Pray Big: Trusting God to Handle Every Prayer

Pray big! Gods powers are limitless.
Don’t limit God with your self-balanced scale of request sizes.
No prayer is too small or too large.

Pray Big because…

There’s no scale for measuring prayer.

It’s not as if we look at a situation and decide, “I need about a number 4 prayer here.”

Say the scale is: 1. Lost keys you won’t need till next week, to 10. Guests coming for dinner in 5 minutes and you can’t get the smoke alarm to quit blaring.

Between 10 and 20 are the really big things, like sickness, accidents and death.

So we think we can’t pray a number 16 prayer for rush hour traffic making us late for a flight.

Why not?

Who makes the rules for a prayer scale?

You can say God did, but if you read the scripture, you wouldn’t be right.

It says we can never ask too much of God. The Bible says He can do way more than we could even think of asking.

Pray Big because everyone matters

This Sunday, big prayers are being answered at our church.  About someone we had all but given up on.

When she was 15, someone told her they doubted she could ever be a true Christian.

At 18, she quit going to church. Period. Ever. She justified herself, saying if there was a God, His people wouldn’t have judged her not good enough. 

At 21 she was into small time drugs. Small, she promised herself. Plus, she would never do hard drugs.

Time moved on. And more time. She seldom let her family know where she was, and never came home for Christmas. Her parents raised her 2 children.

She partied on. Her twenties passed, thirties now. Then forties.

Was her mom still praying? You know she was.  Was she praying big?  I have no doubt.

But, honestly, outside her family, many of us thought of her only rarely. When I did, I worried that her life might not end well. Maybe like her aunt, shot in the head and dumped beside the road. But I couldn’t stand thinking about such horrible things, so mostly, I didn’t.

Then, one day, she came to a bridge. The bridge was called heroin. For some reason, God was also near that bridge, and she felt Him. She said no, I’ve always stayed off this bridge. I won’t cross it now.

She pulled out her phone and called her dad.  “Can you come pick me up?”

And now, 6 months later, she’s going under the Water to be baptized.

What number on the scale was the prayer that saved her?

Was the prayer that saved her in the Size 1 to 10 range, that most of us prayed?

Eleven to twenty didn’t stop her.

Who prayed big enough? Who never quit praying all the sizes?

Her parents? She herself? Her Church family who barely knew her anymore?

All of the above. The small ones and the large. All up and down the scale.

One prayer after another added up to the prayer that put Jesus beside her bridge that day, and placed her in the position to say yes.

Pray Big, because to God, everyone matters.  Every thing matters.

Do you have answers to prayer you can share? Times when God answered a number 4 prayer with a size 24 answer?

God’s power to answer prayer is limitless.