My 8 year-old daughter and some of her classmates were troubled by the recent wildfires in Australia and the threat those fires posed to wildlife (mainly koalas and kangaroos). I don’t think it ended up being sent (or even written), but part of their plan to bring about a resolution to this crisis was to write a letter to President Trump expressing their concerns in hopes that he might offer some help.
How instinctive children are to go to the highest known authority when disaster threatens. My daughter and her friends knew their parents couldn’t help, nor their teachers, not even their principal. They knew if anybody could help it was the President.
The human spirit made in the image of the divine Spirit knows intuitively that without God’s intervention, disaster is certain. That’s EVERYONE! The problem is that not everyone is as in-tune with God’s Spirit as David was. He prays in Psalm 6:8-9
“Depart from me, all you workers of evil,
for the LORD has heard the sound
of my weeping.
The LORD has heard my plea;
the LORD accepts my prayer.”
Even as born-again followers of Jesus, those devoted to the gospel and active in sharing it with others, the flesh can still lie to us, suggesting to us either that our crisis isn’t worthy of God’s intervention, or (even worse) that we don’t deserve God’s help, OR (worst of all) that God can’t be relied upon to come to our aid.
Paul reminds the Ephesians about the faulty logic of lostness when he says of the Gentiles:
“They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart. They have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity.” (Eph. 4:18-19)
He’s talking about outward behavior that flows from inner blindness. And he warns the church:
“But that is not the way you learned Christ— assuming that you have heard about him and were taught in him, as the truth is in Jesus, to put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.” (Eph. 4:20-24)
Paul and David knew that dependence upon God and the outer actions that reflect it begin in the mind—begin with a renewal of the spirit of the mind. It’s a renewal that reminds us that God is interested and invested in our every need. It’s a renewal that reassures us His intervention is not based on whether we deserve it or not. And it’s a renewal that anchors us in the absolute trustworthiness of God and His good heart towards us.
Are you tempted by the flesh to doubt that God will hear and accept your prayer?
Consider that God was preparing an answer to every man’s deepest, greatest need long before ever creating man. Consider that God, in love, chose to intervene in our problems and accept our prayers before ever a problem arose or a prayer was offered. His accepting of our prayers and His intervention in our looming disaster(s) is made visible and actual in the person of Jesus Christ—the Christ David foresaw and the Christ upon whom Paul sought to focus the early church.
I don’t know your crisis in detail nor do you know mine. But as I’ve been reminded this morning I want to remind you, partners in the gospel, that on the basis of our gospel Lord, our great God hears and accepts your prayer!
As the fires of personal or ministry crises rage and the workers of evil (both human and satanic) threaten, will you pause all outer activity for a few moments today in the middle of your week to deny the temptations of the flesh to doubt? Will you pause and voice a prayer in faith—a prayer for your own need, and a prayer for God’s intervention in the needs of your co-laborers in Christ?
Be assured, brothers and sisters: on the merits of Christ, the LORD accepts your prayer!