A Wide-open Prayer

Psalm 81:1-10

Open your mouth wide, and I will fill it with good things. (Psalm 81:10)

ONE OF THE PERSISTENT PLEAS OF “Praying Hyde” was for God to answer the promise of Psalm 81:10 by responding to the mouth wide open and filling it with answers to its requests. Hyde was thinking beyond food, of course. One year he prayed for at least one soul to be saved a day, and by the end of the year more than four hundred people had come to Christ through his ministry. The next year he doubled the request, and God answered; the year after, he doubled it again, and God answered again. Hyde saw no limit to his prayer. The wider a saint opens his or her mouth, the more God is able to fill it.

Sadly, too many of God’s people live with closed mouths, closed hands, and limited expectations. God is good to us anyway; he meets our needs and fulfills many of our personal requests. But when we open our hearts and expectations to fit the wideness of his mercy and the abundance of his Kingdom, we find extraordinary responses to our persistent faith. We become agents of a divine overflow, with heaven’s graces pouring into the world through our prayers. The irreligious people of the world do not know such agents exist and will probably never recognize us as such, but recognition is never the point. We serve God and respond to his ways. And his way is to reveal himself through the petitions of those who love him.

One of the greatest things you can do for this world, and one of the greatest marks on history you can make, is to devote yourself to the divine discourse in which we appeal to God and he accomplishes his will through our appeals. We cannot do that with small expectations because we serve a big God. His agenda is enormous. But so are our prayers if we get a glimpse of his purposes. Open your mouth wide, and see how God responds. Be persistent, and don’t lose heart. The most effective place to be a world-changer is on your knees.

{Lord, forgive me for praying too small and for praying only for my own interests. My heart is yours; fill it with your desires. Then fill my mouth with the petitions that meet those desires, and respond with power. Change the world through my prayers. Amen.