How God Answers

You have prayed and prayed, to no result.

God, are you listening? Do you care? After all, you put these dreams, this calling, in my heart. You gave me the hunger for it. Why do you delay?

This may be your current conundrum. A list and a prayer, but no real outcomes. Why doesn’t he just answer?

Something the body of Christ needs to learn about prayer is how he tends to answer it.

When my children ask for breakfast, I make them breakfast. They are 9,8,5, and about 2. Young ones. Although, things are starting to shift. When the older ones, by boys, ask for breakfast, we are months away from giving them an open fridge and the supplies to do it themselves.

When you were new to the faith, often it seemed like manna would fall from the sky. His presence came easy, his answers came swiftly; the tears came easy and the checks came in the mail.

As you mature, it seems the Holy Spirit likes to answer with partnership. He asks you to send your roots deeper, to perceive how he is answering, and to join him in the work. Let me explain…

If you ask the Lord for a table, often he will give you a forest and an axe.

A table seems like an insignificant thing for the Lord to make out of thin air, but you’re a son, and he wants to teach you dominion and character.

So what would be required to build the table? Work, a team to help fell the trees, actually learning how to create a table, the people to sit around the table and enjoy it. You see, it’s not just a table, it’s a moment of discipleship.

You’ve been praying for your job or your business, for increase, for growth, for more opportunity to be generous and more resource to do it with. How does God answer. Yes, often he will give us gifts that seem like magic, raises and bonuses and promotion. More often, I find as I mature, God will answer by placing the tools for the job in your path. A person to serve and bless, a new employee to witness to, a skilled mentor to ply with questions, a PROBLEM to solve. Yes, often God will answer your prayers with a problem, so you will return to him to solve it, and serve those around you by adding value and solving that problem.

Take a closer look, is God answering your prayers and you simply don’t have eyes to see? He may be answering you by trusting you with more problems to solve and people to serve. He may be answering you with a person for your team that you’ve overlooked. He may be answering you by being, let’s say, “silent”, to test if that is what your heart really wants.

I want to encourage you, God wants to trust you more. Often we like to pray for revival but don’t like the work of the harvest. We pray for more influence but don’t want the holiness required to maintain it. We pray for more money, but lack the generous heart that will keep us sane, joyful, and without idolatry.

Prayer changes you into the type of person that can receive what God wants to give to you.

After all, the Israelites prayed for the promised land; as soon as they cross the Jordan, the manna stopped, and the answer to their prayer was a multi-year military campaign to take land that they would then WORK with their own hands.

Remember in all this, he is training you for an age where you will judge angels. Open your eyes, and see the answers he gives are everywhere, but he often wraps them how he pleases, and not how we expect or want in our laziness and distraction.

God bless you, and keep praying, especially for wisdom.

Photo by Todd Quackenbush on Unsplash