Bold Prayers

I've always been afraid of bold prayers.

What if I'm praying for something that is against God's will?

What if I believe in the answer and then I'm wrong?

Someone once told me that praying "Thy will be done" was a weak way to pray, and it didn't make sense to me. That's how Jesus Himself tells us to pray, and it's an act of surrendering to God's will over our own.

But in coming years I've come to understand what she meant. We should pray "Thy will be done." That should be the baseline of everything we pray; it should be our very heart posture. But we don't need to fear that His will won't be done because of our prayers. We need not fear praying against God's heart. We have to trust that Jesus will intercede on our behalf. That He will know our hearts and correct them if need be. But we also need to know that there's power in our prayers. The God of the universe listens.

I remember someone asking me to pray for her baby to come early, and I did, but my prayers were timid because what if God wanted the baby to come late?

He gives us the power to intercede. And He will not act out of His good design.

In the past few years I've found boldness in the story of the fiery furnace. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego told Nebuchadnezzar, "our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and he will deliver us out of your hand, O king. But if not, be it known to you, O king, that we will not serve your gods or worship the golden image that you have set up" (Daniel 3:17-18, emphasis mine).

These men fully believed that God could and would save them. But if He didn't, if His salvation did not look like their expectations, their position didn't change. And that's how I learned to pray, fully believing but not being shaken if the outcome wasn't what I expected.

God wants intercessors. In Isaiah 59:16, He "wondered that there was no one to intercede." In Ezekiel 22:30, He "looked for someone among them who would build up the wall and stand before [Him] in the gap on behalf of the land." He wants us to pray boldly for what is good and right. And He may not do it in the way we want in this broken life, but that shouldn't stop our prayers. 

Even now I struggle with believing that God listens to my prayers, gives them weight, and answers. Or at least to admitting it.

What if I believe that God will bring me a husband? What if I believe God will blot out generational sin from my family? What if I believe God will do the supernatural?

And what if He doesn't? What if I'm wrong? What if I shared my confidence with others and it didn't come to pass?

The what ifs don't matter.

We don't have to qualify our hope as long as it's dependent on God and not on our preferred answer.

Sometimes this question comes down to pride. We don't want to be caught believing in something that wasn't true. But all this question does is lead us back to our original question/request instead of pushing forward when God has given us an answer. Sometimes, however, it's more than that.

We struggle when we feel like God gave us a promise and then turned His back. Even when we know that all His promises will come to pass, it's hard to navigate something we thought He was promising that didn't occur. Whether that's at all or in our timing.

We can feel disappointed, dejected, and discouraged.

Sometimes this is a sign that our heart was misaligned or misfocused, but sometimes God directed us towards that "yes." 

Maybe our interpretation was off, maybe it was our timing, or maybe it's a prayer that will be answered but in the eternal, not the temporal. 

What I know is that the godly prayers that we pray over and over will always reach the point where the answer is "yes." Where our longings coincide with His good timing.

What I know is that my heart has changed when I've believed in that yes. When I've prayed from that yes.

I was never more content in my singleness than the moment I started believing God would give me a husband.

I was never more passionate and driven in my hopeless prayers for transformation than when I started believing God would transform. 

I need that confidence. I need that drive to keep going. I need that focus on who God is. I need to prepare for eternity by fighting for now. 

I can't say whether each "yes" will look like my expectations of it, but I know that when God gives me a "yes," He wants me to move forward with it boldly. Because I'm not relying on the "yes," I'm relying on Him. So whether I'm praying for what feels like a "yes" or what feels like a "no," praying boldly for something good, for something in tune with God's heart, changes the way we pray. And it changes the spirit with which I pray. 

Rest in the power of that boldness. Rest in the peace of the "but if not," of knowing that He is still God, and He is still good no matter the outcome. Fight for your prayers--not against God but with Him. And live in the beauty, the hope, the satisfaction of belief.

"And this is the confidence that we have toward him, that if we ask anything according to his will he hears us. And if we know that he hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have the requests that we have asked of him." ~1 John 5:14-15