The Special of the Day… From the Orange Moon Cafe…
(an addendum to yesterday's message).
"Simple Prayers, Complex Answers"
What must God do to provide answers to even the simplest prayer, such as, "Give us this day our daily bread?" (Matthew 6:11).
On the surface, the answer might seem straightforward. God is God, and He can do anything that accords with His character, nature, and eternal purpose in the Lord Jesus Christ. "There is nothing too hard for Thee" (Jeremiah 32:17). He could merely speak and the provision would appear. However, the Lord does not usually cause food to spring forth ex nihilo, that is, from nothing. Even the feedings of the five thousand and the four thousand mentioned in the Gospels began with existing bread and fish, meager as the amount seemed to be until the Lord Jesus multiplied and provided a bountiful feast. Our daily provision of sustenance by God results from His working in creation, and the response to His working by human minds and hands. In modern times, the provision of daily bread requires at the very least good soil, proper weather, skillful farmers, processors, distribution centers, truckers, stores, and workers to serve as the means for our Heavenly Father's answer to the request for "daily bread."
Simple prayers, infinitely complex answers. Apply the truth to matters of the human heart. Things become extremely intricate, particularly because the Lord made us to either respond or not to His working for our benefit. As the Lord Jesus said to Nicodemus regarding the new birth, "The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit" (John 3:8). In other words, when we can figure out the origin and destiny of the wind, then we may be able to understand all God does to answer prayer regarding the heart, and how human hearts respond (John 3:8).
The consideration offers a sublime and joyous truth glimmering before us, namely, the simplification of prayer. We often make matter difficult because we are tempted to make it about ourselves. However, if even the simplest answered prayer requires God to work in more ways that we can imagine, the matter must rather be far more about Him. To His eternal praise, it is.
"Your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask Him… We know not what to pray for as we ought" (Matthew 6:8; Romans 8:26).
We do not approach the throne of God, telling Him what we think He needs to do in our lives, the lives of others, or the world. We rather come, asking Him to do that which He knows needs to be done. This does not preclude specific requests for needs as we best understand them. It does, however, mean that we come in the knowledge that God's answers to our prayers will involve so many facets of His working, we would not even recognize most of His answers as answers. As the Apostle Paul declared, our Father's ways are "past finding out" (Romans 11:33).
Surely this takes a place among the most wondrous truths about prayer our hearts can contemplate. We may also find it to be among the most motivating. Our simple requests - the simpler the better - will find the heart and hand of God in response, working in ways of wonder profoundly beyond our grasp and perception. Add to this the truth that our Father provides all things "by Christ Jesus" (Philippians 4:19). In this holy light, wonder bows before an even deeper stilling of our hearts and minds. Yes, the tiniest morsels of our Father's provision in response to our simple requests speak of glories of His heart, mind, and hand beyond our comprehension. We pray, hopefully with a great measure of humility and recognition of the limitations of our understanding. He answers "exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think" (Ephesians 3:20). Yes, wondrous, motivating, and overwhelming with wonder is the calling to pray, or rather, our Father's working thereby.
"Call unto Me, and I will answer thee, and show thee great and mighty things, which thou knowest not."
(Jeremiah 33:3)
Weekly Memory Verse
"Not unto us, o Lord, not unto us, but unto Thy name give glory, for Thy mercy and Thy truth's sake!"
(Psalm 115:1)
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