Digging Deeper – God Gives Different Answers

I don’t know about you, but when I ask for something in prayer, I usually have a pretty good idea of what that answer will look like. My brain has already done the hard work for God and worked out all the details. There is no need for God to do anything but act. What I fail to take into account is that God is not trying to tell the world (and me) the story of “Chris.” God is telling his own story by how he works in the world and in our lives.

Take the story of Lazarus’s resurrection. Mary and her sister Martha knew exactly how God should work in their brother’s sickness. They had seen the formula time and again in Jesus’s ministry: Jesus shows up, and the sick are healed. The problem for them is that Jesus is telling a bigger story.

I love that when we read the two sisters’ greeting to Jesus, they use the same phrase: “If you had been here, my brother would not have died.” I think they had said this to each other repeatedly in the days after Lazarus’s death. It seems like a practiced statement. Mary, the emotionally passionate of the two sisters, throws herself at Jesus’s feet in despair and anguish. But Martha, who gets labeled as the less spiritual sister because of the Luke 10:38–42 account (take a second and flip over to it if you don’t know what I am talking about), seems to imply in her greeting that she knows Jesus has something in mind: “I know that God will give you whatever you ask.” And Jesus tells her what he is about to do, though she doesn’t quite understand the scope of his word in the moment.

When we pray, we must do so with the understanding that the story being told in our lives is God’s, not ours. When we get a different answer than we expected, when we wait and wait for God to move, or when we get a firm no from God, we have to trust that God is doing something to further his own story, and we can trust that the story is good.

Take a moment now and pray. Ask God to use you to tell his story. Ask him to do the things in your life that will bring him glory, because that is a prayer we can trust he will always answer with a “yes.”