Act In Accordance With Your Prayers
By Michael Kelley
Recently, I heard from a college student who had been granted a summer internship. It was an important opportunity for him, one that could set him up well after graduation. The problem was that the internship was in-person, and so he quickly had to locate housing for the summer.
He did the right thing in response - he took his need as a matter of prayer to the weekly prayer meeting at his church. He presented the request, the congregation prayed, and before he left the church that night, no fewer than five families had offered him a place to say for the summer.
Now you could easily look at that situation cynically and say that this student knew that would likely happen. In fact, you could even argue that he manipulated the prayer meeting for his own ends in order to publicly present his need. And if that’s your view, then you could see his prayer request as less of a prayer request and more of an announcement.
Then again, you could view it with less cynicism. In that view, here was a young man who had a need. He believes God answers prayer, and so he asked other people to pray with and for him. And you had a group of people willing to do something that we should all be doing. That is:
We should act in accordance with our prayers.
Consider a couple of more examples:
In Matthew 9, Jesus was busy traveling throughout the region, teaching, preaching, and healing everyone who came to Him. Understandably, crowds followed Him everywhere, and “when he saw the crowds, he felt compassion for them, because they were distressed and dejected, like sheep without a shepherd” (Matt. 9:36).
That’s when Jesus gave a prayer instruction to His disciples: “The harvest is abundant, but the workers are few. Therefore, pray to the Lord of the harvest to send out workers into his harvest” (Matt. 9:37-38).
Did Jesus intend that none of the disciples actually go out into the harvest to do the work of ministry? That they should ONLY pray for the Lord to send out workers, other than them? Certainly not. Jesus would later send these very disciples out to do His work. So even as the disciples were praying for workers to be sent, they should also be acting in accordance with those prayers.
Here’s another example:
Jesus gave His disciples an example of how they should pray in what we now call The Lord’s Prayer. One of the lines of that prayer goes like this:
“And do not bring us into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one” (Matt. 6:13). Followers of Jesus should pray that they would not be led into temptation, but does that mean they have no responsibility? Of course not.
Inasmuch as we are praying not to be led into temptation, we should also recognize that we are very susceptible to temptation. As a recognition of our own weakness and frailty, we should actively avoid situations in which we know temptation will present itself. Once again, we are to act in accordance with our prayers.
To go a step further, we might say that one of the ways we express our confidence in God’s ability and willingness to answer our prayers is through our actions in accordance with those prayers.
We pray for God to change someone’s heart, and so we share the gospel with that person. We pray for God to provide our daily bread, and so we actively search for a job. We pray God would turn our children towards Him and we actively treat them with Christlike love and compassion.
Time and time again, we act in accordance with our prayers.
Michael Kelley is a husband, father of three, author, and speaker from Nashville, TN. His latest book is a year-long family devotional guide called The Whole Story for the Whole Family. Find his personal blog at michaelkelley.co.
