REF NO: 023
COLUMNIST: Rudolf Nii Yemoh Mensah, Prelate, Oasis Potterlight Chapel International
PASSAGE: Matthew 21:22, "And all things, whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive."
BACKGROUND: God promises does not fail. His faithfulness is forever more. Delays are not denials. Keep on trusting and believing in Him.
STANDING ON THE PROMISES
Russell Kelso Carter (1849-1928) was a star athlete of a military academy and a top student. It was at the age of fifteen during a prayer meeting at the Pennsylvania Military Academy that he committed his life to the Lord.
He became an instructor at the academy in 1869 and an athletics coach. Later, Carter allied himself with the Methodists and the holiness movement, becoming an ordained Methodist minister. His history, both personal and theological, passed through some deep and disturbing waters as he searched for balance in his belief.
However, it wasn’t until Carter faced his mortality that he came to understand exactly what it meant to rest on God’s promises. Diagnosed with a critical heart condition by age 30, Carter was facing imminent death.
Christiansen goes on to say that from that moment on the Scripture took on new life for Carter and he began to lean on the promises that he found in the Bible.
Eventually, God rewarded his uncompromising belief and faith by healing him. Over the next several months, his strength returned, and his heart was completely healed. Carter lived, with a healthy heart, for another 49 years.
In 1886 he composed the favourite hymn "Standing On The Promises" The hymn he wrote became more than words and music to him. Standing on the Promises became an integral part of his life.
When we know God’s promise to us, we will never be afraid of what will happen in our life. Most of the time, trusting Him is more effective than trusting ourselves more. Sometimes, He puts us in a situation where we will have to decide to step out of our comfort zone and take the risk with Him.
Although Carter was a professed Christian most of his life, it wasn’t until a crisis with his natural heart that he began to understand the reality and power of Bible promises. He began to stand upon the promises of healing, determining to believe no matter what his physical condition, no matter how he felt.
Which of the promises of God are you holding on to? According to Bible research, there are about 7,487 promises from God to mankind in the Bible. Which of these promises have you held on to?
And to Hebrews 10:23: Let us hold tightly without wavering to the hope we affirm, for God can be trusted to keep his promise. And to Galatians 3:29: Since you are in Christ, I have made you an heir of all My promises.
The good God has given us His great and precious promises to give us hope, joy, peace, wisdom and strength for whatever we are facing in our day.
It is heartbreaking to know that so many Christians out there are DESPERATE for certain breakthroughs, miracles and special favours like that type of Carter in their lives, but they honestly just don’t know. Many Christians today are frantic about God's intervention in their circumstances.
They don’t know what God has promised them. They don’t know where to find a promise in the Bible. They feel doubtful if some promises are even for THEM.
Today's passage gives us one of these promises. Jesus boldly made an unrepentant promise to His disciples that they will have whatever they prayed about in His name if only they will believe it in their hearts. They can have whatever they asked but the only condition is the matter of belief.
The Hebrew word 'emunah' is understood in English to mean “faith” or “belief”. It describes much more than just believing a statement about God. It reveals a life of full reliance upon Him. The word belief in Greek is pistis, which means confidence or trust.
That means it takes total belief, faith, confidence and trust in God to activate and access the promises of God to us from His Holy Scriptures.
Russel Carter was only able to attract the promise of God's healing power when he became resolute to the promises of healing he found in the Bible and started demonstrating constant belief, faith, confidence and trust in God for healing no matter what.
Are you still believing and trusting Jesus for marital, financial, promotional or business breakthroughs? Are you believing Him to defy the doctor's report and receive healing and fruits of the womb?
Do you have faith in enough to keep trusting Him for that miracle or favour even though the situation looks so impossible in the human sense? God can turn your life around and give you a better end as you continue to repose your strong faith and confidence in Him. There is nothing God cannot do!
God is Limitless! There are no possibilities with Him when He sets forth His power to work.
Christ specifically tells the disciples they will receive anything they ask—but only if they have faith. This means to trust in God and His power to do what He wants to do. It also means an alignment with the will of God—it does not mean using the Creator as a vending machine. You cannot cajole God into doing your selfish interest. You cannot invoke God into doing your bidding. He is supreme!
Part of asking "in faith" is trusting God to do what is most fitting with His purpose for us and the world. We can always be confident of God's power as well as His goodness to do what is best. The promise and the condition both need to be understood, and both still stand.
Does this mean that God will give me whatever I ask for because I asked in faith and Jesus' name? Is that what Jesus means here...or is there more to the story? Well, there is; and that's what we’re going to look into. Let’s take a closer look at motives as we explore the scriptural idea from Brother James.
When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures. – James 4:3
Looking closely at having not because of asking not reveals that the problem is not really in the asking. The problem is in the reason why you are asking.
God in his great wisdom and love, chooses not to answer prayers that are pursued with wrong motives. Can you imagine how we would be if God answered our prayers that were coming from our selfish motives? We would all be a mess.
What God is reminding us through James is that while, yes, asking matters and faith matters—motives matter even more.
James identifies some of these wrong motives, but the ultimate desire that drives all the others is the burning desire to get something you do not have. This is known as coveting. To covet is to be jealous of something that someone else has, or to possess a strong eagerness to get something that does not belong to you. Someone has travelled and making it amazingly great there so you also want to travel? Your age mates and those younger than you are all riding luxurious cars and swimming in money hence your reason for asking God to become rich or financial breakthrough?
Why do you want to get married and why do you want to bear children? The fact that your mates including those younger than you are getting married and having their children are the driving focus or because internal and external forces are mounting pressures on you to get married?
Is your mother mounting pressure on you to manufacture a man or woman and conjure marriage from the sky just because she wants grandchildren? Just because she thinks she's ageing and needs to see her grandchildren before she dies? Why is she not living in the moment but the future and counting down to her grave when God has not said anything about she dying before her grandchildren or whatever.
It will interest you to know that some parents even force their daughters to marriage for selfish gains. What they can get, things like the bride price and other benefits. Some do so for pride and jealousy in seeing other family member's including friends or neighbours children getting married and having children.
Most in-laws can mount so much pressure on their daughters-in-law to conjure babies from the sky by hook or crook after some years in marriage. It is more heartbreaking to note that even some mothers who gave birth to their daughters now give intense pressure on them for not conceiving after some time in marriage.
The pressure to get married and the pressure to give me a grandchild nowadays is much more severe from (own) mothers than mothers-in-law mounting that pressure. This is evil. It is so unfair to pressure someone to marry or give birth. It is God who gives marriage and it is God who gives children. Nobody know how to manufacture a husband, wife or baby.
Your daughter not married or given birth doesn't mean she doesn't want to get married or give you a grandchild. Marriage and children are good things to have in life and every growing and grown adult desires it. Your daughter that is of age to marry knows that she needs a man to marry her. You don't expect her to go all over the streets shouting for a husband or just accept any man that came her or sees on the streets simply because she wants to get married.
Yes, you are growing older, she knows! You need grandchildren, she knows. She's growing and menopause is a reality when you get to a certain age as a woman, She knows that one too. But she's not God, she knows and you know too.
Stop bothering your children over wife, husband and grandchildren because they are not God.
As a mother, your job is to keep supporting your children in love and prayer as they continue to wait on the Lord to give them a good marriage with children in it. There has been countless miracles and notable testimonies of men and women of faith from the Bible and our contemporary reflections who experienced delays in marriage and bearing children.
But the covenant-keeping God never disappoint them and even if He did, marriage and children are not the requirements to make heaven. Nothing in life to be desired and pursued more than working out our own salvation with fear and trembling. Nothing much to be desired than seeking first His Kingdom and righteousness.
A good parent encourages her children in this condition and shows great love and support. She doesn't frustrate them by giving them attitudes because they are not yet married or still don't have a child after years in marriage. No truly born again Christian mother or in-laws will treat their children this way because they are the only ones who are getting older but not finding a suitor or unable to conceive.
Everything works for our good according to time and according to God's time and grandmaster planning for our life. Delays are not denials. God is still in the miracle business of giving good marriages and children to all His children who are constantly asking and believing Him for it.
Everything works with time for the child of God. Carter purposed in his heart that even if God doesn't heal his heart condition, his faith and reverence for God will never change. God is supreme. He is limitless but not compelled or obliged to answer our prayer requests even though He has promised to.
He does not answer our requests according to our timetable. He does so by His timing and will. Those who laugh at you and ridicule you for not being married or married but unable to bear children have only seen the first chapter of your story. Those who mock you for a failed marriage, business or ministry have only seen the first chapter of your story. Keep praying and trusting because God is bigger than what people say or think.
You will laugh like Hannah and Abigail. God's time is the best. There is no time as best as God's when we continue to pray and search until we find it. If you are yet to find it, don't stop searching until you find it.
Matthew 7:7-8, NIV: Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. 8 For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.
In this verse, Jesus doubles down on the promise. Everyone who asks of God receives an answer. Everyone who seeks Him finds Him. The door is opened to everyone who knocks.
Receiving our greater expectations from God starts with believing He is able, making the request, and being convinced that He is capable of granting your request when you ask in faith and by His will for us.
Charles Spurgeon quoted, “When your will is God's will, you will have your will.” This is in line with Scripture:
Romans 8:26-27, NIV: In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans. And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit because the Spirit intercedes for God’s people by the will of God.
This year is your year of greater expectations! May God work wonders as you continue to abide in prayer and faith in Him to act on His promises concerning your life and about your situation. Shalom Aleichem!
