Published almost twenty years ago, “Ten Prayers God Always Says Yes To,” Anthony DeStefano changed how I pray and how I experience God’s answers to my prayer. I’ll be spending the next few weeks talking about what I got from his book, and how applying the principles in this book to my own life changed me.
Moses, a Prayerful Man
Early in Moses’s career as a prophet and spokesman for God, he experienced a major setback.
Then the Israelite supervisors came to Pharaoh and cried, “Why do you treat your servants like this? No straw is given to your servants, yet they say to us, ‘Make bricks!’ Look how your servants are beaten! But the fault is with you.” He said, “You are lazy, lazy; that is why you say, ‘Let us go and sacrifice to the Lord.’ Go now and work, for no straw shall be given you, but you shall still deliver the same number of bricks.” The Israelite supervisors saw that they were in trouble when they were told, “You shall not lessen your daily number of bricks.” As they left Pharaoh, they came upon Moses and Aaron, who were waiting to meet them. They said to them, “The Lord look upon you and judge! You have brought us into bad odor with Pharaoh and his officials and have put a sword in their hand to kill us.”
Then Moses turned to the Lord and said, “O my Lord, why have you mistreated this people? Why did you ever send me? Since I first came to Pharaoh to speak in your name, he has mistreated this people, and you have done nothing at all to deliver your people.”
Exodus 5:15-23 NRSVUE, italics added
Moses was doing everything God told him to do, and it was backfiring in disastrous ways. Moses felt hated by his people, of course despised and held in contempt by Pharaoh, and betrayed and abandoned by God.
So, what did he do about it?
He prayed.
God, Please Show Me You Are There
DeStefano begins his ten prayers with a desire to know if God even exists. When prayers litter the floor, seemingly unanswered, it can make a person wonder. When you or I am absolutely positive we are doing, or saying, or being what God has in mind, and it turns into what feels like disaster, it can make a person wonder. God, are You for real? Do You even exist?
God’s Seeming Silence
Sometimes it feels like God does not answer prayer at all, because we pray and seemingly nothing happens. DeStefano named a few unanswered prayers that I can feel keenly in my own life.
- Why did God not cure my father’s fatal illness?
- Why does God not send me some money so I can pay these bills?
- Why has God not given me a friend when I am so lonely?
- Why did God not save my sister’s marriage?
- Why does God not protect against fire, and flood, and earthquake, and storm?
What is going on?
In the face of all our problems you and I want to know why God so often seems silent. If God exists, and if God is really listening, then why does prayer not seem to “work”?
Prayer does work, DeStefano hastens to add, all the time, but sometimes …
- the answer is something we did not want to hear.
- God says “no” when we are at our most vulnerable.
- God says “no” to us even when we have been on our knees, pleading with the Lord in tears. Please God. “Please take this cup from me.”
It seems like God says “no” an awful lot, does it not?
DeStefano suggests that part of the reason might be that we have decided which answers are good and that we should have. Answers that involve suffering are automatically off the list, even though we know what kind of world we live in, what our bodies are like, and who people are. So, as long as we have this mentality, we are going to be upset every time God says “no” to a request.
And consider this. What feels like silence, or a denial of our request, might be another kind of answer, one we will miss entirely if all we are looking for is God granting what we have asked for. What if God is saying:
- No for now
- Not until you are ready (or the other people in these circumstances are ready)
- I am at work preparing what you are asking for, and you will receive it in due time
- What you are asking for is not good for you (or for others in this situation)
- If you are willing to walk through this valley with Me, your reward will be great
God is going to give you and me what we need, not necessarily what we want. God has our ultimate good, our eternal good, in mind, as well as God’s glory and God’s ultimate plan for all creation. Every request is weighed against God’s glory, and this good.
So let us look at prayers that God will answer yes to every time, prayers that really truly work, prayers that will always be for ultimate good, for spiritual life and growth, that serve God’s purposes in our lives, and God’s plan for the world.
These prayers will meet certain fundamental spiritual needs that you and I have, they will never conflict with God’s will for us. God will always be happy and delighted to say “yes” to them, and once granted, our lives are going to change.
Here is the first one:
Please, God, show me You are here
God, show me You are here.
God says that when you and I look for God, and we really want to find God, God will make sure we see the Lord:
When you search for me, you will find me; if you seek me with all your heart …
Call to me, and I will answer you and will tell you great and hidden things that you have not known.
Jeremiah 29:13, 33:3 NRSVUE
Destefano names philosophers who have managed to prove God exists through logic—Aristotle, Plato, Descartes, Immanuel Kant, Pascal, and many others. Some of their proofs are famous. But in the case of faith, God is not an argument, or a concept. God is a living being Who desires relationship with you and with me. The question is, do you and I desire relationship with the Lord? If we do, for real, then when we pray “God, show me You are there,” we are going to get a palpable and unmistakable answer from God.
Moses’s Prayer
In just one day Moses went from being a hero to being in trouble with the pharaoh and with his own people, hated by everyone.
Déjà vu.
Except this time, instead of running away, Moses for the first time initiated conversation with the Lord.
I wonder if Moses had been expecting failure all along. Instead of being confident in God’s word, he was very discouraged. He had allowed God to talk him into coming back, impressed with God’s miraculous power and magnetic personality, hoping against hope that maybe this would work. But clearly, it seemed to Moses, God had not done anything at all, and had instead left Moses slowly twisting in the wind. Ever been there? Felt like God let you do all the heavy lifting, and when things started to unravel, God let you take the heat for it, too?
Prayer is usually thought of as making petitions to God, but prayer in the Bible is often so much more. Prayer is conversation with God. The more honest and heartfelt you and I are, the deeper communion with God will be.
Moses did not claim the promises, he did not ask God to do anything, he did not outline the specific ways he wanted God to fix things. Moses simply laid his heart bare to God. He was miserable. Why did God do evil instead of good? Why did God send Moses, who had not even wanted to come? Why did it seem like God was doing nothing about delivering the people? The Hebrew people’s suffering had increased, and Moses was on an emotional roller coaster, first high on hopes, then miserable with failure.
Instead of a rebuke for weak faith, or for not paying attention when God covered this part at the burning bush, God led Moses in prayer to restore right thinking and a right emotional response to what was happening.
The Heavy Yoke of Emotional and Mental Enslavement
Suffering often indicates God is setting us free from something so that we can follow and embrace the Lord more deeply. Walking in God’s light will always mean you and I are going against the grain. Do not expect our circumstances to conform easily to the journey. Circumstances will resist us at every turn. God wants to teach us how to walk with the Lord, keeping in step with the Spirit of Christ through all these things so you and I can know a joy and peace that transcends circumstances.
God was setting Moses free from the sense of his own failures and setting the Hebrew people free from the yoke of Egypt. What yoke has you miserable today? You are laboring under this thing, and it has you trapped, it is a huge load, it is bondage, and you wish you were free. Like Moses, the yoke may not be a physical one so much as a mindset. What might yours be? Is it self‑centeredness, fear, negative thinking, pleasing other people, trying to be perfect, trying to feel good? What is it?
I can honestly say it took years of therapy, spiritual direction, earnest Bible study, and a squaring of my shoulders to really believe and live by the truth, not the internal yokes that burdened me. And it was going to take Moses and the people a long time, too.
God promises to bless those who follow God’s ways, but God does not define blessings in our terms. Like with Moses, God is leading you and me on a greater journey than we can truly fathom. The hardest thing we will learn on this journey is to give up the illusion that we can manipulate God to bless us on our terms.
The Truth Really Does Set Us Free
God reassured Moses that God’s word is true and reliable, and that everything would happen as God said it would. You and I can experience peace and courage when we remember there is nothing that can thwart God in doing what God is minded to do.
Worship
God did respond to Moses’s questions, but not in the way Moses might have anticipated. But what God did say was way better than what Moses was asking.
Then the Lord said to Moses, “Now you shall see what I will do to Pharaoh: indeed, by a mighty hand he will let them go; by a mighty hand he will drive them out of his land.”
God also spoke to Moses and said to him, “I am the Lord“
Exodus 6:1–2, NRSVUE, boldface added
God told Moses the Lord was going to do something much bigger than release the people from captivity in enslavement. God gave Moses a deeper revelation of God: “I AM the Lord.” This was something more than what God had given to the patriarchs, who knew God only as El Shaddai, God Almighty, and not as YHWH, the One Who Is, the great I AM.
God is intimately involved with the lives of God’s people. When you and I are feeling like the Lord has abandoned us and does not really care about what is happening, come back here to God’s answer to Moses’s prayer.
Thanksgiving
“Say therefore to the Israelites: I am the Lord, and I will free you from the burdens of the Egyptians and deliver you from slavery to them. I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with great acts of judgment.”
Exodus 6:5 NRSVUE, boldface added
Next God led Moses into thankfulness by reminding him of God’s promises. God would liberate them from the experience of distress from their burdens and from the source of their burdens. The Egyptian yoke was not just enslavement of the body, making bricks and working in the fields. It was an enslavement of their minds, hearts, and souls, a breaking of their spirits, so that God seemed small and far away, and the Egyptian gods all-powerful.
In order to really do this, God was going to have a very real and powerful war with all the gods of Egypt, because the people’s hearts were wrapped around these gods after four hundred years of living with an idolatrous people. It was not going to be an easy deliverance. The plagues would be spectacular wonders that instilled faith in some, but would also be terrible judgements for crimes committed against the Hebrews. The Egyptians were going to deserve the judgement that was coming, and everyone would agree, as they saw how hard Pharaoh’s heart was against God and against God’s people.
Faith
“I will take you as my people, and I will be your God. You shall know that I am the Lord your God, who has freed you from the burdens of the Egyptians. I will bring you into the land that I swore to give to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; I will give it to you for a possession. I am the Lord.”
Exodus 6:7–8 NRSVUE boldface added
Finally, God helped Moses to see where he had lacked belief, because God reminded Moses that these promises had been given to the patriarchs along with concrete guarantees. If Moses would only keep in the front of his mind God’s prophecy given to Abraham, his faith would be strengthened. You and I can put our own name in there.
You shall know that I am the Lord your God, who has freed you from the burdens of
- addiction
- crushing feelings
- enslavement to a relationship, or person, or habit
… that I swore to give all believers.
Freedom
Exodus is an illustration of Christian life, God freeing each one of us from enslavement to sin, corruption, and death, into a good and spacious life in eternity with the Lord. In fact, that is what the apostle Paul said in 1 Corinthians 10:1-11, all this was written down to encourage you and me right here, today. Which doubts and wrong beliefs might God be challenging in you right now?
God was going to keep God’s word, because God is the great I AM. The Lord feels our suffering, deeply, with us and it is the Lord’s intention to set us free—from the suffering, and from what holds us captive. God’s stated desire is to redeem you and me for the Lord’s own, to bring us close to God, and one day, to bring us home.
Faithfulness, empathy, deliverance, intimacy, and inheritance are all wrapped up in “I AM the Lord.”
God’s assurance is always available to those who will listen
Are you really down about something right now? Just sick about it, you are so disappointed. Everything looks bad. What might happen if you went directly to God and asked the Lord to comfort you and encourage you? You are still in the middle of the story. Tell God how you are feeling … how things look to you. Risk being totally honest with God. Then listen!
Please God, show me You are here, and that You care.
[cover image: Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash]
