3 Trust in the Lord, and do good; Dwell in the land, and feed on His faithfulness.
4 Delight yourself also in the Lord, And He shall give you the desires of your heart.
5 Commit your way to the Lord, Trust also in Him, And He shall bring it to pass.
We do have to be careful - our God is not some sort of vending machine or genie whom we can expect to do whatever we command Him to. But, He has given us His Word to direct us - and as we are humble before Him and seek His will by spending time in that Word and surrendering to the leadership of the Holy Spirit, our desires can actually conform with His; in fact, I recall hearing that He will actually create desires with us - giving us the desires and granting them. Through our relationship with God, we can discover how we can pray specifically, so that His will might be expressed.
+++++
In James chapter 4, we find a pattern for effective prayer. We are not called to pray out of selfish desires, but God does want us to humble ourselves and ask according to His will. In that chapter, we can read these words:
2 You lust and do not have. You murder and covet and cannot obtain. You fight and war. Yet you do not have because you do not ask.
3 You ask and do not receive, because you ask amiss, that you may spend it on your pleasures.
15 years ago, Lynell Lovinggood was in a bad place - her family had been going through what was termed by an article at The Baptist Paper as "a difficult season," and the midst of it, more bad news came.
Even before her kidney transplant in 2007, there were trouble signs. The article related that even back in the 1990's...
...her rheumatologist saw some things he was concerned about. He thought they might be dealing with lupus, though Lovinggood didn’t have some of the primary symptoms.Fast forward now - the article states that "she went to a service specifically geared to prayers for healing, and the stranger prayed for a perfect match for her. Some friends from her church — Shades Mountain Baptist in Birmingham, Alabama — had suggested she go." She experienced the compassion of her church family, saying, “It was a sweet time of ministry from my church.”
It wasn’t long before they found lupus lesions on her kidneys. She began two years of chemotherapy.
“As the lesions were being destroyed, the kidneys were also, and the function started going down,” Lovinggood said.
The manifestation of the answer to prayer came in August of 2007 when the call came. A 27-year-old had passed away, and that person's kidney was made available to Lynell. The article says that, "she...knows that in the midst of that donor’s death, God worked a miracle — the kidney was a six-out-of-six antigen match, a rare occurrence outside identical twins and some siblings."
After the transplant, she remembers that...
...the worship leader and his wife came over to sing her favorite song — “Great Is Thy Faithfulness” — over her.She said, "It was a beautiful picture of God’s people over and over again...It was overwhelming. Sometimes I would just cry. I don’t know if there’s anything like it, to see God work in so many specific ways through different people.”
And in the days that followed, cards flowed in. She taped them all around her door so she could see them every day. Food came at the same rate. Two months later, meals were still showing up at her door.
15 years ago, that transplant is a testimony to God's gift of health to her and a reminder of the love of God's people and her three children.
From this story, you can see that no doubt the kidney was a "perfect match," an answer to prayer from a stranger, but she also discovered another "perfect match" - the matchless love of Jesus that she saw over and over again from her church family.
During this season of Thanksgiving, we can be very mindful of the blessings that God has given to us - sometimes those blessings will be huge, like a second chance at life, perhaps even a medical miracle. But, there are answers to prayer that occur that we should acknowledge, and those instances of answered prayers can be motivational for worship and for testifying to the greatness of our loving God.
And, we can be encouraged by the specificity of that one prayer - a prayer for a perfect match. Sometimes we can be generic or general in our prayers, and perhaps God is calling us to reach out in faith and pray specifically as He leads us. We are taught that we have not because we ask not, and since we serve such a wonderful Lord who is full of love and power, we can bring the desires of our heart to Him, not demanding or not in presumption, but in humility and a sense of trust in a God who can do beyond what we ask or think.
No comments:
Post a Comment