My attention
came to rest on this expression from God’s word: “Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think…”[2]This
led me to wonder what I could expect to see this week if God was going to do “far more abundantly” than all that we
asked, thought or imagined in prayer.
The first
consideration has to revolve around things God would do in ourselves that we couldn’t
even imagine needing to be done. After all, the God-chosen blueprint for our
maturity is that we end up being like Jesus. Our sarky inability to see
ourselves honestly means that God will have to keep surprising us with exposure
of things that are wrong with us, and invitations into his mind-boggling work
of making us like his Son.
Presuming that
we have prayed that God’s will would be done in ourselves as it is done in
heaven,[3] we
have to expect that he will do things in us that are beyond our imagining or
asking. This means that we should see things on a daily basis that are of the “deeper”
and “higher” variety. The “deeper” things are unexpected disclosures of things
that are broken inside us at a deeper level than we have looked before. The “higher”
things are the unexpected insights into things about God we have not experienced
before.
It should be
no surprise that we are surprised with both the “higher” and “deeper” whenever
we pray for anything at all, since God’s work of making us like Jesus is the
biggest work he is doing in our lives. This is why people who set out to really
get to know God also find that they also begin to really get to know
themselves. The Beatitudes[4]
make it clear that hungering and thirsting for God’s righteousness begins with
feeling, even mourning, our poverty of spirit.
One thing that
helped me the most to appreciate what God is doing in me right now is
associated with the apostle John on the Island of Patmos.[5] As
I considered various reasons that he was isolated like that, I was encouraged
with the picture of God’s work in John at that time. As I sometimes find myself
isolated from the larger expressions of the body of Christ, John’s example of
continuing “in the Spirit”,[6] encouraged
me to seek the fullness of the Spirit in my own “Patmos” experiences. No matter
what I am going through, I want to be “filled
with the Spirit”[7] as
God’s word commands.
Once I have
seen how God is doing unimagined and unasked things in me, I spend the rest of
the day watching for how he continues the surprising answers to our prayers in
things going on around me. I cannot itemize the different things I have noticed
God doing simply because they involve other people. I will just say that, the
very morning after our prayer meeting, I had a couple of talks with people that
I now have on my prayer list. By week’s end my prayer list has grown based on
things I have seen God doing this week that I hadn’t thought to ask for.
My main point
in this is simple: watch and pray;[8]
and pray and watch.[9]
The two together will help us watch what to pray for, and then watch for
answers to our prayers that stretch us beyond what we thought or asked. If we
will write down the people we suddenly meet, or the situations we suddenly
face, and consider them part of God’s answers to our prayers, and then bring
these things back to prayer meetings with the expectation that God will still be
doing more than we can ask or think, we will find our hearts feeling a rising
surge of joy even while things are not turning out the way we thought or
imagined.
In the end, it
is only when we delight ourselves in the Lord, including his unimagined and unasked
answers to our prayers, that we truly experience the desires of our hearts.[10]
After all, we are being conformed to the likeness of Jesus Christ,[11]
so it makes sense that we would delight to do our Father’s will as much as he
does,[12]
even when that will of our Father is a completely unexpected expression of the
plans and purposes of God in us and around us.
Conclusion: If
we truly want God’s will to be done on earth as it is in heaven, we must expect
to experience his will in all kinds of unexpected, unimagined, and unasked
ways.
From my heart,
Monte
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