Magnificent Prayer #53
Magnificent Prayer #53
“Lord,” Martha said to Jesus, “if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But I know that even now God will give you whatever you ask.”
John 11:21–22
How many of us have been blind in our prayers? Look back and think of the prayers you thought had not been answered but now find that God has answered with a bigger manifestation than you ever dreamed. God has trusted you in the most intimate way He could trust you, with an absolute silence, not of despair but of pleasure, because He saw you could stand a much bigger revelation than you had at the time.
Some prayers are followed by silence because they are wrong, others because they are bigger than we can understand. Jesus stayed where He was—a positive staying, because He loved Martha and Mary. Did they get Lazarus back? They got infinitely more; they got to know the greatest truth mortal beings can ever know—that Jesus Christ is the Resurrection and the Life.
It will be a wonderful moment when we stand before God and find that the prayers we clamored for in early days and imagined were never answered, have been answered in the most amazing way, and that God’s silence has been the sign of the answer.
OSWALD CHAMBERS
Pray About It: The silence of God in response to our prayers isn’t a sign that He has not heard or will not grant our requests. Many pray-ers think that God’s silence means they have done something wrong and thus He won’t answer. But Martha and Mary had done nothing wrong. Their request of Jesus was good. And He complied—in His own time, not theirs. As a result, their blessing was even greater than their original request.
God’s silence may offer proof that the answer has come or will come in a greater way than we suppose. Don’t fence God in with your expectations of His action. His silence itself may be the action that grants your prayer.
As you pray today, God may be silent. But the answer you need is on its way, nevertheless.
Prayer is knocking at the door, faith is the expectation that it will be opened.
W. J. HARNEY
From the book
