i prayed; it didn’t work… did i not have enough faith?
NOTE: I am out of town 11 June - 7 July, so I thought I would use this opportunity to invite some of the leaders I have the opportunity to serve with to write a guest devotional. My “pen” will return on 12 July… and you might (rightfully) prefer their reflections to mine!
This week’s devotional comes from the pen of Pastor Karen Mauricio. Karen is a pastor at The Church On the Way in Van Nuys, CA. She currently serves, along with her husband, as Young Adults Pastors. She also works with young families and serves as the art director in the creative department. In addition (if all that were not enough), she sits on the Western District Advisory Council of The Foursquare Church, providing counsel as we endeavor to serve the churches of our district well.
I grew up thinking that if I had enough faith, I could tell a mountain to move, and it would move... like, literally move. From one location to another. I remember going on road trips with my parents when I was younger, and when we passed by mountains, I would start to declare in my tiny little mind, full of faith, that those mountains would get up and move. If you’re expecting me to share an earth-shattering testimony of a volcano in Guatemala packing up its bags and moving across the country,… you’d be wrong. That never happened. Hear my heart; I still believe that a metaphorical or literal mountain can be moved if God commands it to move. As I grew older, the problem remained the same: I prayed and declared my expectations. The more I prayed for specific things to happen, the more discouraged, disappointed and doubtful I became. My theology about who God was and what He could do was correct but incomplete. I had grabbed hold of the all-powerful characteristic of God, but I had yet to understand His sovereignty.
With this, my mind would drift to two conclusions: Either I didn’t have enough faith, or God didn’t hear me. Have you ever had these thoughts? Maybe you had a thought like that five minutes before reading this. If you’re anything like me and have wrestled through these things, this short devotional is for you.
Let me address the unbelief part for a second; there are many examples in the Bible where Jesus couldn’t do miracles because of people’s unbelief (Mathew 13:58, Mark 6:5-6), and there are others that, despite people’s unbelief, He did miracles. He multiplied five loaves of bread and two fish to feed five thousand even though His disciples didn’t think they had enough (John 6:9-14). Despite unbelief, God gave a son to the Shunamite woman even after she said, “O man of God, don’t deceive me and get my hopes up like that” (2 Kings 4:16-17) to the prophet who gave her a promise from God that she would be able to conceive.
Catch this—God did miraculous things, despite unbelief, in the lives of people who recognized who He was. They might have doubted what, how, or when, but they knew Him. On the other hand, He could not do anything for those who didn’t believe in Him.
God is not going to “not fulfill” a promise He has made to you because of your circumstantial/temporary unbelief. He loves you and HE WILL do what He said He would do (2 Timothy 2:13). With that in mind, the real problem is when we doubt who He is. The right place to put our faith is in God’s character and not in what we expect Him to do. In His presence, rather than His presents.
Now, let me address the part surrounding expectations –
Here is the problem with praying our expectations; expectations include our opinion on what, how or when. Expectations don’t leave much room for God’s sovereignty, so we have a hard time when our prayers are “unanswered.” We believe God is all-powerful, but we know how that should look. That way of thinking puts too much pressure on us, gives us an unrealistic sense of power, and often leads to disappointment. When the specific things we are asking for don’t happen the way we expect them to, it often leads us to question our faith or God’s love toward us.
Believing that anything is possible is correct; Jesus taught that in Mark 9:23. When we say “anything,” though, I believe it literally means anything—what we think should happen or anything else that our minds don’t even fathom.
A healthy heart posture is a place where God’s character is trusted in its entirety, where “all powerful” and “sovereign” have the same weight… a place where we pray with expectancy rather than expectations, knowing that God will move powerfully and that the outcome will be great because we invited His will into our lives.
Does this mean I have little faith in thinking this way? Absolutely not. I am more confident now than ever before that I love and serve a God who is all-powerful and sovereign. My trust in Him is beyond my expectations and desires. I trust Him more than I trust my own understanding of things. I pray with strong faith and trust in His character. I know that He will move when I cry out to Him, and I am certain that the outcome will be even better than my wildest imagination, whether I understand it or not. Our God is both all-powerful and sovereign.
