Answered Prayer: chapter 10

Shortly after Darren and I married, I asked the Lord to teach me how to excel in the area of prayer.  The Lord answered this prayer in the year after losing our baby.  I spent hours a day in prayer.  I found such solace while I was praying. I prayed for my children, for the country,  for the nations leaders, for Billings, for the city we lived in, for our church, for the persecuted church and many other things.    And I prayed for my husband.  I prayed that my husband would fulfill his ministry. More specifically, I prayed 2 Timothy chapter 4 for him.  This scripture fit so completely with the ministry that I had sensed in his life.  Ironically enough, it seemed to me that Darren was called to hold the corporate church accountable to pure doctrine.  Though, I could not, at the time, communicate this near as eloquently as I just did here.  I knew it in my heart.  The irony that my husband would function in an area where I was so dysfunctional completely eluded me at the time.  But there isn’t irony in God’s scheme of things. 

             

Prayer was one area that I was firm and founded in.   In my earlier Lively Church days I had been taught that one should only pray one time for something and then stand in faith for that thing.  To pray more than one time for something showed a lack of faith.  For some reason it was not difficult for me to reject this line of thinking.  Although this contradicted Word of Faith teachings,  I had no trouble diligently praying scriptures over and over again.  Actually, each time I prayed in this fashion, my faith and hope grew by leaps and bounds.  It is precisely in this way that I prayed 2 Timothy chapter 4 for my husband day after day for five months. 

             

One night, after spending a couple of days at a youth retreat, he came home very excited.  He tearfully told me how the Lord had touched his life.  He began by telling me that the theme of the retreat was 2 Timothy Chapter 4.  He said to me, "I need to fulfill the ministry that God has laid aside for me". I started to cry then too.  I had never told him what I had been praying for him.  When I told him at that moment, we cried together in amazement. God determines when He is going to answer a prayer.  In many cases people pray for years with no visible results.  I say, keep praying!.  There are other areas that I am still praying about and have yet to "see" results.  Yet, I keep on.  In this case I had prayed for five months.  When God answered my prayer He answered it very specifically.  But then, praying the scripture is pretty specific.