God will Respond for His Own Sake, and Ours
1 O God, do not keep silence;
do not hold your peace or be still, O God!
2 For behold, your enemies make an uproar;
those who hate you have raised their heads.
3 They lay crafty plans against your people;
they consult together against your treasured ones.
4 They say, “Come, let us wipe them out as a nation;
let the name of Israel be remembered no more!”
5 For they conspire with one accord;
against you they make a covenant
It happens here and several other places in the Bible. It’s a way of praying that puts all of our problems and God’s power over them in the right perspective.
At one point, even Hezekiah does it by taking a letter written by his enemies and lays it down right in front of the altar.
It’s appealing to God to defend His own reputation. Many people spend a lot of time defending God. He doesn’t need defending, He needs revealing. When He’s revealed, He will happily defend Himself.
This kind of prayer helps us to see our circumstances and the Lord in the proper light. Whatever struggle you have, the Lord is right here with you in it! And He always wins. He wins in the Glory. He wins in the Fame. He wins in the credit for always being a deliverer. One way or another, God works all things to His own glory and majesty.
So we tell Him. Sometimes in the middle of that prayer, He heals us. He reminds us by the power of His Holy Spirit that He is in absolute control and knows when to defend His name and how.
That turns our prayer and plea in to worship. We begin to praise Him when we realized that we can trust Him with all of our situations.
We become confident that if God is remaining silent, it isn’t on accident. If God doesn’t act and so something that we can see or feel, we can trust that He’s actively doing something invisible. I’ve seen all kinds of people change their minds about things for no logical reason. People respond passionately to what I thought was a lame sermon. People weeping after a simple conversation.
And others that we never see nor hear any evidence from, but we trust that God is working.
Let us give Him our struggles and ask for His input. He cares more about the people we’re praying for more than we do. He cares about His own glory and reputation more than we do. As we come before Him with our requests, we can stand behind Him and watch Him move.
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