“But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves.” James 1:22……………..
“There’s no reason for them to pray. You need to obey,” the Spirit of God told me one afternoon.
I had felt rather impulsively I should ask some friends for prayer about something, had even started to send them an e-mail to that effect, and that’s when the Spirit of God intervened. The reminder He gave me contained a message for all of us.
I was having a little bit of a challenging day, par for the course for weeks past, and I figured some prayer would help me out. But the Lord showed me I didn’t need people to pray me out of my circumstances and out of how I was feeling. I needed to OBEY HIM. He had already given me instructions, day after day in fact. And the only way out of my circumstances was through them, and the only way out of what I was feeling was to persevere and TO OBEY THE INSTRUCTIONS HE HAD ALREADY GIVEN ME!
Know why I had started reaching out for prayer? Because I wanted to wave my little magic prayer wand, get my friends to pray, and voila, everything would change and work out the way I wanted and I would feel great! My focus was off the Lord and off His Word, and off of what I needed to do in obedience to Him, and on myself, what I wanted, and how I wanted my friends to pray for me so I could get what I wanted! Thank God, He stepped in to remind me that OBEDIENCE was what I needed.
Friend, if you’ve been waving your magic prayer wand around at all your friends to pray, perhaps you need what I needed that day – to examine your heart and life in the light of the Lord and His Word, and to see if perhaps the answer to whatever you face is LOVE FOR HIM, TRUST IN HIM, and OBEDIENCE TO HIM.
Nothing wrong with prayer, but prayer isn’t intended to be a quick magic fix so we can feel better, so our circumstances can change to our liking, and so we can avoid what the Lord is calling us to do.
The verse above makes clear God doesn’t want us to just study His Word; He wants us to obey Him. The Lord speaks to His followers’ hearts in accordance with His Word, and when we are sure what we are hearing is from Him, we need to act upon it. Not wave our little magic prayer wands in the air for a quick fix to satisfy our flesh but OBEY THE LORD in LOVING REVERENCE TO HIM!
Look to the Lord, friend. What is He speaking to your heart?