The audio for this devotional is not available for now, but you can have your device read it to you.
Reading options
Verse:(If we look forward to something we don’t yet have, we must wait patiently and confidently.) . . . For example, we don’t know what God wants us to pray for. But the Holy Spirit prays for us with groanings that cannot be expressed in words. —Romans 8:25, 26, NLT
We often hear that God answers prayer with yes, no, or wait.
I can understand yes and no, but for me the answer wait is problematic. How do I know if an answer is no or wait? If I cannot “hear” His answer, how do I eventually know when I have received one? I finally came to understand that God answers my prayers by using His profound principle of unfolding. Unfolding is about stories.
God unfolds stories with His sense of timing, not ours. For example, at the beginning of the Bible, God unfolded an answer to Adam’s unvoiced prayer for a mate of his own. First, God introduced Adam to all the animals and told him to name them.
Sometimes God sets up our desires to pray for certain things. That was called discovery learning, and Adam discovered that he was only a half.
Then Jesus let Adam help create his other half with a part of himself. This was an unfolding story as well as an answer to prayer.
Job and God were part of another unfolding story.
As far as we can tell, Job never got an answer to his prayer asking why he was going through all his troubles. He was depressed; he wanted to die, but he trusted that God was not out to punish him. For some people God’s lack of answer to prayer for Job is troublesome. But I have come to believe that it is not necessarily those with the strongest faith who receive the biggest miracles. I think dramatic answers to prayer are often for the benefit of the weak in faith. God wants us to trust Him with the slowly unfolding answers to prayer that we may or may not ever see with our own eyes. In prayer we do not try to manipulate a whimsical God. We join His story, trusting He knows the storyline better than we ever could.
My smaller story always falls inside that bigger one. He wants to weave them together, and for that He needs my trust in His omniscience.
So the best way for me to hear the answer wait is to stay tuned in to the story God is unfolding all around me. When I trust patiently for His profound principle of unfolding, his apparent no answer often transforms into a resounding yes!
Kathy Beagles Coneff