Tuesday, June 15, 2010

WHEN GOD ANSWERS PRAYERS

Bob Russell is a fluent speaker and preacher in line of religious affairs. He has been into tour around Europe untiringly and with zeal preaching the word of God even to the extent that he consequently met an accident in one of his endeavor. This laid him abed for quit sometime in the hospital. Russell has fertile religious and spiritual ideologies as fortified by his down-to-earth experiences. Some of the contents of the book were mainly exhorted from among his preaching. These circle mostly on prayers and God.

“God answers every prayer, for either he gives what we pray for, or of something for the better.” - Soren Kierkegaard

Our Manners on Prayer

We always seem to consider prayer as an amount or a medium of exchange to buy a commodity from God. We usually fall into our knees when we are constricted by needs and other infirmities, and forget everything when we are casually on tract again to life.

Prayer is always compartmentalized – that is, by certain grace of time and place. And other human activities are devoid of prayer itself. If we pray in times when we are dragged by needs, anxieties, anger and frustrations we see God as an over-the-counter pain reliever. That is, we remember him at this juncture and some other times his out of the blue again.

Man's faculty is brittle and fluctuating, always tantamount to ingratitude and forgetfulness. Prayer is always in danger of a vain negotiation between man and a personal and loving God.

We usually pray as if we are holding a scepter putting God under the veil of our superficiality, to the extent of imposing an imperative over him. As if God slept last night. As if God is so dull of the queer twists of our world. Say Bob Russell, “prayer is not meant to be dictation. We, in our immaturity sometimes don't know what to ask for. Jesus himself was not a dictator in his prayers. In the garden of Gethsemane he prayed, “not my will, but yours be done.”


Prayers Need Not Be Perfect

Every one has doubts, God doesn't expect perfect faith, but he does expect sincere faith (Bob Russell). It is a fact that we are doubter by nature and it follows that we cannot dispense the anxiety that our prayers will not come true. However, we are not being told to have perfect faith, rather earnest faith. We only have to acknowledge to God our weaknesses, our dependence on him so that God may fill it. While boasting ourselves to be self-sufficient, surely God will not fit into it.


Unanswered Prayers

One of the most frustrating things grounded to prayers, oftentimes, in lieu to us, is that we deemed it as unheard and always unanswered.

Bob Russell stressed out, “God doesn't guarantee that he'll answer all of our prayers exactly the way we ask, or prayers would put us in charge of the universe. That would be dangerous.” he added that, “sometimes God uses natural means to answer our prayers. God moves mountains more through gradual erosion than through Volcanic eruption.” God, according to Bob will take into account our immaturity and limitations, no matter how much we think we know what's best for us, God sees the “bigger picture” and is interested in what is best for us.

Further, God will not answer prayers in verbatim fashion. Say one of you is asking for a dry season and the other is asking for wet one and you are at the same locality. Which of you will be heard? God cannot make dry and wet season at the same time and in the same place. Wet and dry are two polar or opposite elements of nature, just like light and darkness which would be impossible to be in the same place together. Else, God would be scrambling nature and contradicting himself.

We know that God respects nature the way he has given us perfect individual choices. What God has done, God will not undo, although he can destroy it. He made you a man; he cannot undo you into an ape or a banana. Wet is wet, dry is dry, light is light and darkness is darkness in their respective place.

Everything is perfect when God made this world. So, there is no need to undo it or God must have done a mistake when he made this world. Nonetheless, your prayers will be heard in the way that God sees it to be best for you and to your fellow. God doesn't have time to self-centered and selfish prayers.


Finally, Prayer is...

True and clear enough when God said that he'll be with us 'till the end of time is a divine promise he really meant for all. And he is not “watching us from a distance” as cited in a song.

Our God is not a scrape of genie-in-the-bottle who cares only for petty yearnings. Instead, he is a God who is intimate, a God who cares for both sides of the coin in our lives.

At his end (Bob Russell) he said, that prayer is saying, “Father, will you do thine with me? I can't do it alone! It's too big for me. Then, when you step out in faith, you discover that with our heavenly father beside you, the sky's the limit.”

☺☺☺


No comments:

Post a Comment