Once we get past the hurdle of actually praying, we begin to invite prayer in all faucets of our lives, and we begin to discover true relationship with God. We learn to bring God into the big things, the small things, and everything in between. This is exactly the place where God wants us to be. It is right in the middle of depending on God where we begin to discover the abundant life Jesus describes in John 10:10 NLT.
Getting To The Abundant Life
I will not sit here and pretend that responding to God’s various answers is easy. I am not going to pass this off as some kind of spiritual life-hack which you can easily pickup by following three easy steps. Learning how to process God’s answers is something which you will learn with experience over time. It will take making a lot of mistakes before some of this really clicks.
We do not get to the abundant life by simply reading an article and magically everything in your walk with God is different. Processing and responding to God’s answers will take tweaking and fine-tuning. You will get certain things right and then mess up on what should be the easy parts. There are just certain things in life which do not come with a map.
Let us get something out there. Following Jesus can be messy! There, I said it. But let me be clear, it is not messy because of Jesus. It is all on us. No passing the buck or pointing the finger. Our self-seeking, sin nature makes this whole depending on God thing really tough. The last thing we want to do is to learn how to interpret God’s answers to our prayers. If we are honest, we like the whole self-directed, self-pleasing, what’s in it for me philosophy.
Get to Know God
While I can’t exactly give you step-by-step directions, what I can tell you is that the closer you grow to God, the easier it will be to understand and process His response to your requests. The Bible is the closest thing we get to a map. So grab hold of your Bible, open up your map, and dig into God’s Word. Spend time getting to know some of the intricacies of God. Read about the stories of other believers like you and me who struggled with knowing how to respond to God’s answers to their prayers. When God’s responses leave you questioning, go back and revisit when God says…”No,” “Yes,” or “Wait.”
