Is He answering your prayers?  Do you think He has heard them?  If He isn’t answering and He has heard them, what may be delaying His response?  Is it timing?  Are we simply asking for the right things at the wrong time or is there perhaps a deeper, more elusive understanding?  If what I have asked for is consistent with His Will what possible rational would delay His execution?  Is He training me in patience to understand that He alone determines when I receive a blessing?  Is He temporarily denying my petition so that I build faith muscles in continued request through prayerful fellowship?  Or has He determined that whatever thorn or poverty I am experiencing is actually His intention for my betterment to the enrichment of His perfect Will?

Does the enemy still have the wherewithal to delay God’s answered prayers?  What is the extent of a raging battle in the heavenly realms?  Does the enemy still maintain plausible resistance having lost the potency of sin and death?  What differs in our prayer lives now that we have Grace, now that we have the Spirit of God living within our fiber, now that we are made of Holy mettle?  Do we remain helpless against the enemy, knowing that somehow he and his fallen may battle to delay or forestall our blessings given in answered prayer by Almighty God?  Are we still to expect that each of our prayers rises to God’s review and that He alone determines what shall be given through Grace and Divine Provision?  What do you believe, for as you believe you will live.

Am I still asking for things born of my own self-interest?  Why of course I am for I remain trapped in this fleshly dominion.  Can I differentiate through Divine Discernment those prayers which are consistent with His Will and those that are of my own volition or desirous enrichment?  Must I continue to waste the precious moments I have alone with God, before His throne, asking for riches, glory, healing or relief when I go into the process with the knowledge my requests are inconsistent with His Word and His Will?  Come on at some point I must grow up in my faith and understanding.  I know what God wants for me and I know those things that are born of desirous craving, covetousness or self idolatry.  Must I then hold my breath, beckoning God’s angels to fight their way through enemy lines to deliver these selfish wants?

My prayer life is not my own.  I am instructed, guided and led even in prayer by the Holy Spirit’s masterful teaching hand.  Even now I find myself changing my tone, my delivery, limiting my words and listening intently for God to speak, where I used to whimper, beg, wander and utter voluminous petition before a Mighty God.  God knows what I need and what is good for me and He will get me to where He needs me to be at the precise time He needs me there for His good purposes.  Certainly there are things that I want for myself, but I must not insist as a wanton child that an all knowing God deliver according to my precise request or demanding ploy the wants of my villainous heart.  Perhaps the very thing I want is the obstacle set before me blinding me to the true and glorious intended blessings of God.  Maybe He is waiting for me to surrender that want in order to open the door to a broader horizon.  Should it trouble me that I may be my own greatest obstacle to unrealized blessing?  Isn’t this the most rational explanation for unanswered prayer?  Must I want what I want when I want it even when doing so prohibits me from receiving what God wants for me?

It is time for us to wake up as a body.  The work is out there.  God commands he doesn’t simply ask politely, though He does allow us the stupidity of exercised free-will, disobedience before He resorts to discipline.  This is the time, we are the people.  The work is out there.  What am I doing today to spread the Gospel, to lead people to a cross where they will be saved from sin and death by a Righteous Saviour for Eternity?  Am I praying that someone else catches fire when I am utterly unwilling to accept the zealous flames within my own heart?  The work is out there.  Am I looking toward the daydream of revival when there are no seeds of rebirth within my own spirit?  Am I a changed man become a man of change.  Am I bringing the world into the church or am I bringing the church into the world?  Am I so eager to extend my own petitions to God that I refuse to listen to His commands upon my life?

What am I?  A man making His own history or a man revealing the mystery of Christ to a dying world that so desperately needs my loyalty to ambassadorship.  He is the great “I am” and if I reflect Him in any small measure than what “am I”?