God is a compassionate Father who listens to His children. He wants them to be productive, healthy and living to their full potential. Our Father invites us to bring our needs, desires, and wants to Him. He especially loves when we bring the needs of others into His throne room. Our Heavenly Father lavishes good gifts upon us. He rejoices with us as we share testimonies of answered prayer with others.
However, over loving Father doesn’t answer every prayer in the way we would want, and this can be confusing. How could a loving God refuse His children anything that they would ask?
I have the blessing of overseeing an Internet ministry since 1996, and for many years, I invited people to submit prayer requests from around the world. I rejoiced with those who subsequently reported changed circumstances, healings, restored relationships, and prodigals returning home as a result of their prayer requests. I have witnessed amazing miracles in my local church through prayer. I am the first to testify of the goodness of God, and I regularly share stories of answered prayer in my local church and over Social Media.
However, I have yet to find a money-back guaranteed method or a step by step guide on how to pray the magic-bullet type of prayer that sees immediate results every time.
God has a good reason for not giving us a fool-proof prayer instructional manual; God longs for a heart to heart relationship with His children. From Genesis to Revelation, He demonstrated His undying passion and fierce determination to woo our hearts to His. God knew that if He were to place a “Dummies Guide to Getting What You Want From God.” into our hands, our focus would be on the formula and not on Him.
God ALWAYS has our best interests at heart. He wants us whole and healed. He longs for us to know His love and to spread that love in practical ways to the world around us. It is never His will that we go hungry or become entangled in the chains of mind-numbing debt. It is never His will that we would be homeless or live without the necessities of life. Because He created us, He knows every dream, longing, and wish that is in our hearts. His heart breaks at our heartbreak. His ultimate aim is to see captives of injustice, addictions, bitterness, and loneliness walk in freedom. He finds no pleasure in seeing anyone suffer.
God created us to be in fellowship with Him, and He knows that prayer is the best way we commune with Him. Contrary to some beliefs, God doesn’t find much joy from seeing His children beg, plead, and bend over backward in hopes of getting an answer from Him. It tears His heart to see His children reach about in the dark, hoping that somehow they stumble across the right combination of words that will finally open the door to answered prayer. Prayer was never meant to be a stab in the dark.
I have learned a few things as I’ve walked with the Lord for 40 years, but I still have much to learn, and I don’t have all the answers. I do know this: when I stand on the foundational truths that God is good, God cares, and God’s hopes and dreams for myself, my loved ones and the world around me are better than anything I could dream or imagine, I am on the right track.
All Bible verses, unless otherwise attributed, are from the English Standard Version (ESV).
©1997, 2016 Katherine Walden
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