James 5:16, "The earnest prayer of a righteous person has great power and produces wonderful results.” Today's episode talks about how important it is to pray earnestly. It is also important to pray expectantly. This verse talks about the legend of Honi the circle maker who drew a circle in the sand and refused to leave it until God made it rain. We can learn a lot from Honi! Music:"Adding the Sun" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Your Prayers Will Be Answered!
James 5:16: "The earnest prayer of a righteous person has great power and produces wonderful results.”
The Big Life Devotional Podcast has an excellent episode yesterday titled “Praying in Circles.” What I loved most about this episode is that it gave us an action we can do to pray for our children, or really anything we are praying for. The idea of praying in circles comes from a book called The Circle Maker by Mark Batterson. This is an amazing book that talks about praying circles around our problems. Mark starts his book off by telling us the legend of Honi the Circle Maker—a man bold enough to draw a circle in the sand and not budge from inside it until God answered his prayers for his people. Honi was a man of God.
I am not sure if He was a prophet, or just a prayer warrior, or what. It had not rained in a very long time and the people in the village came to Honi and begged him to pray to God for rain. Honi agreed and he drew a circle in the dirt and prayed to God for rain. He told God he would not step foot out of that circle until it rained. He prayed and he prayed. Eventually, it started to sprinkle. When he saw this he could have stopped praying. He could have said thank you, Lord, I truly appreciate this little rain that you sent us. However, He didn’t. He said thank you Lord and also, this is not the rain I am praying for, I am praying for more rain. He continued to pray and praise the Lord. Finally, it was raining down so hard it was starting to flood the area, and all those that were standing around watching him pray were running for shelter.
What the Lord just put on my heart as I was typing is that we stop praying too early sometimes. At the first sign of our prayers being answered we stop praying and accept that small offering as the answer when God actually has so much more to give us. It is not that we don’t want more it is that we think we will be bothering God, or we will be greedy if we expect more. God wants you to know that is not true. He has so much more for you and He is just waiting for you to be open to receiving it. God wants us to expect big things, amazing things.
For instance, when we have partial healing, yes, absolutely thank God for that, and also let Him know you are expecting full healing. Keep asking for what you want. Don’t shy away because you are afraid you are asking for too much. I heard a phrase once and I love it. It reminds us why we ask for a lot. The phrase is “I’m not greedy, I’m just needy.” We aren’t asking God for more because we are being greedy, we are asking God because we know that we can’t do anything on our own and yet through Him, we can do all things.
The verse above says, “The earnest prayer of a righteous person has great power and produces wonderful results.” Do you know what earnest means? The definition of earnest is “resulting from or showing sincere and intense conviction." What are you praying for right now? What is that prayer that you keep asking God about? That one prayer that you wonder if it will ever be answered? Are you praying earnestly for it? The Bible verses we read are talking to us directly. Each one of us and they are promised by God. Today’s verse tells us that the earnest prayer of a righteous person has great power and produces wonderful results. You can take this to the bank. This is a factual statement that you can rely on. If this is true, why haven’t some of our prayers been answered?
There are a couple of reasons for this. First and foremost is explained in Isaiah 55:8-9 “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the Lord.“As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” God is sovereign. He has a plan and it is better than our plan, even though we tend to think our plan and our timing is better. God knows what He is doing and so sometimes our prayers take longer than we would like or are answered differently than we would like because God has a better plan than we do.
However, I think sometimes our prayers take longer to be answered because of things we do or don’t do. Are we praying earnestly? Are we asking every single day? Are we asking for enough or are we settling for scraps? God doesn’t want to give you crumbs from the table. He wants to give you the whole cake. Why aren’t we asking for the cake? We will not be bothering God by asking Him for big, bold prayers. We will be honoring Him. Have you ever been asked to do something at work or in your personal life and the thing you were being asked to do was really difficult? How did you feel when someone asked you to do it? Did you feel honored that they thought you were capable of doing it? Yes, you might have been nervous, as it was a difficult thing or even just a new thing, and yet you felt honored that someone thought you could handle it or you could be good at it.
I remember each time the ladies in my prayer group asked to do a new thing. For instance when they asked me to be on the discernment team, or they asked me to be on the prayer team. I was so honored. It felt amazing to know they thought I was capable of doing those things. In a similar way, we honor God when we ask really big, bold prayers. We show Him we know how amazing He is. We show Him that we know He can do the impossible and that nothing is too big for Him. We are not asking God for too much, we are asking too little of Him.
It talks about persistence in the circle maker too. Mark Batterson talks about how we give up too soon sometimes when we are praying. We assume it is not God’s will if He takes too long to answer and yet maybe God is just waiting to see how badly we want it. What we are willing to do for it. For instance what if Honi, drew that circle in the sand and stood there for 5 hours and then gave up and yet God was going to make it rain after the 6th hour? We don’t know God’s timing, we just need to keep asking. Is there anything you want so badly you would be willing to draw a circle in the sand around that prayer? It doesn’t have to be standing in a circle in the sand until you get it, but maybe you could pray for 5 minutes every single day about that one thing until you get an answer. Maybe you could sit in a church every day for a few minutes until it is answered. Maybe you could commit to going to daily mass until it is answered. It doesn’t matter what you commit to as much as it matters that you are willing to commit to something.
I think you will see more answers to prayers if you do this because you will be more focused on your prayers. You will be searching for that answer because you are expecting it to come. It is as if you know it will be answered and so you are waiting expectantly. I wonder if that is the problem. I wonder if we are praying expectantly or not. Do you honestly expect God to answer your prayers? Are you on the lookout for the answers? Maybe that is why Honi’s prayer we answered so quickly. Actually, I have no idea how long he was standing in that circle, but I know it wasn’t months. He knew God would answer His prayer and He was willing to stand there in a circle, looking foolish, until God did. He put his pride aside and was willing to look foolish to wait on God. When we do this, when we step out in faith and put all of our trust in God, He never lets us down. There was no way God was going to not show up for Honi. Honi was honoring God by showing everyone in that town that God is the one to turn to when we need something. When you step out in faith, trusting God, He will always show up. He will not leave you hanging. Pray big, bold prayers, and watch how the Lord shows up for you. Pray earnestly and watch the amazing results. I just looked up in The Circle Maker Book, to see how long Honi prayed for and it said as his prayers went up the rain came down. So I guess his prayer was anwered pretty quickly. Batterson said Honi’s prayer was resolute yet humble, confident yet meek, expectant yet unassuming. I think we can all learn a lot from that statement. How can we follow Honi’s example of how to pray?
Dear Heavenly Father, I ask you to bless all those listening to this episode today. Lord, we want to pray earnestly, show us how. We want to step out in faith and demonstrate your awesomeness to all those around us, give us the holy boldness we need. Give us the persistence and the fortitude we need to continue to pray those prayers that don’t seem to be answered. Don’t let us give up Lord, help us keep asking. Show us, put on our hearts what it is you want us to do. If you want us to commit to doing something while we wait, put that on our hearts, let us know, and then give us the strength to do it. We love you, Lord, you are truly amazing. We thank you for always showing up. We ask all of this in accordance with your will and in Jesus’ holy name, Amen!
Thank you so much for joining me on this journey to walk boldly with Jesus. I wanted to remind everyone that my retreat in October is open for registration. It is going to be a great weekend full of love. The Lord has been talking to me a lot about what that weekend should look like and I know it will be amazing. If you feel like you would like to feel a little more love from God these days, this retreat is for you. If you feel like you would like to have a deeper, more intimate relationship with the Lord, this retreat is for you. If you feel like you could use a little time away getting to know some really awesome people, this retreat is for you! Come join us, it will be great. CLICK HERE for the retreat or to walkboldlywithJesus.com. I look forward to meeting you here again tomorrow. Have a blessed day!