A Time To Stop Waiting In Prayer – Radio Classic – Dr. Charles Stanley – How To Talk To God V2 Pt 3

Israel’s victory at Jericho is one of the most famous stories in the Bible. But many people don’t know that what followed was an embarrassing defeat, which left Israel’s leader, Joshua, confused and on his face before God.

Using this rich story, Dr. Stanley illustrates how believers can discern the time to pray and the time to act. Prayer is essential, but it was never meant to replace action.

This message is Part 3 of the series: How to Talk With God – Volume 2

With a message from god’s word, here’s Charles Stanley.
Would you turn please to Joshua chapter 7?
We wanna read the first 13 verses together and the title of this message when it is not in order to wait Upon god in prayer, there’s a principle here I believe that probably would indicate a problem that many people have in their prayer life.
So he says, but the children of Israel committed a trespass and their curse thing for Achan, the son of Carmy, the son of Zapdi, the son of Zera of the tribe of Judah took of the accursed thing, and the anger of the lord was kindled against the children of Israel.
And Joshua sent men from Jericho to ai, which is beside Bethhaven on the east side of Bethel and speaking to them saying.
Go up and view the count country, and the men went up and viewed it.
They returned to Joshua, said unto him, let not all the people go up, but let about 2 or 3000 men go up and smite ai and make not all the people to labor thither for they are but theo.
That is, uh, weary, everyone. So they went up thither of the people about 3000 men.
They fled before the men of ai.
And the men of ai smote of them about 36 men, but they chased them.
From before the gate, even under Shebarim, and smoke them in the going down, wherefore the hearts of the people melted and became his water.
And Joshua rent his clothes and fell on his face on the earth, uh, upon his face before the arc of the lord, until the evening tide.
He and the elders of Israel and put dust upon their heads.
And Joshua said, our last oh, lord god, wherefore has thou at all brought this people overjoin to deliver us into the hand of the amorites, to destroy us, would to god we had been content and dwelled on the other side of Jordan?
Oh lord, what shall I say when Israel turn at their backs upon their enemies?
For the canaanites and all the inhabitants of the land shall hear of it and shall surround us and cut off our name from the earth, and what will thou do under thy great name.
And the lord said unto Joshua, get the, uh, prayerful lies there upon my face, Israel has sinned, and they have also transgressed my covenant, which I commanded them for they have even taken of the accursed thing and have also stolen and dissembled also, and they’ve put it even among their own stuff.
That is what they stole they’re gonna use for themselves profit.
Therefore, the children of Israel could not stand before their enemies, but turned their backs before their enemies because they were cursed neither will I be with you anymore except you destroy the accursed thing from among you, upsanctify the people and say, sanctify yourselves against tomorrow.
For thus say at the lord god of Israel, there is an a curse thing in the midst of thee, oh, Israel Though canst not stand before thine enemies until you take away the accursed thing from among you.
Now let me present you a little dilemma and see if you can identify with this.
Suppose, for example, that, uh, whatever your work may be, you lose it. And your boss walks in the barn.
He says, I’m sorry. We don’t need you any longer. I hate to have to tell you this.
Gonna pay you 2 weeks, and that’s it.
Because of inflation and all of these things, So you come home and you reason to yourself.
You say, well, the lord, I know that I’ve lost my job for a particular reason.
Surely, you must be trying to teach me something, and I wanna know what you’re teaching me And so what shall I do at this point?
And so you have one of 2 things you think about.
You say, well, uh, shall I wait upon the lord and just sit and do nothing and wait for god to do something?
Or shall I go out and pursue seeking another job or some other vocation?
And so oftentimes, we’re in that dilemma, and we don’t know what to do.
And so the question arises When do you wait upon the lord and when do you get up and do something?
So let me put it this way.
There are times when you face this situation and you don’t know what to do, that you don’t do anything.
You just feel God’s don’t move, don’t make a decision, don’t do anything, just wait upon me.
On the other hand, their times when a situation arises and, uh, uh, some circumstance changes.
And you say, what shall I do?
And god wants you to get up and take the initiative and do something.
Well, in this particular passage here, I believe there is an example, uh, what god is saying to Joshua to help us identify a problem that many people have in their prayer life.
When, uh, as a result of not knowing may be exactly what to do or thinking they don’t know what to do, they sort of fudge young guy a little bit.
And they keep wondering, well, what doesn’t the lord answer my prayer? What doesn’t god change my circumstances?
What does god allow me to be in this comes stands.
Why did god create all this in the first place?
And so, instead of being able to have it clear in their minds and hearts what’s going on, Uh, they just sort of fumble around in their prayer life, and either they quit, or they just sort of pray out of, uh, confusion and frustration.
So I want you to listen very carefully because most of what I’m gonna say is to build the background of about 5 statements I wanna give you, but it’s very important that you get the whole picture of what’s happening.
And three things I wanna share with you.
First of all, the calamity of the nation of Israel, the cry of Joshua, and the command of god.
So with that in mind, let’s look to see what’s happening.
Right before chapter 7, the people of Israel have gone to, uh, across the Jordan and have faced the city of Jericho invincible in pregnant walls.
And I’m sure when they got there, they said, to themselves, there ain’t no way for us to take city because, uh, there was no one going in and out.
They were absolutely seemingly self sufficient within themselves.
And you’ll recall in the 6th chapter that god tool, Joshua, 2 things.
First of all, he gave him a promise in verse 2, and he said, I have given into by hand Jericho.
Now watch this. First of all, they gave him a promise. He says, I’ve given into thy hand Jericho.
Following his promise, he gave him the military strategy with which to take Jericho.
I was listening to a general speak this last week and referred to this particular passage, and he said The most ridiculous piece of military strategy ever put on paper is to be found in Joshua chapter 7 because who in the world ever won a war, Mark around it once a day for 7 days, 7th day, marching around it seven times blowing trumpets and having a big shout.
But the scripture says that god tore the walls down all the way flat to the ground so that the nation of Israel could march in.
Now, One of the interesting things here that I think we overlook sometimes is that when god gives direction, he doesn’t give generality.
When god says, here’s what I want you to do. Here’s the way I want you to do it.
God is very precise. And I think a beautiful example of that, and sometimes trips us up because we think now god’s given us direction.
It’s up to us to figure out how to get it done.
But notice what he said in this 6th chapter.
He told them what to do, but beginning in verse 10, he said, and Joshua had commanded the people saying, 6, 10.
Yee watch this. Yee shall not shout nor make any noise with your voice.
Neither shall any word proceed out of your mouth until the day I bid you shout then you shall shout.
That means they had the problem of marching around that city. They had got all lined up.
Everybody’s in formation, followed Mark They marched all around that city.
Those tremendously half thick walls all go around the city and couldn’t open their mouth.
Now he wasn’t speaking in general. I’ll just he said, god, said, don’t open your mouth.
And more than likely they had, god will instruct somebody dead.
Because, and I got to ask him myself the question, why do you suppose god told them to talk.
Well, it certainly wasn’t because they wanted to be quiet.
I mean, those folks could certainly see thousands of people out side walking around the city walls and could you imagine what they must have done?
These folks must be out of their mind. They must be practicing.
The reason he wanted them to walk the way around the city never opened their mouth is because he knew what they’d be saying.
I know what you might have been saying. We’d have been marching, and we’d have said. Ain’t no way.
Look at that wall. And we would have we would have talked ourselves into the most negative doubting situation.
And they would have said, what’s Josh you up to? This is no way to win the battle.
What are we doing? We just walk around the walls. In fact, we don’t even have our arms.
So we’re just walking around the wall. And can’t even say a word.
And here, you see, had they been talking to each other? They had talked themselves into great, great discouragement.
2nd day, 3rd day, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th.
And by the end, they were saying, you know, he’s gotta be out of his mind because, listen, God didn’t tell Joshua everything he was gonna do.
7th day they marched around, and I believe on the 7th time around when Joshua said, alright, blow the trumpets and shout.
They blew the trumpets and shout and shouted.
And then all of a sudden, the army began, were were standing there absolutely in shock because they watched cracks began to form that wall.
I believe they hit the road in the other direct for at least to to to miss the falling stones, then when the wall fell in the proper strategy, they moved in to take So they had just had a tremendous tremendous victory.
Everybody was just praising the Lord and shouting glory for what god had done.
So Joshua said, now, look, the next at his AI, sent in a bunch of spies.
And so they came back and they said, Joshua Small, just a small place. No problem.
And after all, all you need to do, Joshua, is send up a couple of, uh, 1000, uh, 3, maybe 3000 others, and we’ll take a out.
Look what we did at Jericho. Big mistake is in what we did.
They didn’t do a thing at Jericho. Look what we did at Jericho. We’ll take AI with no problem.
So the calamity came because Joshua, instead of listening for god’s promise and god’s strategy, he listened to his cohorts talk about what they were gonna be able to do, never waiting for god’s strategy at all, sent in about 3000 men, Little Olitsy bitsy city of AI came rushing up, put them on the run, killed 36 of them, and put them an absolutely absolute humiliation and disarray came home all discouraged and dis and disillusioned.
And, The Bible says that the people’s hearts turned like water. They were so absolutely overwhelmed with fright.
He says they hearts became like water.
Now, you you you know sometimes when you felt strong and in your strength and god was doing something and then all of a sudden fear gripped you and absolutely, you’re turn to spaghett it, and you felt like running water.
There just nothing in you strong at all. That’s the way they came back in humiliation and absolute defeat.
And I think there are many many principles in this passage, and one of them is sure is this.
One of the mistakes they made was this. They forgot a basic principle spiritually.
And that is whenever you have walked out of a beautiful, successful experience, watch out because right just outside the door, Satan is laying his snares all before you because he knows you jump dropped your guard because you just had a great spiritual victory.
And so they exercised pride. They ceased to exercise caution that in wait upon god for his direction and his guidance, and so they got in trouble.
So what I want you to see here is the result of that is Joshua’s crying out before god because what he does here sounds just like all of us at some time in our life.
So look, if you will, uh, at, uh, verse, um, uh, 6.
So when they came back defeated, the Bible says, in Joshua, rent his clothes, fell on his fell on the earth upon his face before the arc the lord, until the evening tide, he and the elders of Israel, and put dust upon their heads.
Now let me share what he did.
It says he rent his clothes which when when when a person was grieved, just totally grieved beyond that comprehension and that capacity to face it, they would just tear or srayed their garment.
So he ripped off his garment.
In absolute grief, the scripture says, not only did he tear his garment, He fell upon his face in humiliation, and it says he fell upon his face before the arc of the covenant.
The arc of the covenant contained the commandments of god given to Moses.
So, god gave the arc of the covenant to the nation of Israel as a physical material.
Symbol of the presence of god.
So the wherever the arc of the covenant was, that’s where god was, in their mind, that indicated to them the of god’s present.
So when the, uh, arc at one time was removed from them, and you recall that in the enemy’s lands, they had all kinds of sores and boils begin to break out.
And god again to judge them, the arc of the cabinet, the presence of god.
So he ran his garment out of grief.
He humilled himself, before god by lying before him before the arc of the covenant.
And the scripture says that he put dust upon his head.
And that was the indicate that he was in mourning.
So he and the elders of Israel, that is the major leaders of Israel, that’s what they were doing lying flat out before god dest on the head, garments rent mourning and crying out.
It says that they did that till evening tide, and maybe the battle was earned in the morning more than likely.
And so they’ve been lying old age mourning and groaning and so forth.
And I want you to listen to what Joshua prayed.
And this is just as unlike Josh as anything to be found and see who this sounds like. Listen.
Joshua said, oh, lord god, wherefore hast thou wherefore has thou and all brought this people over Jordan to deliver us into the hand of the amorites.
What does that sound like? Doesn’t that sound like his crowd 40 years before in the wilderness when they were saying all Moses?
Just came through the Red Sea, all of pharaoh’s chariots, mired up in the mud, soldiers floating all over the shore drowned by the judgment of god, And god, having given him a tremendous victory, he won, but a few days, they were saying, Oh, my goodness.
What are we gonna eat now? Are we gonna drink? What in the world’s gonna happen to us?
Why is Moses god? They want to stone him. And what is Joshua?
Well, don’t that Joshua went through the Red Sea?
Joshua lived, Josh when Caleb 40 years in the wilderness they live, and everybody their age, all the adults had died down to 20 years of age.
And so here he is with a whole group, a whole new generation of young people.
And he’s the leader, has Moses’s mantle. And what is he doing?
Lie prostrate before god repeating their same old prayer. Why did you put us in this mess?
Why did you leave us over on the other side of cana? On other side of Jordan.
And they used to they used to say, oh, why didn’t you leave us over in Egypt?
What they didn’t say was this. Oh, god.
Why and you leave us over on the other side of Egypt, down in Egypt, enslaved, where our families were being destroyed by the Egyptians.
You see, it is amazing how satan blinds us, we say, Oh, the good old days.
How many of you wanna go back to the good old days? That’s what I thought.
Because when you really get mature, they weren’t as good as they seem to be. They’re just different.
They aren’t necessarily good. So here he is, And I want you to notice his prayer.
He doesn’t mention a single promise from god. There is no thanksgiving from god. There’s no praise in the lord.
There’s no reminding god of any of his promises.
He’s in humiliation before god grieve in his heart unburdening his soul. There’s nothing systematic about that prayer at all.
Here is the man crying out before God. Oh my god. Why have you done us this way?
Now, let me ask Let’s be honest. How many of you’ve ever gotten under prey?
And if you real honest, you’d have said, oh, god. What’d you put me in this mess?
If you have your honor, most of you, not.
All of us, it sometimes have said more than likely, lord, how did I get in this mess?
And then you see, we don’t wanna say, lord, here’s what you did to me, but here’s what we say.
We sort of covered camouflage what we fear.
We say, Lord, why did you allow me to get into this mess?
And, Lord, Why do you, why do you treat me this way?
And, and I, if you love me the way you say you do, why do you allow these things?
What we’re doing is blaming God.
Now, listen, god is not to be blamed for all the messes we create.
So here is Josh you a blame in god. What’s going on now? What does god say?
The Bible says that god says Joshua, what are you doing lying down your face? Get up.
Now, he probably didn’t say it quite like I said it, He may have said it in far more stern words.
Listen to what he says. The lord said to Joshua, get the, uh, he didn’t ask him why.
Get the, wherefore lies there upon my face. He says, Joshua, what are you doing lying upon your face here?
Now, here’s what happened. And god tells Joshua what happened. The lord told Joshua to tell the people.
When you go into Jericho, I he says, I’m gonna give you Jericho. The whole city of Jericho is yours.
But when you go in, you remember this, you’re gonna kill every man, woman, and child, and you’re the save the gold and silver precious things for me.
Now, you say, well, isn’t that cruel of god? Let me tell you something.
God knows the human heart. And less a man is penalized for sin and penalized deeply for certain types of sins, god knows that the society is not fit to live in.
So that where we are. So here’s what god said.
He said, Joshua, a sin has been committed in the nation of Israel.
Somebody has taken the gold and silver, and you would have found out who it is, and you are to stone them to death and then burnt that whole family.
So here’s what they had to do. It’s a big responsibility.
Had divided them up by tribes, divided them up by families. That was family names.
You know, Smith, white, green so forth, then they divide them up by households, you know, all the Smiths to in this household together, and then the fathers so that ultimately, it didn’t make a difference.
Who did it? The father was responsible. So they divided up in those 4 divisions.
Now, god said to Joshua, you’re responsibility is to get up off your face crying out to me and blaming me for the problem.
And you’ve got to you’ve got to get your elders together here. Divide this whole nation up.
And we’re going through this nation, and we’re gonna find out the problem, the source of the one who’s taken the stolen civil, which was sanctified under god Now, when god said you to go in and take the city, and god says, you know, the silver and gold is mine, that means god sanctified set up the part for himself.
Achan took the golden silver and hid it among his things to be used for himself.
He said, you find out who has sinned against the nation of Israel, identify them, stone them to death, and then burn their whole family.
Now god was trying to show them that when he said something, he meant what he said.
So, Joshua, the Bible says, that god said to them. Now, watch this. He says, now look.
He says, beginning in verse 12, therefore, the children of Israel could not stand before their enemies, but turned their before their enemies.
And verse 13, he says thou can’t stand before thine enemies until you take away the curse thing from among you.
And what he was saying is he says, I’m not gonna be with any more.
Not gonna help you any more battles till you deal with the issue at hand.
So Joshua did exactly what god said, and they correct the situation.
Now I said all of that simply to bring it down to 2 or 3 things I want you to notice.
I think oftentimes we make a mistake in our prayer life that we’re not been quite aware of.
We wonder why god does not answer our prayer. We want a prayer life that is effective.
We wanna be able to talk to god and have god hear us and respond accordingly.
So all of that is natural and normal. That’s what god wants for each one of us.
But the question comes, why is it that we pray and we pray and we pray and somehow those things don’t fall in place like they ought to.
Well, I think there’s a similarity here in this passage that I want you to notice.
Here’s what Joshua did.
Now let’s don’t put too much, uh, let’s don’t blame Joshua too much at this point, but I want you to see a similarity here.
Joshua came back, realizing that they’d been defeated. And instead of saying, Lord, here am I.
Search my heart, searched the heart of the nation of Israel.
He said, Lord, why did you do this to us? So he wanted to blame god.
And as a result of that, of course, god said to him, now Joshua, you’ve laid on your face before me in in sack cloth and ashes.
And you’ve been grieving in your heart. You’ve rent your garment. And you’re praying, oh, god.
Why did I do this to you? Why did I do that? Joshua get up off your face.
A sin has been committed. Correct that problem. Then I will bless you until you correct them.
There’ll be no blessing. Now here’s what happens oftentimes.
Sometimes you and I come to a situation and we want an answer from god.
And god says, here’s the answer.
When you correct this either in your life or your family or your business or your church or whatever the organization may be when you correct that, then I’m gonna bless you.
And sometimes, if it’s not all time all time, we don’t know what it is.
Sometimes God will say something’s not right. And we have to keep searching out to find out what it is.
But when god says to us, here is the thing that you need to correct in your business.
There’s dishonesty in your business.
Sing in a way, you you have a practice in your business that is not in keeping with my will.
You’ve gotta correct that. Uh, here’s a habit in your you’ve got to deal with it or in your family.
You’ve got to deal with this thing among your teenagers or or or your husband or your wife or whatever it might be.
You’ve got to deal with And you see as long as we say, alright, Lauren.
I wanna thank you for showing me that.
And then we just pray about it and pray about it and pray about it and pray about it.
Now listen listen to me carefully, there’s some things god wants to identify and he wants us to pray.
He wants us to wait and pray and listen and pray because god’s doing something within us, doing something in this situation.
And as we’ve explained before, when he’s ready, we are ready, and he works it all up.
But there are times when god says, deal with this.
We say, thank you lord Jesus for showing us what we need to deal with.
Now, we’re gonna deal with it. Now, lord, I just want you to show me.
And you know what we do instead of having the courage to deal with it, we sort of skirt around it.
We say, Lord, I wanna thank you for showing me all about Next time we get on to pray, we keep praying about it, and we keep praying about it.
And what we’ve discovered is it’s ease easier to pray about it than to deal with it.
And so we just keep praying and keep praying.
We say, oh, lord, won’t you please show me why you’re not blessing me.
Please help in guts as I’ve already shown you.
And I’m sure that god must have said to some of us at times, why don’t you get up off your face, grieving and mourning and groaning and complaining to me and blaming me for your circumstances and get this thing straight down in your life.
And then I’ll bless you till you do. I’m not gonna do it.
And you see, sometimes we don’t wanna deal with it.
So we skirt the issue and got says, this is the problem.
Now we don’t always know exactly what it is. That’s how you have to keep praying until he shows you.
But, listen, Once he shows you, for example, let’s say they back you onto somewhere in your life, you borrowed some money from somebody, and you didn’t pay them back.
And every once in a while in your prayer life, you know, it comes up.
And, uh, once in a while, it comes up real strong and you say, now, Lord, you know about this and so and so.
And we say, and lord, and so you know, we keep and and once we say, Lord, you know my past, and I wanna thank you that you have forgiven me for that.
And I know that I owe that fellow some money, on and on and on we go.
And what god is trying to say to us, god wants to say, deal with that.
And so if there’s something back there that you’ve not dealt with, somebody you owe some money to, and, uh, and you skirt you pray all the lord bless the church and bless this and bless missions and bless my family, bless all these things.
And god isn’t hearing one bit of that.
When god says, deal with that when you deal with that, then I’m gonna bless you.
And you see, god knows that everybody makes mistakes.
Everybody sends against them at some time, not because we won’t to everybody has failures in his or her life.
That’s not the issue. God is in heaven waiting to check on your next failure.
God wants to see your heart. He wants to know if we’re willing to deal with it.
If we have a repentant spirit, if we want to say, Lord, you’re right. I must deal with that immediately.
I will do so. And I believe the whole principle of that passage is not to lay blame on Joshua.
Though Joshua did go about it the wrong way, he didn’t say, lord, I know that you are faithful.
I can look back and see the Red Sea experience.
I can see 40 years of taking me through all of that.
And now I know that there must something wrong and I wanna deal with it, Lord.
She’ll be what it is. He’s blaming god.
So I wanna give you 5 things never to forget in your prayer life. You listen?
Number 1, write them down. There is a time to wait and there is a time to act.
The time to wait is on is when you do not know from god what to do next.
But once god shows you something needs to be corrected, you need to get up and get it corrected, then come back to praying.
He said, but now wait a minute. The Bible says, praying always right.
Men should always pray and thank not correct.
What he saying here is that doesn’t mean you can’t pray on your way to correct what god said, correct, but it means that we’re not to wait and just hem haul around fudge on god.
That’s what I call. Just sort of fudging. Lord, I’m gonna get around to it one of these days.
Sometimes because we don’t have the courage to face up to it or deal with something in our life.
So number 1, there are times when we must wait upon the lord and not to act until we get direct The second thing is this, that blaming God in prayer is a waste of our time.
When you get on your knees and you tell god all about your circumstances, and you imply, and you indicate that god somehow is slightly responsible for this.
You might as well stop. You and I cannot blame God. Now, listen.
You say, but suppose there’s something I didn’t particularly do. And I’m in this circumstance. Listen.
Don’t blame god because here’s what you’re gonna discover. I wanna say it again.
Sometimes what you feel the most difficult about and you feel like to buy them’s dropped out.
You don’t know what to do next, and you think, oh, god. Why did you do this to me?
God isn’t doing something to you.
He’s doing something you liberating you and freeing you and moving you on to a greater spiritual experience than you’ve ever had before.
So blaming god only turns it inward.
Number 3, you and I, when when we pray and god shows us the error, it may be something over here that we need to correct something in our own personal life when he shows us the era that needs to be corrected, corrected immediately with god’s guidance, and don’t keep praying around about it and him hauling around telling god you’re gonna do it one of these days.
It needs to be corrected when god shows you.
And as I said before, now I don’t mean like a bulldog, go rush in, just chew everybody up, or just one person.
You asked the lord to show you how to do it. God will give you the details.
That’s what he told Joshua. He said Joshua, get up, get this thing corrected, and then he told him how to do it.
So you and I need to wait for the large direction as to how But you see, if we keep putting it all, god is not going to bless us until we deal with the issue at hand.
Alright? The 4th thing I wanna say and I wanna say it again, I said a few moments ago, if you’re not careful, you’ll find yourself praying as a substitute for action.
Now god wants us to pray always, but he, and sometimes we have to pray and not act.
But when he says move, we’re to move. When god says move and you say, I think I’m gonna pray.
It’s much more worshipful. I’m just gonna trust the lord. God says he’s faithful.
There’s some things we have to take the initiative for. He said, Joshua, get off your face.
Get out there and get those folks divided up and find out what the problem is and correct it.
Then I wanna bless you. Could it be that god has already told you what to do about your job?
Could it be that god has already told you what to do about sin?
Could it be that god’s already told you what to do about your family?
And you’re still talking to god about it. And he wants you because he loves you.
He is forgiving towards you. He wants the best for you. He wants to encourage you.
He wants to prosper you. He wants to build you up. He wants to conform you to his likeness.
What he does when he points his finger at something, he’s pointless He never points his finger towards something in our circumstances or in our life as his children in a condemning way.
He does not doing. He points his finger as a as a finger of encouragement to lift us, to build us, to help us, to strengthen us, to shape us into his likeness.
And he’s saying, deal with the deal with the deal with the deal with it because I wanna bless you.
Deal with it. Stop praying and start dealing.
And sometimes, one of the primary reasons that many of god’s people, not blessed, is because they will not get up off their face and deal with the situation, uh, whether it’s, uh, for example, a woman says, you know, my husband’s been out of work for months, and he says he just trusts the lord.
I said, well, is he looking at hardship? No. He’s just trusting god.
Well, it may be that what god say, I’ll tell you what I do.
If you all know what I do, you may not be interested, but I’m gonna tell you in a way.
If I were a man and I didn’t have an occupation, I saw my family begin to suffer brother, I believe it was god my responsibility to look and god’s responsibility to identify the work.
You see, praying also involves initiative.
We must deal with the issues that god lays upon us in order to reassure us of god’s continuous blessing in our life.
And the last thing is simply this.
You keep praying about, you put this in your own words.
Let’s put it this way. Praying without dealing with the problem, will cheetahs of this.
Continuous prayer without dealing with a problem will cheat us of success.
And what he’s saying in this passage is this, once god shows us the air of our way.
Once he puts his finger on something, we had to get up off our face, take the initiative, and correct it.
Then we have the privilege of claiming god’s blessing for future success. Let’s pray together.
Father, we thank you for that passage, and there’s so many wonderful exciting things that we’d like to share in that.
And I do pray that what little time we’ve had to share this very hour.
That you’ll take the truth, that central basic primary theme of that passage, and drill it into our hearts, riveting it into our minds, put a cap on it so that we cannot escape it.
And we pray that each one of us will exercise the courage, father, to deal with.
To focus upon, not just to look at, not just to talk about, not even simply to pray about.
But having had you identify the problem in our heart, begin to look at it, with initiative and begin to correct the situation in order that your blessing may flow again once again in our life.
Thank you for your generous, loving, kind, forgiving spirit orders.
And thank you for that you look at the motivations of our heart.
You see our failures, but you also see our potential.
And I pray that every single person might recognize that he or she has tremendous potential in Christ Jesus under the umbrella of his perfect will.
We thank your father for speaking to our hearts, and I pray that each one of us will examine our heart that we will examine very careful to see if the full if the full intention of your blessing, we’re receiving.
If we’re just being partially blessed because we’re not willing to deal with some issue or issues in our life and help us to see, you don’t ever leave us.
You said, I’ll never leave the nor forsake then. When you said to these people, you’ll not be with them.
You didn’t mean you wouldn’t walk with them, but that you would not guarantee them success nor would they be able to look to you and trust you to help them to succeed?
I pray every man, every family, every single person in this fellowship and those who are out there, father, who really wants your best, really wanna be asked, really wanna become the person you want them to be, that you’d speak to their heart and give them the courage to get on their face.
And then once you’ve identified the problem, Get up, correct the problem, move on in their Christian life, growing, encouraging, and being a blessing to others.
And this I ask in Jesus name and for his sake.