Whether it’s spiritual growth in Christ, better health and finances, marital restoration, or finally meeting the person that is destined to walk with us through life, we all have a desire that is on our hearts. This desire has been the subject of our prayers for quite some time, and we believe it is important to our overall happiness and well-being. The reality that we’ve all probably experienced for ourselves is that some blessings take longer to manifest. This is just the truth, and for many of us it is a bitter pill. But rather than leaning to the negative, we must flip this to the positive. God is faithful to His promises, and some of those promises have conditions that we must meet. Understanding this truth is very pivotal, because, whether we want to admit it or not, our commitment to meet the condition is most important to God. We should be praying to meet His conditions more fervently and enthusiastically than we are praying for the desire of our hearts.
In the Old Testament, God delivered His people from the bondage of Egyptian slavery. The Egyptian pharaoh was brutal, and the people had been very oppressed. Heavenly Father always wanted to protect them and surround them with His love and blessings, but they wanted independence. They rejected His sovereignty and began to worship idols. They moved themselves from beneath His arc of safety and blessings. When they did, the devil pounced on them unmercifully and used the Egyptians to keep them in bondage. Exodus 1:11(NLT) says, “So the Egyptians made the Israelites their slaves. They appointed brutal slave drivers over them, hoping to wear them down with crushing labor. They forced them to build the cities of Pithom and Rameses as supply centers for the king.”
We must never forget that we have a spiritual enemy, the devil, and the devil’s mission in the earth is to kill, steal, and destroy. Jesus Christ tells us this in John 10:10. As believers, we often underestimate two things. We underestimate the degree to which the devil is gunning for every believer, and how incredibly evil and dark his devices are; we are blind to the degree to which he will set us up and try to take us down. The other thing that we grossly underestimate is the potency and unfailing quality of the weapons God has given us to overcome and outsmart the devil’s devices and tactics.
Ephesians 6:11(NLT) says, “Puton all of God's armor so that you will be able to stand firm against all strategies of the devil.” God commands us to put on ALL His spiritual weaponry. Somehow, many believers convince themselves they don’t have to do this, and this kind of thinking is a major contributor to why our blessings continue to be stolen by satan. We have a choice. We can choose not to wear God’s covering in the way He has commanded. His people did this in the Old Testament, and people are still doing it today. However, we must realize that the reason God has equipped us with fail-proof spiritual weaponry is because we desperately need it. God has created life in such a way that it cooperates fully and beautifully with the authority of Christ. Jesus Christ is the living Word of God, and John 1:4 tells us “The Word gave life to everything that was created, and his life brought light to everyone.” So, when we step outside the Word, we are outside of Christ and away from the covering our Christ-authority provides.
Heavenly Father is so incredibly patient with us. He tells us in Ephesians 4:24(NLT) to “put on the new man which was created according to God, in true righteousness and holiness.” He will not force us to do this, and He doesn’t rush us. You and I put on more of the mind and heart of Christ according to our own free-will. Very often, the delays we experience in our blessings mirror our delay in putting on more of the example of Christ.
God doesn’t deny us His blessings. Psalm 84:11(NKJV) declares, “For the LORD God is a sun and shield; The LORD will give grace and glory; No goodthing will He withhold From those who walk uprightly.” Our Heavenly Father is good all the time. He delights in blessing His people, but He will never overstep His Word. This is why it behooves us to make a shift in our prayer lives.
From where we’re standing today, most of us are not enlightened to the aspect of our lives that keeps our blessings at bay. We know we’re not perfect, but sometimes we coddle our imperfection and weaknesses instead of partnering with God in Christ to grow beyond them. Many of us continue to indulge the same patterns of behaviors, the same negative thinking and attitudes, and don’t make a concerted effort in prayer to be transformed. The Spirit must increase, and the flesh must decrease in our lives. This must be our continual focus, every day of our lives. The Bible is a spiritual book for God’s spiritual children. It’s the final and definitive authority of life, and we must walk in the Spirit according to God’s Word. We can’t place God’s Word in second or third position where it just has control over limited aspects of our existences. Many of us have allowed ourselves to be trapped in a loop where our lives resemble conduct consistent with what’s popular in the world. We are intoxicated with this stuff, and it’s reaping havoc on our prayer lives.
God tells us in Romans 13:14 to clothe ourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ and stop focusing on how to gratify the desires of the flesh. In plain terms, the desires of our spirit-man must come before the desires of the flesh. We must be nourished with God’s Word so that we are spiritually equipped and prepared to handle the blessings we seek.
It is not prudent to think that God will bypass the conditions of His promises; He will not. Our Heavenly Father wants us to make a shift in our prayer lives to prioritize His agenda for our spiritual growth before any other desire. Our prayers are the containers for what is most important to us. If we’re primarily praying about the desire and never praying about the spiritual maturity that helps us receive those desires, what message does this send to God about how we value His priorities? Let’s pray that He will open our eyes to what we need to see within our own behaviors and attitudes. As we commit ourselves to grow in Christ and get beyond the things that hold us back, we will see very clearly that the wall separating us from the blessing we desire will come tumbling down. ■
Scripture quotations marked (NLT) are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois 60189. All rights reserved.
Scripture taken from the New King James Version. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
“Make A Shift In Your Prayer Life”, written for VictoryinJesusChrist© 2022. All rights reserved. All praise and honor to God through Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior.
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