Mark Ashton, in his book, A Voice in the Wilderness, talks about a small boy who was writing a letter to God. Christmas was approaching and he wanted to ask God for certain Christmas presents he badly wanted. He began his letter with these words: “I’ve been good for six months now.”
But then he thought about it a little and crossed out the “six months” and wrote “three.” After a little more thought, he crossed that out and put “two weeks.” There was another pause, and he crossed that out too.
Then he got up from the table and went over to the little nativity scene that had the figures of Mary and Joseph. He picked up the figure of Mary and went back to his writing and started again: “Dear God, if ever you want to see your mother again…” (Mark Ashton, A Voice in the Wilderness, OM Publishing; www. PreachingToday.com)
We laugh at that, but sad to say, that’s the way a lot of people view prayer. They think they have to bribe a reluctant God, and if that doesn’t work, then somehow manipulate Him to give them what they want. No wonder so few people ever experience the joy of answered prayer.
Prayer is not manipulating a reluctant God to give us what we want. It is communicating with a God who wants to give us more than we could ever ask or even think. Martin Luther once said, “Prayer is not overcoming God’s reluctance, but laying hold of His willingness.”
So how then do we lay hold of God’s willingness? How do we connect with a God who is very generous and willing to share His riches in glory by Christ Jesus?
If you have your Bibles, I invite you to turn with me to Genesis 25, Genesis 25, where we see how an Old Testament couple laid a hold of God’s willingness in prayer.
Genesis 25:19-21 This is the account of Abraham’s son Isaac. Abraham became the father of Isaac, and Isaac was forty years old when he married Rebekah daughter of Bethuel the Aramean from Paddan Aram a and sister of Laban the Aramean. Isaac prayed to the LORD on behalf of his wife, because she was barren. The LORD answered his prayer, and his wife Rebekah became pregnant.
Rebekah was barren, so Isaac prayed and she became pregnant. It’s really that simple. If we want to lay hold of God’s willingness, then we must...
PRAY.
We must pray like Isaac did. That means, 1st of all, we must be persistent in our prayers. We must keep on praying and not give up until God answers. According to verse 20, Isaac was 40 years old when he married Rebekah. But according to verse 26, he didn’t have any children until he was 60 years old. God waited 20 years to answer Isaac’s prayers, but there is no indication that Isaac ever gave up praying. No.
He persisted in his prayers until God came through, and that’s what we need to do if we’re going to lay a hold of God’s willingness. We must persist in prayer.
One of the world’s largest magazine fulfillment firms is in Chicago. They handle all their magazine subscription mailings by computer, which automatically sends out renewal and expiration notices.
Well, one day, the company’s computer malfunctioned and a rancher in Powder Bluff, Colorado, got 9,734 separate mailings informing him that his subscription to National Geographic had expired.
This got the rancher’s attention. He dropped what he was doing and traveled 10 miles to the nearest post office, where he sent in money for a renewal, along with a note that said, “I give up! Send me your magazine!” (Stand Firm, September 1999, p.19; www.PreachingToday.com)
That’s the power of persistence! And that persistence works in our prayers, as well. Jesus Himself said, “Keep on asking, and you will receive what you ask for. Keep on seeking, and you will find. Keep on knocking, and the door will be opened to you” (Luke 11:9, NLT).
If we want to lay hold of God’s willingness, we must persist in prayer. Now, that’s not because God is stingy and unwilling to answer our prayers and we have to overcome his reluctance. Oh no. It’s just that God wants to do more for us than what we ask.
You see, when we go to prayer, we want God to change our circumstances. But more often than not, God wants our circumstances to change us. That’s why He often delays His answers to our prayers – not to keep something from us, but to give us more than what we could ever ask or even think.
God wants to give us things like patience and strength of character. He wants to grow our faith and increase our love as we learn to empathize with those who hurt. You see, when God delays His answers to our prayers, He is giving us something whole lot more valuable than that for which we usually ask.
So don’t give up praying. Don’t give up on God, for if we keep on praying, we will get what we ask for and usually a whole lot more! It’s the best way to lay hold of God’s willingness and generosity. Like Isaac, we must persist in our prayers even if it takes us 20 years or more.
Then, like Isaac, if we want generous answers to our prayers, we must pray for what God has already promised. In other words, just ask God to keep His Word.
That’s what Isaac did. When he was a teenage boy, Isaac and his father, Abraham, took a trip together to the mountains of Moriah. When they arrived, Abraham tied his son up, put him on an altar and nearly sacrificed him to the Lord. But God provided a substitute sacrifice and Isaac’s life was spared. That’s when Isaac heard God say to his father, “I swear by myself, declares the Lord, that because you have not withheld your son, your only son, I will surely bless you and make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as the sand on the seashore” (Genesis 22:17). Isaac knew that promise applied to him; so more than 20 years later, after he got married, he begins to ask God for children.
You see, Isaac is simply asking God to keep His promises, and that’s what we must do if we want to see amazing answers to our prayers. Just keep on praying the promises of God. Just keep on asking God to keep His Word.
But someone says, “That’s going to limit my prayers!” No, actually it doesn’t. It’s our own selfish desires that limit our prayers; but when we pray for what God has already promised, it actually expands our prayers. When we look in the Bible to see what God has said about our situation, it gives us more things to pray for than we ever thought possible.
J. Oswald Sanders, in his book, Prayer Power Unlimited, talks about a family in Queensland, Australia who could barely scrape together enough food to survive from the desolate piece of property they owned. For many years, they toiled, eking out a living, not knowing that beneath their feet lay one of the richest mountains of gold the world has ever known – Mount Morgan. Their potential wealth was beyond measure, but they lived in poverty, all because they were ignorant of the wealth they possessed. (J. Oswald Sanders, Prayer Power Unlimited, p.39).
My friends, that’s what we have in the Bible – “a mountain of gold,” so to speak. Someone once counted over 30,000 promises in the Bible, promises which cover every area of the human experience. J. Oswald Sanders says, “There is no conceivable circumstance of life for which there is not an appropriate promise waiting to be claimed (Prayer Power Unlimited, p.41).
Please, don’t be ignorant of the wealth you possess right here in this book – the Bible. Open it up. Discover what God has already promised, and start claiming those promises today. You’ll find yourself asking God for more than you thought possible, and you’ll begin to experience some amazing answers to your own prayers.
If we want to lay hold of God’s willingness, then we must persist in praying for what God has already promised us. In other words, just keep on praying the promises of God. Just keep on asking God to keep his word. Then…
EXPECT GOD TO ANSWER YOUR PRAYERS.
Expect God to answer in extraordinary and powerful ways. Look for God to respond in ways you least expect it, even against impossible odds. Anticipate unusual and unstoppable answers to your requests.
That’s what happened to Isaac. He experienced an unusual answer to his own prayer. He prayed for a child and got twins!
Genesis 25:22-23 The babies jostled each other within her (Literally, they crushed each other within her. There was a war going on inside Rebekah’s womb). And she said, “Why is this happening to me?” So she went to inquire of the Lord. The LORD said to her, “Two nations are in your womb, and two peoples from within you will be separated; one people will be stronger than the other, and the older will serve the younger.” (NIV)
This is an unusual answer to prayer! 1st of all, Isaac prays for one child, and God gives him two! Then on top of that, God tells Rebekah that the older child would serve the younger one someday. Now, that’s not the way it is usually done. It’s customary for the younger to serve the older. But God says, “No, the older will serve the younger. God’s ways are not man’s ways, and so when God answers prayer, expect some unusual things.
Romans 9 is the New Testament commentary on these verses. There it says, “Rebekah’s children had one and the same father, our father Isaac. Yet, before the twins were born or had done anything good or bad—in order that God’s purpose in election might stand: not by works but by him who calls—she was told, ‘The older will serve the younger.’” (Romans 9:10-12)
God chose the younger over the older, not because the younger was going to be the better man, not because of any works he might do in his life, and not because he had more potential. Oh no. The fact is, from the human perspective, the older son grew up to be the better man with a whole lot more potential. We’ll find out very soon in the story that the younger son turned out to be a home-bound, mamma’s boy, who resorted to manipulation and deceit to get his way.
Even so, God chooses him over the older son for His own purposes, and that’s the way it is when God chooses to save and use us for His glory. He doesn’t choose us because we have better potential or because of anything we have done or are going to do. No. God chooses those of us who have the LEAST potential from the human perspective.
1 Corinthians 1 says, “God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. He chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him” (1 Corinthians 1:27-29).
God’s ways are not our ways, and so when God answers prayer, expect some unusual things; expect God to do some things that we wouldn’t normally do.
Pastor Mark Buchanan describes the Tuesday night prayer meetings at Brooklyn Tabernacle “like skydiving into a tornado, exhausting and exhilarating all at once.” He had read about the prayer meetings in Pastor Jim Cymbala’s book, Fresh Wind, Fresh Fire, but nothing prepared him for the event itself: 3,500 God-hungry people storming heaven for two hours.
Afterward, Mark Buchanan and a friend went out to dinner with the Cymbalas, and during the course of the meal, Jim Cymbala turned to Mark and said, “Mark, do you know what the number one sin of the church in America is? It’s not the plague of internet pornography that is consuming our men. It’s not that the divorce rate in the church is roughly the same as society at large.”
Jim Cymbala named two or three other candidates for the worst sin, all of which he dismissed. Then he said, “The number one sin of the church in America is that its pastors and leaders are not on their knees crying out to God, ‘Bring us the drug-addicted, bring us the prostitutes, bring us the destitute, bring us the gang leaders, bring us those with AIDS, bring us the people nobody else wants, whom only you can heal, and let us love them in your name until they are whole.’” (Mark Buchanan, Messy, Costly, Dirty Ministry, Leadershipjournal.net, 5-15-09; www.PreachingToday.com)
You see, that’s exactly what Pastor Cymbala has done. When he came to New York, he had no training and no experience. All he had was a little church of about 20 people in a run-down facility in the inner city. But he gathered those people together for prayer on Tuesday nights, and they began to expect God to do the unexpected. They began to expect God to reach the least, the last and the lost, and God did just that in answer to prayer!
Tell me: Who are the people in our community that nobody else wants? Who are the people here that only God can heal? Let’s pray for those people, and when we pray. Let’s expect God to do the unexpected even right here on Washington Island. Let’s expect God to help us reach even those nobody else would choose, who seem to have no potential whatsoever. Let’s expect God to do some unusual things through us.
Then let’s expect God to be unstoppable in keeping His promises and accomplishing His unusual purposes right here! That was Isaac’s experience. Even though Isaac was well beyond the age to have children, God gave him children just as He had promised.
Genesis 25:24 When the time came for her to give birth, there were twin boys in her womb. (NIV)
Just as God had promised.
Genesis 25:25 The first to come out was red, and his whole body was like a hairy garment; so they named him Esau (which in the Hebrew means “hairy").
Genesis 25:26 After this, his brother came out, with his hand grasping Esau’s heel; so he was named Jacob (which in the Hebrew means “heel grabber"). Isaac was 60 years old when Rebekah gave birth to them (i.e., to Hairy and Heel-grabber).
Isaac was well beyond the age to have children, but that didn’t stop God from doing what He said He would do. Despite their age, Isaac and Rebekah had twins, and the younger tried to usurp the position of the older, even from birth. God’s purposes and His promises are unstoppable, despite impossible circumstance and despite attempts to deliberately thwart God’s plan.
When the boys grew up, Isaac himself tried to stop God’s plan to bless the younger over the older. In Genesis 27, an old, blind Isaac tried to bless the son he thought was Esau in direct contradiction to what God said here in verse 23, but he ended up blessing Jacob instead.
Nothing can stop God from keeping His Word; so when we pray, let’s trust Him to be unstoppable in accomplishing what He said He would do. Let’s trust Him to come through even though it seems impossible, and even though Satan himself should try to stop us.
Jesus said, “I will build my church and the gates of Hades will not overcome it” (Matthew 16:18). That’s a promise, and God will keep that promise no matter what. So let’s pray when we storm those gates against Satanic strongholds in people’s lives. Let’s pray expecting those gates to fall and God to rescue people from Satan’s Kingdom as Christ builds His church.
That’s what Billy Graham has done through his many years of ministry. He organized prayer teams in every city at least a year in advance of his going there to preach the gospel. As a result, he saw hundreds, even thousands, of people come to faith in Christ in nearly every place he preached.
Bobbye Byerly, in her book, Miracles Happen When Women Pray, talks about a time when she and her son, Jim, worked as counselors in a Billy Graham Crusade at Shea Stadium in New York. “The airplanes from La Guardia Airport flew over the stadium, dozens by the hour,” she writes.
“On the opening night of training, the Reverend Billy Graham started talking with us from the podium as the engines roared overhead. He paused, glanced up and quietly said, ‘We’ll have to do something about this noise. This just won’t do.’ He bowed his head and said a simple prayer to the effect: ‘Lord, we ask you to shift the wind and send these planes in another direction. Thank You. Amen.’
“Well, we were believers,” Byerly writes, “but this was a tall order. We weren’t sure what, if anything, to expect. But God did it – he answered our prayers in a wondrous way! The morning newspaper reported that the winds had changed during the night, and the airplanes over Shea Stadium had to be routed another way. For several days thereafter, thousands of people came to Christ under this anointed leader’s preaching. At the conclusion of the crusade, the winds reverted to their normal flow, and the airplanes returned to their normal flight patterns. (Bobbye Byerly, Miracles Happen When Women Pray, Regal, 2002, p. 20; www. PreachingToday.com)
God’s purposes are unstoppable! So let’s not be surprised when he keeps his promises
in answer to prayer.
If we want to lay hold of God’s willingness, we just need to pray, expecting God to answer. Just keep on asking God to keep His Word, counting on Him to work in unusual and unstoppable ways.
Time magazine, on January 2, 1956, published these words from an unknown Confederate soldier:
I asked God for strength, that I might achieve,
I was made weak, that I might learn humbly to obey…
I asked for health, that I might do greater things,
I was given infirmity, that I might do better things…
I asked for riches, that I might be happy,
I was given poverty that I might be wise…
I asked for power, that I might have the praise of men,
I was given weakness, that I might feel the need of God…
I asked for all things, that I might enjoy life,
I was given life, that I might enjoy all things…
I got nothing that I asked for—but everything I had hoped for,
Almost despite myself, my unspoken prayers were answered.
I am among all men, most richly blessed.
You and I, too, can be most richly blessed if we would just get on our knees and pray.
