Waiting on God to answer my prayer

“Don’t fear, Zachariah. Your prayer has been heard. Elizabeth, your wife, will bear a son by you. You are to name him John. You’re going to leap like a gazelle for joy, and not only you—many will delight in his birth. He’ll achieve great stature with God.” Luke 1:14-15, The Message

I'm part of a study group made up of coaches from Chetek-Weyerhaeuser High School and Middle School that meets regularly for breakfast, discussion and prayer. The other morning, Tom, one of the group's defacto leaders, asked us this question in preface to a study of Luke 1: “Did you ever pray for something a long time that God answered in an unusual way?”

Zechariah certainly can say he did. By the time we meet him in the opening verses of Luke's Gospel we learn a couple of things about him: he's a Levite who can count Aaron, Israel's very first high priest, as one of his ancestors, he's a godly and upright individual and he's an old man married to an old woman who is barren. In those days to be barren was to be considered cursed by God and it may cause some tongues to wag that you had some skeletons in your closet that must have provoked God to be so displeased with you.

To be a Levite in ancient Palestine was no little thing. It meant that from time to time you served in Jerusalem at the great Temple carrying out the functions that only you and fellow Levites had performed time out of mind. It just so happened that one time when Zechariah and his division were on duty that by luck of the draw he was chosen to enter the Holy Place and pray in the room right outside where the Ark of the Covenant was kept. This was a huge honor, something that may only happen, if it did at all, once in a lifetime.

The day came. Zechariah dressed in the robes befitting of this honor entered the Holy Place to pray and while praying and going through the sacred liturgy the arch angel Gabriel appears. To say that he was deeply moved would be to engage in gross understatement. He's utterly terrified. And what does the angel say but that his prayer has been heard and will be answered. Incredible as it may seem, his aged wife, Elizabeth, long since her prime will bear a son but not just any son. She will bear the forerunner of Messiah, “the prophet of prophets” as my friend Tom refers to him. Talk about answered prayer!

Some of the gang in 2008. Some have since moved away and serve in other places now.

Like everybody else, I have prayers that I have prayed for a long time that have yet to be answered – people who are presently not walking with God to be converted or to return to the straight and narrow or our children's future spouses who (presumably) they have yet to meet. I've prayed for Chetek a long time, too. Every week at “the Breakfast Club” (the weekly gathering of pastors and ministry people who come together at Bob's Grill for breakfast and prayer) at least one of us has prayed, “Your kingdom come” for our city. And what in my heart does that look like to me? A vibrant, thriving faith-community who join together regularly for prayer, fellowship, teaching and witness; who are trusting enough of each other to share pulpits or worship corporately together; and who together exert an increasing kingdom influence on the citizenry of Chetek. When I pray for “revival” that's what I think – not just a “souped-up” church or “reved-up services” but a non-parochial faith community increasingly growing in a sincere love for the Lord and for one another.

Our corporate gathering with Chetek UMC last summer

It's not that we do not experience some of that now – for our part, a couple of times a year Refuge will shut down and join another fellowship for worship on a Sunday morning. Again, for my part, my pulpit is open to any of the guys (and Carrie from UMC) in our community pretty much at any time. But the Breakfast Club remains pretty much a group of evangelicals who are politically and culturally to the right of the spectrum. How much better it would be if some of our liturgical brethren like Pastor Guy from Chetek Lutheran (an evangelical himself), Father Jim from St. Boni or Pastor Carrie (a wonderfully Spirit-filled lady) could join us as well and once a week we all had breakfast together? I'm sure that out of this intimacy greater things would come for the place I call home. But pastors are busy. They have to take care of their flock, chair committee meetings, attend to the needs of their fellowship (and in Ty's case, who is the pastor of two congregations in two different communities, fellowships.) When you feel there's so much to do, it's difficult to assess that “wasting” an hour and a half at Bob's is worth the loss in productivity. For the task-oriented, it seems like just a whole lot of kibitzing.

When we had finished our study of Luke 1 Tom asked us this after he read “In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar...the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the desert”(Luke 3:2):“How do you think Zechariah felt about God answering his prayer in the way he did?” Clearly, over the years he had been disappointed with God and his apparent deafness to this simple prayer of one of his servants. But during the nine months of his wife's pregnancy his perspective had radically changed provoking him, no doubt, to reassess what he had considered divine indifference. As in so many things there is always so much more that is going on than we can tell.

One of the coaches shared that Zechariah's story reminds him that even when his prayers are not being answered the way he thinks they should be, he has to give no room for doubt and simply believe that God is up to something. Indeed. When Gabriel had dropped the bombshell on Zechariah that aged Elizabeth is going to have a baby, the first words out of his mouth were characterized by disbelief: “Do you expect me to believe this? I’m an old man and my wife is an old woman” (v. 18). Clearly, Gabriel was not dealing with facts and the way things are. For such bold balking he is silenced for nine months to remind him that he should never bother to tell God about facts and the way things are. Can you imagine hearing the best news you could ever hear in your life and not being able to share it with anyone? No wonder on the day of his son's circumcision nine months and eight days later the song that bursts forth from him (1:68-79) is 39 weeks of awe gushing out of him like water breaching a dam.

Pastor Norm is part of the membership of The Breakfast Club – in fact, the founder of it – who has prayed for our community far longer than any of us. Over the years he's logged countless miles as he has walked and prayed for our city. He's coming up on his 82^nd birthday. From time to time, he'll share with tears in his eyes one of his long unanswered prayers, “I want to see it. I keep asking God that before I die I will witness a move of God in our community.” I can get God not answering my prayer spiritual schlep as I often feel that I am. But Norm's? It seems so, I dunno, not right.

Pastor Norm, a man I consider a spiritual father in the Lord

Of course, we will continue to pray for God's kingdom to come to Chetek. As far as I know, it's a prayer that should be prayed and answered, for that matter. But until it is and until he answers it in the manner he desires to do it, I have to believe that God hears me - that God hears us!,  that he is good and because he's good therefore he must be up to something good. Or so Zechariah tells me.

"Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel;

   he came and set his people free.

He set the power of salvation in the center of our lives..."

- from the Benedictus (Luke 1:68-69, The Message)