How many times have you hoped for, wished for, waited for and then was disappointed when your dream, goal, or desire never came to pass. Are you at a point right now where you are considering giving up on that dream that lives deep within your heart? Are you feeling discouraged that what you thought would be by now looks like a distant hoop dream. Has Jesus let you down? Has he even heard your prayers? Does he know what you truly desire? My sister, I am here to offer you some encouragement.
The scripture verse(s) we talk about today include: Mark 11:24 (Amplified translation)
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Sarah Elizabeth
Our Faith Your Day Declaration!
Jesus, thank you so much for loving me in the way that you do! You designed me on purpose for a purpose. I want to live to my full potential today, with a mindset that honors you and a soul that seeks to know you better. Jesus I know that you are the way, the truth and the life, and I ask you to guide me and reveal to me what it is that you want to show me here, have me experience here, and learn from this season. Help mold me and shape me into the best version of me. I will live today as your vessel ready to receive your word, respond to your promptings, and pour out your overflowing love to those all around me. Please allow your thoughts to become my thoughts, your ways to become my ways and your will to become what I truly desire. Jesus if you are in it I want it and if you are not I don’t! I choose to faith this day of life! I am so grateful to be your girl! In Jesus name Amen!
I have a really powerful verse for us today, and I am so excited to share it with you because I know that this one is going to totally redefine your version of faith! How many times have you hoped for, wished for, waited for and then was disappointed when your dream, goal, or desire never came to pass. Are you at a point right now where you are considering giving up on that dream that lives deep within your heart? Are you feeling discouraged that what you thought would be by now looks like a distant hoop dream. Has Jesus let you down? Has he even heard your prayers? Does he know what you truly desire? My sister, I am here to offer you some encouragement. Not only does Jesus know exactly what it is that your heart desires, that he’s loving enough to not give it to you. Say what? Are you wondering if you heard that right? Let me say it again…Jesus loves you so much…and knows the specific desires of your heart, that sometimes he doesn’t give you what you want. Ok now before this absolutely crushes your spirit let me explain. Our best is most often not Jesus’s best. What we desire…often has components of what he truly desires for us…but the problem is that sometimes we get so hung up on the how and the when, that we forget to have faith for God’s way.
Mark 11:24 in the amplified bible translation promises this: For this reason I am telling you, whatever things you ask for in prayer (in accordance with God’s will), believe (with confident trust) that you have received them, and they will be given to you.
Personally I really love the amplified version of this scripture because it adds a few parenthesis of key information that can often go overlooked in other translations. For example in the NIV version this same verse Mark 11:24 says: Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.
This verse is in red font which means it is directly from the mouth of Jesus…so wise words indeed…we need to pay extra attention to the red font in our bibles…however, it’s sometimes taken a little too literal, and this is where some people can become discouraged. It’s far too easy to read it in the way that if you ask for it in prayer…you just have to believe it’s yours…the issue here is that we don’t get some key additional information that is absolutely crucial…and here is where that first amplified version comes into play. Let’s read it again. “For this reason I am telling you, whatever things you ask for in prayer (bracket…in accordance with God’s will), believe (with confident trust…aka Faith) that you have received them, and they will be given to you.
I want you to think about a dream, goal, or wish that you hold in your heart right now. Something that has not happened for you yet, something you’ve been waiting on and wondering if it will ever actually really happen…you’ve been praying, and you’ve got faith…but still nothing. I can’t help but wonder if maybe what you are praying for isn’t God’s best for you…maybe he has something even better in store. Maybe your dream is far to small for him to give it…maybe what you’re asking for isn’t in alignment with his best plans for you. So here is where you become discouraged right? And trust me my sister I have been there. Many many times. Pleading with God, begging him and becoming bitter for what I want that he hasn’t given me. After all his word says pray for it and it’s yours right? Well not exactly. If we go back to our verse today, we have to really focus in on the bracketed information to glean the key learning here. Praying for what you want isn’t the same as having faith in what God wants for you. The only way to guarantee that you get God’s best plans for you is to pray for the things that are in accordance to his will. So simple yet so difficult right! I personally had some struggles adjusting to faith in this regard. At first when this was all new to me I was reluctant to pray for God’s will for me, because like what if his will wasn’t what I wanted…what if it was less than I desired…what if he gave me the toned down, watered down or kinda boring version of what I wanted…truth be told…I didn’t know our Jesus well enough when I had those doubts. It took some crazy faith for me to step out and boldly ask him to give me the desires of his heart…to show me what was holding me back, to bring forth his very best. And my friend do you know what I’ve learned time and time again…if you’re feeling let down by where you are at right now…or discouraged about why things haven’t happened the way you want them to…then you are holding on too tight, and it’s time to step out in crazy faith and pray to ask God to take your wishes and align them with his best plans for you. Hold on to your version of what you think is idea with a very light grip, and be ready to hand it over to him to exchange it for his version. This might sound completely out there, but he’s never let me down. You see the reason in the past I was being let down…was because I was trying to tell God what was best for me…and it’s once I discovered that I have no flippin clue what is best for me, and that I totally decided to trust that he does…I saw time after time, that if I just kept in faith…then he would move the mountains in precisely his way, in precisely his timing.
And I’m not the only one…the bible is jam packed with examples of people whose prayers were answered in ways that seemed completely crazy until they happened. You remember Abraham and Sarah…the couple who was desperate for a child…desperate enough to do all sorts of crazy things in order to make that dream a reality…including having a baby by another woman in order to achieve what they were hoping for. God heard their prayer…but he didn’t want to just make Abraham a father…he had more planned for him…even before Abraham had one son, God had promised him to be a father of nations…crazy right…well it sounded that way until it actually happened. Fast forward generations later and Abraham and Sarah had a family lineage that rivaled the number of stars in the sky. You see at first they were making the classic error that so many of us make…we pray, we wait, we grow impatient, we start to wonder if God actually heard us, we grow even more impatient, we try to play God, we try to come up with our own solutions and options, we try to make things happen ASAP and then we act super surprised when our plans blow up in our face and turn out horribly wrong.
What if we were to consider Moses who with a seemingly insignificant staff parted the Red Sea at just the right moment. That seems crazy right, but it was only crazy Faith until it actually happened. In that critical miracle Moses was a recipient of the outcome of faith. He communicated with God regularly and was simply carrying out and following through on God’s orders when he really just had to have that confident trust that God would come through…and as always he did…at exactly the right time and exactly the right way.
Or how about Simon and Andrew who had fished all night and didn’t catch anything, and then in crazy faith held on to God’s promise of provision. In the precise moment that they were instructed to throw over their nets once more, the bounty of the sea became theirs. Sure they had doubt, but they also had enough faith to allow Jesus to do what he does best…which is to show up big in our moments of hopelessness.
The thing about faith is that it often looks alot like waiting. And its sometimes when we feel that we are waiting too long that we begin to let our doubts eat up our faith. What I’ve learned is that the waiting is the key component of faith. Faith is not just trusting completely in God’s goodness, but it’s also the active waiting as the process unfolds. It’s in the waiting that we can discover so much more of who God made us to be. It’s in the waiting that we discover that it’s all out of our hands and in his. For some people the waiting kills their faith, it’s there that they get so discouraged that they begin to take matters into their own hands. But for those of us who have the faith to pray, have the faith to wait and have the faith to trust, oh what blessings will be revealed along the way! It’s only seems crazy until it happens!