Our conversations with God are often filled with requests. And, throughout the Bible, God tells us over and over to come to him with all kinds of requests. He tells us to lay our cares at his feet and leave them.
One of my favorite parables is the story of the Persistent widow. She knocked and knocked and continued to knock on the door of the unjust judge until he finally took care of her issue and gave her justice so he could get rid of her. As Jesus told this story, he then tells us ‘how much more’ our heavenly Father loves us so we should have no doubt he will take care of our concerns when we ‘knock on his door’.
I have used this ‘persistent widow’ method in the middle of several stressful situations in my life. These were times where I needed to make a decision and I needed an answer from him so I knocked on God’s door until he answered. This meant that I prayed about this issue every time it entered my head – easily 50 to 80 times in a day.
I found that many of these times, God changed my perspective as I prayed and listened. He has actually changed my perspective in the middle of these stressful times more often than he gave me a direct answer. By the end of some of these days, my understanding of what was going on was drastically different at the end of the day from when I started that morning. That’s so ‘like’ him, don’t you think?
So now I don’t usually pray for a specific answer- I pray for understanding of what is going on and directions for how to move forward.
In Chapter 9, Daniel reminds us in his penitent prayer that we don’t make requests of God because we are righteous. We don’t make requests because we have done a lot of good things so now its God’s turn to pay us back.
We don’t make requests because we’re ‘good enough’.
We’ll never be good enough on our own.
We can make our requests of God because he is merciful. We can make requests because he is full of grace.
We can make requests because he loved us first and sent his Son to die for us. Jesus makes us good enough.
Thank you, Abba Father.
