Pray Continually: Devotions From Time Of GraceBeispiel

Wait for it

I am convinced that one of people’s greatest frustrations and hindrances to their faith and confidence in God is the dilemma of “unanswered prayer.” When you have asked and pleaded for help during a season of stress and nothing seems to have happened, all you can conclude is that God is unable, or if able does not know what to do, or if he does know and doesn’t act he must not love you anymore. If any one of those three conclusions is true, our faith is devastated.

We are earthbound. We are locked into the rigid grid of time, able to experience only one second at a time. God is unlimited in space and time. He is everywhere and “everytime” at once, managing the lives of the believers for good over both the short and long term.

Sometimes we have to wait because God’s answer involves a complex set of occurrences that have to happen first. Sometimes we wait because God, knowing us better than we know ourselves, sees that we need to wait. Sometimes we wait because we are too immature for the gift that he will give.

What Scripture makes clear is that you can trust God’s brain and his arm and his heart. “I am still confident of this: I will see the goodness of the LORD in the land of the living. Wait for the LORD; be strong and take heart and wait for the LORD” (Psalm 27:13,14).