Many times Christians exhibit a Christmas mentality when presenting their petition prayers. Before the December birthday celebration, people spend their time looking for what someone wants for Christmas. The children are eager to share their page list of things they would like. Adults, no doubt less energetic, will drop hints about what they might wear. Now, perhaps wish lists can find their way under the Christmas tree, but there are also some unexpected gifts that bring a surprise to the recipient. In fact, the response to the surprise gift may generate more excitement than the expected gift. Many of our prayers are requests that basically correspond to our needs and desires. When we received our response, we expressed our gratitude and then almost immediately began preparing our next request list. To emphasize our needs/desires, we enlist others to join our prayers to invoke the reality of Matthew 18:19. Answered prayer is a shot of spiritual adrenaline. Receiving an answer to prayer is a blessing and encouragement for spiritual growth.
There is another area of blessings that seems to go unrecognized, and that is the area of unsolicited blessings. These are acts of Grace that God gives us every day, but we do not recognize them. For whatever reason, we tend to see God’s actions as originating solely from our prayers. If we haven’t asked God to intervene, we assume that everything that happens in our lives is just a natural path of coincidental experiences. When we walk with the Lord, we will see abundant blessings all around us. When we do not accompany the Lord during our daily routines, our blessing meters will not register his participation in our daily activities. God wants to be active in our lives and bless us, but we don’t acknowledge blessings from him because we are too busy with the sights and sounds of a sinful world. We need to start being aware of God’s daily activities in our lives. Look around you and see God’s blessings, they are everywhere. When we stop focusing our lives on ourselves and start putting God before everything, we will witness so many blessings that we will think we are on the outskirts of Heaven.
As I look back over the years, I see more and more of God’s role in my life. The things that he had previously thought were just coincidences were actually incidents from God. During my trucker days, I lived lifesaving situations that had shocked even my own initiatives, when, in truth, they had been God’s intervention. Many of my decisions were, in fact, directed by God. When I began to realize how active God had been in my life, I was overwhelmed. I remember sitting down and hitting the rewind button in my memory bank and seeing how involved God had been in my life. All the years that I had spent asking God, while at the same time not witnessing his blessings, made me ask for forgiveness. Witnessing God’s daily inner action in one’s life is a vital part of the believer’s growth pattern, just as prayer is a vital part of a believer’s faith. Jesus said that God knows what we need before we pray. (Matthew 6:8) What will surprise many believers is that God may have already begun to answer our prayer even before it is spoken. He knows what we are going to ask and he may have already prepared the answer for our observance.
God answers prayer, as well as blesses us, even if we are unaware of the fact. As we continue to ask God, let us also praise him for what we are experiencing. Prayer is giving God permission to work in our lives. It is opening our doors for God to work in a requested area in our life. Let us also open our eyes and see what God is doing. Let’s not be surprised when we receive an unsolicited blessing, because his blessings are all around us, waiting for us to discover them.
