Recently I've had a number of conversations with fellow college-age friends about the relationship between prayer and action. Some of my friends have struggled with the question: If you pray for God to do something, do you really have to act on it or will the Lord answer your prayer anyway?
I guess the short answer is yes, He will answer it, though not in the way He would have if you had gotten up and acted. Often in that situation, His answer is to tell you to get up and do something about it.
This topic came to my attention again yesterday as I listened back to an old chapel message from my days at The Master's College. In the spring of 2011 Kevin DeYoung came and preached for two chapels at TMC. This quote is from the second of those chapel messages, where he was preaching from Joshua 7.
(One quick note first: this message is referring mostly to prayers in the midst of trouble, but it can be used in other prayer contexts as well. Many of our prayers in life end up being for God to do something or give us something or take us out of a certain situation, and these are often the instances where we need to act in connection with our prayers. That is what DeYoung is addressing.)
When you offer the Lord a prayer of exasperation, there are basically three things that He can say to you in response. One, He can say, 'It's gone!' meaning, 'the circumstances that are weighing you down, I remove them.' The illness, it's gone; the unemployment, it's gone; the heartache, it's gone -- He can do that. The second thing He can say is 'My grace, My grace is sufficient for you. You're weak, you're exasperated. I look good, I get glory when my people persevere in the midst of weakness.' So He can say 'It's gone,' He can say 'My grace,' or He can say, 'Get up!'
Now, the first response is the least common. Just, okay, all of it, better. All your problems removed. Now, pray, and the Lord can do that, but He doesn't often do that because it doesn't teach us as much. And so, He will often say to us, 'My grace is sufficient.' He wants us to grow. And He will just as often tell us to 'Get up!' which means, 'I hear your prayer, and I will respond, but you also have some work to do in response to your prayer.'
I love this passage from Nehemiah, chapter 4. Here the Israelites are rebuilding the wall [of Jerusalem], and they have opposition, and we read in Nehemiah 4:7-9, 'When Sanballat and Tobiah and the Arabs and the Ammonites and the Ashdodites heard that the repairing of the walls of Jerusalem was going forward and that the breaches were beginning to be closed, they were very angry. And they all plotted together to come and fight against Jerusalem and to cause confusion in it. And we prayed to our God and set a guard as a protection against them day and night.' I love that. Prayer is not an excuse for inactivity. We're gonna pray -- we have enemies, and we're gonna pray, and you know what we're also gonna do? We're gonna set a guy with a sword up on the wall. We're gonna see if God is going to answer our prayers by us using our brains.
Prayer is not an excuse for passivity. When you look for a job, you look for one. Don't just wait for open doors; sometimes doors open because you knock. Don't just, 'Well, I put something up on Monster.com, there it is. Coming home, Mom and Dad.' No, you need to work. If you want to get married, guys, ask a girl out. Or if that's not the right language, ask to court her, or something. Don't just wait for God to pluck a mate from your side, that was a one-time deal. So you pray, and then you get some guts. You do something, okay? Someone wrote a book about that. Joshua was right to pray, but the Lord's answer to his prayer in this case was to tell him, 'Get up.'
The rest of this sermon can be found here, and it is worth a listen. May your prayers the rest of this week be followed by action for the sake of God's glory.