The Road to Answered Prayer is a Journey

God is faithful and everything He does is faithful. His word is true. What He says will come to pass, comes to pass. All throughout the Bible you can track His words to the fruition of the same. He gave each one of us a measure of faith so that we could respond to His faithfulness with the same quality. Those who succeed in doing God’s will take Him at His word.

While God is faithful and has given us faith, we are still learning how to trust Him with our faith. When we think the answer to our prayers is “not yet”, it could simply mean that God is moving in His timing and not ours. What we look for as time markers or milestones may not be an indication of what God is doing in a situation. We set ourselves up for disappointment by gauging God’s goodness on something we can measure. It is important that we stay near to God’s heart as we pray and believe His faithfulness to answer His best way. We don’t know everything, but God does. He only has good for us.

We can’t give up before the fulfillment of the time it takes for answered prayer. One of the pictures that stands out most to me is one where a man is digging a tunnel through a cave with a pickaxe, trying to get to the treasure. He quits and turns around to leave just before he reaches the opening containing treasure on the other side. This is an idea of how long we should hang on for answered prayer: until we reach the other side. Until God’s glory is manifested in that situation. Until the person we are praying for is touched by the mercy of God. What else is our faith for if not to believe and expect God for something greater than we are already seeing?

God is all over your faith in Him. He is with you and will never leave you nor forsake you in the expectancy stage. At times it won’t feel like your prayer is being answered or that anything is moving at all toward its fulfillment but DON’T BELIEVE THE LIE THAT NOTHING IS HAPPENING. Just because we can’t feel it, doesn’t mean God isn’t moving.

Throughout the Bible there are stories of situations looking and being bad, but at a time, the very next day, everything changed. In one 24-hour period, the situation went from terrible to God-touched and God-breathed. Did all the prayers to God take place in those few short moments before change? No. They happened when the situation looked dismal. God’s people cried out to Him AND HE HEARD. He changed the situation for good. That’s who He is in us and for us.

So don’t quit on yourself, don’t quit on others who need God to intervene on their behalf and certainly don’t quit on God. He has so much invested in you – His name is Jesus. Let Him have His perfect way in you. There is so much more to do in the kingdom to glorify God and to set the captives free.