Praying Backwards by Bryan Chapell

Author:Bryan Chapell [Bryan Chapell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781585582631
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group

Specific Expectations

Mueller’s biographer says the minister wrote down prayer requests because he believed a permanent record of specific prayers and answers helps accumulate “evidence in our own experience that God is to us personally a prayer-hearing God.”[2] In his lifetime Mueller recorded fifty thousand answers to specific prayers. He said that approximately ten thousand of the answers came on the day the prayers were offered. His biographer writes, “On [one] occasion eight specific requests are put on record, together with the solemn conviction that, having asked in conformity with the word and will of God, and in the name of Jesus, he [Mueller] has confidence in Him, that He heareth and that He has the petitions thus asked of Him.”

By asking in Jesus’ name, Mueller intended not only to ensure Christ’s intercession but also to indicate willingness to submit to God’s will. Mueller expected God to answer as heaven knew was best. The record of answers to specific prayers also reminded Mueller that God’s responses could be more glorious and wiser than the requests he had made. On one occasion Mueller wrote, “I believe He has heard me. I believe He will make it manifest in His own good time that He has heard me; and I have recorded these my petitions this fourteenth day of January, 1838, that when God has answered them He may get, through this, glory to His name.”

Mueller’s oft-cited expectancy of God’s intervention was not a presumptive confidence in God’s doing all that the one praying asked. Mueller used Jesus’ name with the expectation that God would answer in the way that most glorified the Savior.

Maintaining such expectation must have been difficult after some of Mueller’s prayers. During the same time that God was repeatedly rescuing children through the orphanage, Mueller’s own child was stillborn, and his wife became grievously ill. Through the course of his life, Mueller buried two stillborn children, a one-year-old son, an adult daughter, and two wives. Why would God allow such vastly different responses to prayer? Until we are with him, we will not know. But now we can know his divine character, and we can trust the One who provided Jesus for us to listen to us and to do the best for our eternity and his glory.

A Pattern for Worship

Specific prayer is an act of worship demonstrating that we are willing to submit everything in our lives to God—our smallest desires and greatest aspirations. At the same time that we offer specific prayers, however, we complete our worship by submitting our desires and aspirations to God’s will in Jesus’ name. Praying for specifics opens our lives, moment by moment, to the presence and rule of the Lord. We rivet our attention on him by trusting his hand in every situation. Such constant and specific prayer provides the privileges of a nearly unbroken conversation of the soul with God in a life of perpetual worship.

Specific prayer puts us on intimate terms with our heavenly Father. We trust him to care about the details of our lives, and in doing so, we learn to trust him more.

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