1 Peter 3: 12 (Psalm 34: 15)
For the eyes of the Lord are upon the righteous, and His ears attend to their prayer.
The National Day of Prayer is coming up soon, May 7th. Why should we devote an entire day to prayer? The answer is, because Dad is listening. Moreover, He is attending our prayer. I want that, don’t you?
In the early part of this year I wrote that I believed Father was calling us into a deeper prayer life this year. Now we understand why. He was enlisting us in an attack on the coronavirus. Yahweh knew the earth was going to produce this virus and that it was going to infect the human population. So, He called His people to battle and the way we fight is by prayer.
God had His eyes upon us then and He does now. That means that He is watching over us. He is listening for our voices to be lifted in prayer, but that is not all. He is attending to our prayer. That means He is doing more than just casually listening. It means He is listening attentively, paying attention, but it implies more even than that. Like an attending physician, attending refers to the one who is caring for the sick or needy and brother are we needy.
God is listening for some faith filled prayers and then He takes those and uses them to formulate our answers. The words you speak, are the answers to my prayers. Isn’t that cool? When we all pray together, it is like a sports team working together. One of us can put a thousand to flight and two of us ten thousand so what about a hundred of us praying in agreement? This is not simple math. There is an exponential increase as we pray together. The point is we are each part of this big team. We pray and our God not only listens, but He prays with us. “At the same time the Spirit also helps us in our weakness, because we don’t know how to pray for what we need. But the Spirit intercedes along with our groans that cannot be expressed in words,” (Romans 8: 26). It gets better, “And He who searches the hearts knows what the mind of the Spirit is, because He intercedes for the saints according to the will of God,” (v. 27). God, through His Spirit, helps us pray so that we pray according to the mind and will of God. It is teamwork again. We cannot get away from that principle because that is the way our Father has designed this earth to function.
I will be back on May 7th to ask you to dedicate the day to prayer. In the meantime, I hope you will begin to prepare. I also hope today’s devotional has encouraged you that our Father is attentive and cooperating with our prayers. That should inspire us to prayer. It should be an encouragement. I pray it is.
Father, take this time to touch your people. Give us a passion for prayer and confident expectation of your attentiveness. We thank you Lord.