Philippians 4:19 And my God will supply every need of yours according to his riches in glory in Christ Jesus.
James 4:3 You ask and do not receive, because you ask amiss, that you may spend it on your pleasures.
When we read the promises of God, we must read them the way we ourselves want to be heard—in full context. Just as we expect others to understand our words in light of what we’ve said before, God expects us to interpret His promises in light of all He has revealed in His Word.
It’s tempting to isolate a promise like “ask anything in My name” and stretch it to cover every personal desire. But “anything” doesn’t mean “everything.” And “whosoever” doesn’t mean “whoever ignores God’s will.” God’s promises are not blank checks for the self-centered or the disobedient. He hasn’t promised to fulfill our every whim—He has promised to equip us for His will.
Imagine being asked to build a fence, and the one who sent you says, “If you need anything, call me.” That “anything” clearly applies to fence-building, not requesting a sports car! Likewise, when God says, “Ask anything,” He means anything related to what He has asked you to do. He has not promised to indulge our whims but to equip us for His work.
This is why many prayers seem to go unanswered—not because God is unfaithful, but because we’ve misunderstood how they relate to His assignment for our lives. False assumptions produce false expectations, and false expectations delay the heart’s joy (“Hope deferred makes the heart sick”—Proverbs 13:12). But when our desires align with His purpose, prayers are answered, lives are transformed, and Christ is being formed within us. (Galatians 4:19)
God never promised to fulfill all our wants, but He has assured us that He will meet all our needs (Philippians 4:19). His provision is always connected to His purpose. He is faithful in equipping you for His calling, not to make life more comfortable but to make you more useful for His Kingdom.
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[worthy_plugins_devotion_single_body]Yesterday we wrote about one of the greatest moves of God … the Moravian Revival. When the community was in complete disarray, Count Zinzendorf focused on how they could live together in love despite their differences. He called all the men together for an intense study of the Scriptures to focus on how Christian life in community was portrayed. These studies combined with intense prayer convinced many of the believers that they were called to live together in love and that their disunity and conflict were contrary to the clear calling of Scripture.
In the late 1800s, an awakening in South Africa led by Andrew Murray was a powerful move of God. Studying that revival yields essential insights concerning the events occurring now throughout the United States. As the spirit of God began to move in Cape Town, Murray compared the SA revival with past experiences of revivals in Europe. He decided that the intense “emotionalism” was a false experience of God and charged in to break up the meeting. Stepping out of the church, he encountered his father standing and weeping. His father rebuked Andrew, “How dare you stop something that I have prayed to happen for 30 years!”
Revivals, that is, genuine Divinely ordained seasons of the activity of God among men, have a universally unusual character. Normal activities and behaviors give way to the tangible influence of God’s Holy Spirit, whose inspiration brings a freedom of expression, emotion, conviction, worship, and other variations from normal experience.
During the Catholic inquisitions, as millions of Christians were being killed by the Jesuit Priests for apostasy, throughout Europe, Christians were fleeing. In Bohemia alone, there were an estimated 4,000,000 Christians before the Jesuit inquisition, and ten years later, only 800,000 people remained in Bohemia – all of whom were Catholic. These terrible events prepared the ground for one of the greatest moves of God that have ever been recorded, the Moravian Revival, which lasted for over 100 years. Gustav Warneck, the German Historian of Protestant Missions, testified, “This small church in twenty years called into being more missions than the whole Evangelical Church has done in two centuries.”
I love to study past revivals and in studying them, there are two recurring themes that stand out:
First, that He has often used obscure and unknown individuals to lead revivals, and that even these men whom He used so powerfully never considered themselves to be “special”, but often wanted to stay out of the limelight.
During the Great Depression, poverty swept across America like a whirling tornado, ripping up dreams and scattering hopes to the wind. One such poverty twister hit a small part of Texas where a man named Yates ran a sheep ranch. Struggling even to keep food on the table, Yates and his wife did all they could to survive. Finally, they had to accept a government subsidy or lose their home and land to the creditors.
When Joseph was thrown into prison, his life was thought to be over. How could anyone escape an Egyptian prison? But then, in one day, according to God’s perfect timing, he was instantly promoted to reign over all Egypt with only the Pharoah, (“god on earth”) as his Lord…