Pray Big

Lately I’ve been thinking about how so many of our prayers are so small. We ask for God to give us clear traffic on the way to work or the mall. We pray for someone to say, “yes” to our request. We ask for a good night’s sleep.

And yes, those are good prayers; God wants you to ask Him for anything, great or small. As Jesus taught us in Matthew 7: 9 &10, “What man is there among you, if his son asks him for bread, or a fish, will give him a stone, or a snake?” In other words, “lunch”?

Lunch is a little thing, and Jesus goes on to say, “If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father Who is in Heaven give good things to those who ask Him.”

So yeah, small prayers are fine! God wants you to have all the good things, no matter how small they may be, and He will give them. But I can’t help but believe that He also longs for us to pray beyond those tiny things.

One of my favorite NT verses, which if you know me at all you’ve heard me quote before, is Matthew 21:22, where Jesus says, and “all things, whatsoever ye ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive.” In other words, “as much as you can ask and believe for, you can have.”

Wow, God is so generous! I know most people don’t think of Him that way, but He is. He is predisposed to giving. He loves, loves to give us our hearts’ desires. Ps. 37:4 tells us: “Delight yourself in the Lord and he shall give you the desires of your hearts,” and Ps. 145:19 says, “He fulfills the desires of those who fear Him.”

Generous. Magnanimous. God is over-the top on this.

Think about it: Here we have God Almighty saying, “Anything you ask for, believing, you can have!” So why are so many of us asking for such small things? 

We pray for what’s easy; what’s humanly possible. But what about the big things? What about the impossible things? Jesus said in Lk. 18:27, “The things that are impossible with men are possible with God.”

But you know, sometimes even small things can be impossible, and that can make them big things things too. For instance, there was a little boy on the southern island of Mindanao in the Philippines whose pastor, Alex Gonzales, taught his church that the age of miracles had not passed, and that they could participate in such miracles. So, one day at the school, the boy’s teacher told the class to bring a pencil and paper the next day, since there’d be a test. 

The next day all the kids arrived with their pencils and papers except this little 8-year-old, since his family was too poor to provide him with one. (Now some of you might think, “nobody’s that poor! But I’ve been to the Philippines several times, as well as some other similar places, and I can assure you that yes, people can be that poor.)

At any rate, the teacher told him he was sorry, but the boy couldn’t take the test, so heartbroken, the child walked out the door and sat on the front steps of school building. Then he remembered Pastor Alex Gonzales’ sermon on miracles, on the great God who did impossible things, and prayed, “Dear God, please give me a pencil so I can take the test.”

Now the pencil was a small thing, but it was also a big thing, because it was an impossible thing. Pencils don’t just appear out of thin air. But the boy asked for one anyway, because God was supposed to be a God of impossible miracles.

After praying, he opened his eyes and looked around, (I don’t know, maybe he was expecting a pencil to drop out of the sky,) but there was… nothing. So with his eyes filled with tears and his arms folded around his knees, he just sat there.

Then, as kids will do, he rolled the notepaper into a small cylinder, twirling it back and forth between his open palms, and suddenly felt something… hard… inside the paper.

What? He quickly unrolled it again and there in the middle of it was a bright shiny yellow pencil. It was a brand-new, with an eraser on one end and a machine sharpened point on the other, (even though there was not a mechanical pencil sharpener within 30 miles of that place.)

He immediately ran into the schoolhouse waving his pencil. The teacher asked him where he had gotten such a nice one, and he paused, thought, and finally said, “The impossible God gave it to me!”

It was, indeed, an absolute miracle; an impossible thing that happened upon the request a child who believed that God could do anything. 

But think about all the impossible miracles people prayed for in the Bible! There, He does outrageous things all the time. He turns sticks into snakes; He makes an iron axe head float in water. He translates a guy to Heaven in a whirlwind, brings coins from a fishes’ mouths, stills storms…

All these are over the top miracles, and yet doing such things just seems to be a part of His Divine Nature. God is such a wild God! How did we get so tame?

A preacher named Miles Munro said God once told him, “Ask me for something that makes Me look like God.” Now that’s the kind of thing I’m talking about.

‘Cause truth be told, God loves doing these kinds of things. His Word is full of stories about them: In Joshua 10:14 Joshua prayed that the sun would stand still so he’d have time to win a battle. Now that was a crazy prayer.

Obviously, this was before Copernicus was born, right? I mean, doesn’t the Lord understand science? If the sun stood still, that would mean the world had stopped turning and everything on it would fly off it into space, right?!

Wrong. God rules the Universe and can do whatever He wants. And God wanted to answer that crazy prayer, so the sun stopped moving in the middle of the sky and delayed going down for a full day.

In Jn. 11:1-44, Jesus prayed that Lazarus, who’d been dead for 4 days, would come walking out of his grave alive and well. (Folks, this guy was in a tomb, underground!) And he did – Lazarus came out! Yet another impossible miracle.

In Exodus 14, Moses prayed that the Red Sea would part so the Children of Israel could escape through it on dry ground. That was an even wilder prayer, and yet that’s exactly what happened.

And yet amazingly, we’re kinda used to hearing these stories. And they do seem, in a strange kind of way, almost normal to us. (Normal as in fairy tales, anyway…) But when you think about people actually praying and believing for such things today, well, they do seem a little wacko. And yet the Bible teaches that God did, and still does, perform “wacko” miracles for those with the faith, confidence, and abandonment to presume He’d dare to do such things for them.

But sometimes we have another problem with prayer that’s not about faith or vision: sometimes we only ask for what we think we’re worth. And regrettably, all too often we don’t think we’re worth that much.

Motivational speaker Tony Robbins tells a story about a money clip he used to carry in his pocket, with a few hundred bucks in it. He usually had some change there, too. And one day he met a homeless guy begging on the street. So, he pulled out the money clip and some loose change came with it, so he put the change in one hand and the dollars in the other and told the guy, “Take one. Either hand. Your pick.”

The guy looked at the one hand with 100s of bucks, and then the other with the change, and then grabbed the change and ran away. And Tony thought, “what? He took the change instead of hundreds of dollars?” And that’s when he realized that the little bit of spare change was all that man thought he was worth.

But there’s another beggar story in the Bible that speaks to that. Jesus met two blind men and when they asked for help, he asked them, “What do you want me to do for you.”

Well, they knew Who they were talking to and what He was offering, so in this case they didn’t sell themselves short. They knew they could ask for anything – a house, a real job…anything.

So they asked for what they really wanted, down deep in their hearts, They asked for the impossible. They said, “We want to receive our sight.” And that’s what they got.

Friends, we need to pray like those blind men, not like that homeless guy. We need to think enough of ourselves to ask God for His best. Because seriously, He’s already given us that, hasn’t He? He valued us so highly that He gave His own Son for us. “So how will He not also with Him give us…all things?” (That’s Romans 8:32.)

Do you have an impossible dream – something that burns within you but is just not doable? Or do you need an impossible miracle; something that human agency just can’t perform? Believers, let’s be believers. Let’s not reign God in by only asking for the easy things, the things we can understand as being humanly possible. Let’s lift our eyes higher, believing that our impossible needs can be met, and our hopeless dreams can come true. Because in John 14:14, the One Who created the worlds, parted the Red Sea, stopped the mouths of lions, raised the dead, and yes, even stopped the sun, said, “If you ask anything in my Name, I will do it.”