June 7 – Don’t allow Him to rest!

I post watchmen on your walls, O Jerusalem; they should keep praying all day and all night. You who pray to the Lord, don’t be silent! Don’t allow him to rest until he reestablishes Jerusalem, until he makes Jerusalem the pride of the earth.   (Isaiah 62:6,7  NET)

This verse is a repeat of May 5th’s post, but it has been so transformative for me, I felt that I had to write about it again to expand on it’s powerful message:

God is looking for watchmen, people who will pray for God’s blessings, for big victories, for the extraordinary, and who refuse to be silent.  He’s looking for people who will not let Him rest until they see their blessings, until His promises come true in their lives.

I grew up in a Christian home, the son of a pastor, a missionary who moved his family from Pennsylvania to a small, poor country in Southern Africa when I was two and a half years old.  It was a good childhood, one where we read the Bible together every night, went to bed at 7pm, no TV, no video games, a lot of playing outside, and church every single Sunday.  At times all of the missionary families would get together, enjoy a good meal, and then go into the living room and sing hymns late into the night.  Many of those songs still come to me, wonderful songs with powerful messages.

I grew up believing in God, watching my parents sacrifice their own country and comfort to help the poor and lost.  But though I believed in God I never remember being taught today’s passage.  (It’s really a command, but we can also see it as a promise.)  This idea of praying for something you want, refusing to be silent, and refusing to allow God to rest until He answers you would have been something completely foreign to me.  I would have argued that this attitude was disrespectful to God, and that we should wait for God to act, and if He didn’t act that would mean that miracle or request was not for us.  But where did I get that from?  That argument sounds spiritual and humble, but it’s not biblical.  It was not Peter’s attitude, nor Paul’s, Hannah’s attitude nor David’s.

I am now fifty-five, and only at twenty-seven was when that old attitude began to change.  Twenty-seven was a huge turning point in my life.  My worldview was transformed.  I began to look at God, and pray to Him in a completely different way.  I started to see Him as Someone who was interested in doing the supernatural in my life… and I have not regretted that change one day of the last twenty-eight years.  I have seen more of God’s power, and experienced His presence to a much higher degree than the first half of my life… in fact I see miracles now and am able to fight demons and see them retreat when I couldn’t do either before.

God is looking for people with the same attitude.  When this verse speaks about Jerusalem, it’s referring to the Church… to us.  Stop falling for the lie that God doesn’t want to do great things in your life. He does, but He also expects you to refuse to be silent and to give Him no rest until you receive what you want.  After all these years I’ve learned that this is not disrespectful, but one of the highest forms of respect for God.