Reading Time: 8 minutesI didn’t know what to make of Jesus’s statement. I didn’t know how to reconcile, “for everyone who asks receives,” with reality. It seemed obvious that it wasn’t true. Was Jesus lying, was he mistaken, were these not really his words, was the Bible not really God’s Word, did these words not mean what they appeared to mean? So I put it on the shelf. From time to time I’d come back to it and try and understand.
Then one day I saw it.
Reading Time: 13 minutesBut Jesus and the Bible talk about answered prayer like it’s a sure thing, a certainty, something that is extremely reliable. Here’s Jesus:
Reading Time: 3 minutesM.’s family has a bunch of dogs, some Pit Bulls some Chihuahuas. A few weeks ago they discovered one of the Pit Bulls with its mouth locked around the neck of one of the Chihuahua’s, her daughter S.’s pet.
Reading Time: 4 minutesI like this one because if played out over an extended period, about two years. Too often we call it quits when the answer doesn’t show up right away and we end up missing out on what God wants us to have.
Reading Time: < 1 minuteNitz shared a beautiful testimony of answered prayer with us yesterday at church. A friend was in the hospital with a blood clot in her lung, a very serious condition, the friend couldn’t even get out of bed or move around. Nitz felt led to lay on the bed with her friend as she read
Reading Time: 2 minutesSome more testimones of answered prayer from the last couple church services. – N.’s friend, an elementary school teacher, was quite distraught about being moved to a different grade level. N. told her not to be upset, let’s pray, God will help you. They prayed, N. said there was a very strong anointing of God
Reading Time: 3 minutesWe had so many great testimonies last Sunday I thought I’d share them with you. What blesses me most is that all of them, except the last, are the result, not of mine or Becky’s prayers, but of the prayers of other people in our church. Nothing gives me greater pleasure than to see the people we have taught doing the work of the Kingdom of God…
Reading Time: 4 minutesI love this quote from George Müller:
“How precious to have learned in any measure to stand with God alone in the world, and yet to be happy, and to know that surely no good thing shall be withheld from us whilst we walk uprightly!”
Müller is known for his book, Answers To Prayer, which details how God provided for the needs of the orphanages he started in 1800s England, through answered prayer without resort to natural means, i.e. without resorting to the typical fundraising techniques of his day appeals to the rich, fundraising letters, conferences, chicken dinners or, as Pastor Price used to say, “Katydid candy sales.”
What I didn’t know was that Müller started these orphanages specifically for the purpose of demonstrating to the Christian world that God would provide for his children without Christians having to resort to natural means. In other words that a Christian could learn to stand with God alone in the world, with no one else to back them up or take their side or help them but God, and still have their every good thing supplied. Here’s Müller:
Reading Time: < 1 minutePreviously we saw that according to Jesus, according to the Bible, God wants to answer our prayers, it's his desire to answer them. Then we saw that it's not just up to God we have a part to play in receiving the answer. Now we want to begin to look at what our part is,
Reading Time: 7 minutesMost of us, kind of, have the idea that God’s willingness is the main obstacle to answered prayer. We think that if only God wanted to, He would answer. We think that if we can just figure out how to get God to want to, then we’ll have it made. We end up figuring that if we were good enough, or if God liked us enough, or our request was important enough or spiritual enough, then that would cause God to want to give us what we ask. So we try to figure out how to be good enough, or how to get God to like us enough, or how to make our request seem important or spiritual enough, so that God will want to grant our petition.
But, here’s the great secret of answered prayer…