Your Prayer Has Been Heard: How God Meets Us in Seasons of Weariness and Waitingනියැදිය

You can learn a lot about a person based on what they do with their gas tank. Are you the kind of person who fills up as soon as it gets to a quarter tank, or do you like to see how close to empty you can get?

I'm definitely in the second category. I love seeing how much I can squeeze out of a tank. In high school, this habit got me in serious trouble. My friends and I were driving to see a movie when my car suddenly lost all power right at the top of a highway overpass. I had run entirely out of gas.

Fortunately, we were going fast enough to coast down the other side. We managed to push my dad's car across several lanes of traffic into a gas station. We missed the previews but made it to the movie. That experience taught me to be more careful about pushing my limits.

While running out of gas might be inconvenient and embarrassing, there's a bigger problem many of us face. It's not that our cars are getting close to empty - it's that our hearts and souls are running dangerously low.

This may have been an incredibly challenging season for you. If you had to choose one word to describe how you feel, it might be "weary."

According to the dictionary, to be “weary” means to be physically or mentally exhausted by hard work or strain. Weariness can mean being characterized by fatigue, impatience, or dissatisfaction with something.

I'll make this personal. Fill in these blanks:

"I feel weary of _______. And as a result, I am _______."

What are you weary of right now? What has you fatigued, exhausted, impatient, or discouraged?

How would you finish the second sentence? Are you frustrated, annoyed, discouraged, or something else?

If you can complete that sentence, then you’ve taken the first step in the right direction. Because what cannot be named cannot be healed.

Recently, I was listening to one of my favorite Christmas songs, "O Holy Night." There's a line that hits me every time: "A weary world rejoices."

When I heard those words recently, I thought, "That's exactly how I feel." Perhaps that's exactly how you feel, too. You feel weary.

But, there's a massive contrast in that phrase. You have "weary" and then "rejoices."

When we feel weary, most of us don't feel like rejoicing. When we're exhausted and discouraged, the last thing we want to do is throw a celebration. We tend to move in the opposite direction.

Yet, because of the good news of Jesus, the songwriter wrote these powerful words: "A weary world rejoices."

Over the next few days, we're going to explore why and how weary people can rejoice. I hope that you'll find new meaning and experience God's presence in the midst of your weariness.

We're going to spend time in Luke chapter 1, looking at the story of a priest named Zechariah and his wife Elizabeth. This couple had been weary for decades, and their story teaches us something powerful about how God works in the midst of our exhaustion and disappointment.

Their story begins in dark times. There was corrupt leadership, an oppressive government, and spiritual confusion everywhere. Yet in the middle of these dark circumstances, God was about to do something incredible.

The people living at that time didn't experience comfort and control. They didn't have answers or clarity about the future. What they had was waiting and weariness. Somehow, they found reason to rejoice.

Tomorrow, we'll discover what Zechariah had been praying about for years and how those prayers reveal something important about our own hearts.