“Yea, they turned back and tempted God, and limited the Holy One of Israel”. (Psalm 78:41).
Many of us limit God in many ways due to lack of faith and a lack of understanding of the will of God for our lives. But one way in which we limit God and which we would want to touch this morning is in the place of “unanswered prayers”.
What do some do after such an experience of unanswered prayers? Some begin to doubt the power of God or dig deeper into themselves thinking that something is wrong in need of fixing.
While one cannot deny that Satan, sin, and unbelief play massive roles in unanswered prayers but one key factor often overlooked is the fact that God is sovereign and He has the power to say No or Yes to our requests or to delay the request until a time he deems best for our own Good.
In actual fact, for a genuine child of God, no prayer goes unanswered because “No or wait” are answers before God.
When God reaffirmed his promise to Abraham about having a child of promise in his old age Abraham found it incredulous, and his faith clung to his son Ishmael who he could see and not to the unseen promise in Isaac. For Abraham at this point, it was a matter of sight and not of faith.
Little wonder, after God reaffirmed the promise of Isaac’s birth all Abraham could say was: “ O that Ishmael might live before thee!” (Genesis 17:18).
The truth is having left the place of unanswered prayer as dejected men most of us have gone back to holding on to our Ishmael afraid to further believe God for our Isaac. However, with God, delay isn’t a denial and a No isn’t a rejection.
When God told David he would not build him the temple but his son Solomon would, what did David do? He was not dejected having known the will of God but began to assist Solomon in the process of making provisions for the construction.
Cycling back to Abraham, we may want to ask about why God held on to the promise of Isaac. God delayed Isaac’s birth to teach Abraham that nothing is too hard for him to accomplish and to eventually strengthen Abraham’s faith in God’s omnipotent power. This strength of faith would carry Abraham to a willingness to attempt to sacrifice the same Isaac at the request of God.
At this point, Abraham’s faith was so strong that he no longer had his faith in the things God could give him but in God, in God’s higher plan. God had become to Abraham the most important equation in the challenges of life.
Today many call Abraham the father of faith more than the father of Isaac. His legacy for us all was more in the gift of faith than in the gift of Isaac. This was God’s higher plan for Abraham.
In the place of unanswered prayer, David looked away from himself and looked toward God to be of assistance to his Son in the building of the Lord’s Temple. The most important thing with these men was what God accomplished in them through his Wait and No.
With these men the word of God by the Apostle James had his root: “ But let patience have her perfect work, that ye may be perfect and entire, wanting nothing”. (James 1:4-8).
In the place of waiting and a No to a prayer, Abraham and David accessed God’s higher plan for their lives.
The legacy of David therefore transcends the temple having become the ancestor of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Beloved, God has a higher plan for our lives that transcends our needs and we should let him accomplish this higher plan in our lives by submitting to his will in prayer because his power is perfected in our weakness and his grace is sufficient as we depend on him and not our own strength. (2 Cor. 12:9).
This is the higher plan where God wants all believers to be especially in this end time when God has promised to shake the earth- a time when nothing is certain, when nothing is given, a time when only our trust in God is certain.
Reading
2 Corinthians 12: 1-10
