Our God is the Living God as opposed to gods constructed by men’s hands or produced by the imaginations of their wicked hearts and the blindness of their minds. Our God is the One who made the ear to hear and the eye to see. Shall He not see and hear us? We may ask, “why then does He not answer when we call?” He has answered a prayer that probably no mortal had ever before this moment prayed. He answered in such a memorable way, that it should be a model for all who are of faith in Christ. Why don’t we rush to recall that day? Why don’t we rehearse it until it becomes ingrained in our thinking and expectation? I am speaking of an occasion recorded in the Scripture where God listened to a man, Joshua, who prayed out of the bounds of normal thinking and forever changed regular order. He set a precedent in prayer where God listened to the voice of a man and answered in a manner we had never before heard. This Scripture reads, “Then Joshua spoke to the Lord in the day when the Lord delivered up the Amorites before the children of Israel, and he said in the sight of Israel: ‘“Sun, stand still over Gibeon; and moon, in the valley of Aijalon.’ So the sun stood still, and the moon stopped, till the people had revenge upon their enemies […] So the sun stood still in the midst of heaven, and did not hasten to go down for about a whole day. And there has been no day like that, before it or after it, that the Lord heeded the voice of a man; for the Lord fought for Israel” (Joshua 10:12–15).
At the writing of the book of Joshua, there had never been a time when an answer to prayer had resulted in such a miraculous phenomenon, that is, a miracle of Joshua proportions! To us, the Lord says, “for I know the thoughts that I think toward you, says the LORD, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you a future and a hope. Then you will call upon Me and go and pray to Me, and I will listen to you” (Jeremiah 29:11-12). The Lord has promised to listen when we pray to Him. He says, “call to Me, and I will answer you, and show you great and mighty things, which you do not know” (Jeremiah 33:3). We should not only pray for possible things, but for the impossible, thus setting new precedents in prayer! The Psalmist says, “I sought the Lord and He heard me” (Psalm 34:4). The precedent in scripture is that God has listened to a man who prayed for the impossible until it became possible and changed the “natural order” of things, the sun stood still, and the moon stopped and did not hasten to go down for about a whole day in response to a man’s prayer.
God now says to us, “call to me, and I will answer you.” He desires to answer the sincere cry of His people! Christ’s perfect example is the greatest of all in scripture. Jesus Christ “who, in the days of His flesh, when He had offered up prayers and supplications, with vehement cries and tears to Him who was able to save Him from death and was heard because of His godly fear” (Hebrews 5:7). Jesus Christ, the greater Joshua, won a much more substantial victory than the Joshua of the Old Testament! Jesus did not win a single battle in a single day but defeated the enemies of God and man forever through His resurrection from among the dead by which He delivered an innumerable number of souls and redeemed them to God because He prayed and was heard! His resurrection out from among the dead is a guarantee of your resurrection and mine! Therefore, let us dare to pray for and believe God for the impossible, leaving an example to future generations.
Learning to Pray,
Pastor Don