to do so.  In our Mission Headquarters we have for years met each morning, considered together what were our immediate projects of faith in our many foreign or home bases, sorted out what seem to us to be obvious needs which should be supplied--and then we have daily prayed the prayer of faith.  In general I must say through the experience of thirty years, God gives a vast amount of what we ask for and largely in the way we ask for it; but sometimes not.  Then what?  I say again faith is in a Person.  We believe Him.  He is true, though all men are liars.  All promises in Him are Yea, and we say our Amen to that!  So if the thing does not happen as we asked and believed, we still believe, because we are believing Him!  We don't say the prayer is not answered.  Never!  We say it is answered.  Wait and see!  The perfect Biblical illumination of that is Abraham sacrificing Isaac.  Isaac was the son of faith, the son in whom the promises were anchored.  How could he sacrifice that one?  It was God's supreme test on Abraham, not to prove what was in him, God knew that already; but as an example for all time of what faith really means.  Abraham's solution of his dilemma was simple, because his faith was single.  He believed God--that was all.  If God told him to sacrifice Isaac, yet God had also said that the promises would be fulfilled in Isaac, then God will raise him from the dead.  And Abraham went and acted in that faith, for he said to his servants, at the foot of the mountain, 'Abide ye here with the ass; and I and the lad will go yonder and worship, and come again unto you.'   Abraham's faith was not in the way God does things, but just in God the Doer.  That is the answer to the problem of so-called unanswered prayer.

"Back to our point then. Prayer is the product of our union with Christ. He in us is the Pray-er. So that the first need in the prayer life is not to pray, but to relax! Quietly, naturally, recognizing the Real One within us, we sort out what warms or stirs our heart with a sense of definite need or challenge. Now we are ready to pray.

"What form is our prayer to take? Supplication? Importunity? One fact seems to me to stand out from the lives of the men of the Bible. However they might start their praying, it must end up in faith. It must be the prayer of faith. Indeed they are all called men of faith, rather than prayer, in the Hebrews 11 survey, though it is true that their exploits of faith, when studied in detail, have a background of travail in prayer. And what is significant about their contacts with God? Invariably, as they meet with Him, He tells them that He has something already in hand which He is now going to manifest through them. For Abraham there is God's fixed assurance that he would become a great nation. For Moses there is the sure word that God is going to bring the people out of Egypt and into Canaan, and that he can go before Pharaoh and through the trials in the wilderness in that certainty. For Joshua it is the same; the crossing of the Jordan, the capture of Jericho are declared to him as settled facts well before they took place. And so through all Biblical history. The Saviour Himself knew all about His death and resurrection long before they came to pass, and kept telling His incredulous disciples. What then do all these evidences indicate? That in God's sight these future events were already in existence in His timeless dimension.

". . . And if there is no time with God, and the Bible says there is not: if past--present-future are a permanent and present reality to Him: if the many statements of Scripture on election and predestination, the many prophecies, the many declarations of coming events as already in existence, cover the whole of human history, then it is plain proof, at least to me, that what is true of large events is equally true of small. We too with God may 'call the things that be not as though they were,' because they really are. How do we do this? Well, personally, as this one or that one, or this or that situation, is on my mind, and I can regard it as within the compass of the interests which are my concern, I straightaway take it for granted that this is a thing already in existence in the invisible. I affirm it as so, I thank the Lord; and as the need, still unsupplied in the visible, keeps returning to my mind, I keep affirming and praising, and stating the fact when it is the right occasion to do so. If my concern is for a fellow-believer, then I keep remembering that, if God has predestinated all believers to be conformed to the image of His Son, He will infallibly do what He says, and by faith I can keep seeing Him in that one, completing what He has begun.

"On that same basis, as a missionary secretary, when God has gone out to a mission field in the bodies of some of His servants, I already see the church of Christ in existence among the nationals, where there is nothing visible as yet--and keep seeing it.  The same, of course, when some do receive Christ and the young churches begin; I see by faith a complete Christ in them, leading them into the life where God going out through them in serving, saving love is the only reason for their existence.  If it is unsaved people, then if they have been brought into my personal circle of concern, I take their salvation as an accomplished fact and that God is in process (it may be through me) of bringing them to Himself.  The same with circumstances of need.  The negative (not-have) condition is, in the timelessness of God, only the foreshadowing of its dialectical opposite, the positive (the supply).  The two are linked, just as it was said that the fallen Adam was only a figure, or foreshadowing, of 'Him that was to come'; and in God's eternal outlook, the positive (the last Adam, the Saviour) was in existence and foreordained long before the first Adam was created and fell.  So God 'saw' the barren Sarah as the mother of nations; and Jesus, for the joy set before Him, endured the cross.

"So there it is. We are introduced by the eye of faith into another dimension, a world-to-come, where there is a dissolution in our consciousness, by the authority of the Word of God, of illusory separation; and some scientific discoveries of our day can help rid us of our inhibiting materialistic outlook, and to glimpse both through the Scriptures and by scientific hypothesis our union with a timeless God; and that means the outworking, through the operations of His faith in us, of His purposes which in His sight are already in existence, and a faint foreshadowing of the ultimate glory in our oneness in a one Christ in whom the whole universe will be one in us.

"So learn to release your burdens, not carry them. Prayer itself may often be unbelief, for instead of glorying in a God who has already done in the invisible what is not yet apparent in the visible, we are nagging at Him to do it! Many a time we are so burdened and occupied in hopelessly hoping for an answer to a prayer we have not really believed, that we have no freedom or largeness of heart to encompass the burdens of others or of a world. A wife can set her husband's salvation back by her 'burden' for him, often expressed in unwise preaching at him! Whereas, if she releases him to God by the act of deliberate faith, and keeps repeating that act, she will be more occupied in hopefully loving him than in unbelievingly tearing him down. A mother can be so obsessed with the need of her unsaved children, instead of releasing them to God in faith in the accomplished fact, that she has no heart or vision for the thousands of other unsaved mothers' sons. Prayer meetings also are dead affairs when they are merely asking sessions: there is adventure, hope, and life when they are believing sessions, and the faith is corporately, practically and deliberately affirmed."