Waiting for God’s Response

Prayer is one of the easiest spiritual disciplines while at the same time one of the toughest. Easy because it is simply talking to God. But yet very difficult because we’re talking to a being who is not visible to our human eye or audible to our human eardrums.

How do we communicate with Him? How do we make it a fruitful thing?

There is no ‘formula’ for praying, any more than there’s a formula for talking to our parents or our spouses. What we find in the scriptures though, is extremely helpful as we develop our life of prayer. Psalm 5:3 contains only a couple brief phrases, but very dense in its instruction on how we can be productive in our prayer time.

The Frequency of Prayer
Although David is saying he prays in the morning, it might not necessarily be ‘beginning of the day’ or ‘when the sun is coming up’ for us (however, morning is a great time to greet the Lord and put on your armor). I see the reference to ‘morning’ as indicating regularity, habit, pattern. We see regular times of prayer in the Bible.

Daniel prayed 3 times a day (Daniel 6:10).
Paul says, ‘Pray without ceasing’ (1 Thessalonians 5:17).
Peter and John going to the temple at the hour of prayer (the ninth hour, 3:00pm) – Acts 3:1

It’s not, ‘on a random occasion’. Not just ‘when I need God in an emergency’. It is regular and often. We communicate with those we love on a regular basis.

Prayers with Intention
David says he ‘orders’ his prayers.The word choice is interesting. It comes from the same phrasing as when people would stack up wood for a sacrifice on an altar.

Quality: The wood itself had to be the best wood or it was rejected. There were actually people whose jobs it was to search the wood for worms. If it was found impure or unfit for the fire it was thrown out.

What would be examples impure or ‘wormy’ prayers:

Selfish – all about me
Materialistic – give me this or that
We’re living in sin – expecting God to answer while we have unrepentant sin

Method: There was a method to the stacking for optimal burning. Kindling was used first and then the wood laid upon it. We build fires like that right? You don’t just throw a bunch of wood in a pile.

The point is: there is some planning that goes into it. We should carefully think through what what we might talk to the Lord about. We need to go into prayer prepared. We have direct personal access to God, and so we should be purposeful and intentional! Maybe write some things down or keep organized mental notes. Otherwise it may become rambling and ineffective.

Waiting for God’s Response
We actively wait. We expectantly wait. We look diligently for God’s response.

‘Look up’ (from the KJV) means to keep watching and observing. It carries the idea of spying; peering into the distance; watching with expectation. It is literally bending forward in order to see better.

How do we see God’s answer if we’re not looking for it? If we want to see how he’s responding to our prayers, we should be bending and leaning forward, straining to see what He’s doing.

Watch for Amazing Things
We should be watching, waiting, looking – even for the small things – because that is when we’ll see amazing things.

When I was on the floor of the Grand Canyon in 2000 for a week, do you know what amazed me the most? As awestruck as I was, it wasn’t so much the high rock walls and the deep gorges. As majestic as it was, it wasn’t the Colorado River winding its way through Arizona. It was the beauty in the tiny flowers. It was the small salamanders and frogs. It was the stillness and quietness of the starlit nights. But I had to look for these things because they got lost easily in the vast expanse.

We must be leaning forward and looking for God’s answers to our prayers or we might never see them.