Prayer and Faith are Siamese twins. It’s essentially impossible to have
one without expressing the other. Unfortunately, because of that close kinship,
they’re both susceptible to the same kind of diseases: the properties that make
them virtues, also make them vices.
David said in Ps. 38:25 that, “For in you, O LORD, do I hope: you
will hear, O Lord my God.”
I believe the wording of this prayer of faith is a good portrayal of the
attitude a believer should hold when praying.
Many of us Pentecostals and Charismatics have turned God into a jukebox that
will play the desired music as long as you insert the right amount of coins. It
may be in the form of “I believe it, that settles it”, or other said gimmicks
that we do to ostensibly ‘cage’ God or put Him in a corner, (if you don’t do
this God, that means your word is not true”), etc.
There’s this general teaching of ours that, if you
pray to God and nothing happens, then “give a sacrificial seed”, and if
nothing still happens, “Praise and dance around Him for 10 hours”, and if
nothing happens...
This picture of an Almighty God who can, but WON’T
until you throw something His way is beginning to look more like the exacting
idols the missionaries asked my forefathers to stop worshipping centuries ago.
Like the power inherent in faith, things happen when we pray. But that
does not make God our personal Santa Claus or Genie, waiting on us to grant our
each and every wish.
He is still “the blessed and only Potentate, the King of kings, and Lord
of lords; Who only has immortality, dwelling in the light which no man can
approach unto; whom no man has seen, nor can see...” (1Ti 6:15-16).
Prayer doesn’t make God our puppet, prayer is a request, a plea to Him
to interfere into our realm to change things to the way He wants them to be in
the first place(Mt 6:10).
That is why I admire David’s wisdom when he cried, “For in you, O
LORD, do I hope: you will hear, O Lord my God.”
As much as he was making an imperative request, he still addressed God
in 3 different ways that alludes to His total power and sovereignty: LORD, Lord
and God.
To a devout Jew as David, those were heavy terms. YHWH (the self-existent
and eternal one), Adonai (Master, Owner, Lord), and Elohim (God, the covenant creator
of all things).
Whenever we pray in faith like David in this psalm, lets make sure the
gravity of his choice of words do not get lost in translation.
AMEN.
More Blessings await you today; you’ll not miss them in Jesus Name.
GREG ELKAN
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