What if God gave you the sweetest deal of the century?  Maybe the best offer in the millennium?  Suppose God said to you, “Ask Me for whatever you want and I will give it to you.”

Can you imagine?  “Ask Me for whatever you want—anything at all, nothing is too big—and I will, not might, or could but I will give it to you.”

What would you ask for?  Would it be truckloads of money (not to be used selfishly, of course)?  Would you want to be able to pay off your bills, help out some friends, secure your children’s future, help your church, support a bunch of missionaries, and pay for finding a cure for cancer or AIDS?  It may cross your mind that having a new house and luxury car might be a way to let people know that God is not a stingy God.  After all, it’s okay to have money as long as it doesn’t have you.

Hearing God tell you that He would gladly give you anything you asked would be a mind-boggling prospect.  Impossible, you say?  Not so.  Nearly three thousand years ago, God gave that exact opportunity to a man named Solomon (2 Chr. 1:7).

Solomon had has hands full.  He was the second son of the fateful David and Bathsheba union.  When David died, the weight of a young nation rested on the untested shoulders Solomon.  He had to step up and take David’s place as king.  Talk about big shoes to fill!

Yet, God knows when we are facing more than we can handle, and He knows just what we need.  So God appeared to Solomon in a dream and made him the unconditional proposal: “Ask Me for whatever u want and I will give it to you.”  To his credit, Solomon knew what to ask for [2 Chr. 1:7-10].

GIVE ME WISDOM

When given the opportunity to ask God for anything, Solomon asked for wisdom.  “Give me wisdom” is one of the most effective prayers found in the pages of Scripture, and one God loves to answer [2 Chr. 1:11-12].

Solomon asked for wisdom and God said, “Yes.”  In the Book of 1 Kings we can read a summary of the amazing way God answered Solomon’s prayer for wisdom [1 Kings 4:29-33].

With what decisions are you currently wrestling?  Do you need wisdom to carry out your ministry more effectively?  Are you trying to figure out how to lead your family?  Do you need insight into a relationship?  Then, pause right now and ask God to give you wisdom for every decision you are encountering and every situation you face today.

Etched into every soul are deep, personal desires and dreams that refuse to go away until they are realized.  We may temporarily lose sight of them in the busyness of day-to-day living, but they are always there, crying to be fulfilled.  As time goes by, these yearnings take on a painful desperation when the hope of realizing them begins to fade.  Nothing we or anyone can do, and no amount of time, can release us from the gnawing hurt of an unfulfilled dream.  Doubts and questions disturb our prayers.  You wonder, Has God forgotten me?

What can we do with these dreams that stubbornly refuse to come true and yet mulishly refuse to go away?  We may want to try Hannah’s prayer.  Like all stories of great answers to prayer, this one begins with a great need.  Hannah was a woman who needed nothing less than a miracle [1 Sam. 1:1-3].

Note the lonely, desperate, painful words at the end of verse two: “Peninnahhad children, but Hannah had none.”  Hannah had no children in a world in which bearing children served as the chief source of a woman’s esteem, provision, and protection.  Her arms had never felt the trembling joy of holding her own baby.  Her lifelong passion to be a mother went unfulfilled year after year [1 Sam 1:3-8].

“The Lord had closed her womb.”  As years passed, Hannah’s barrenness caused her to become the object of scorn.  And not only that, but she had a husband who totally misunderstood her pain.  Like most men, Elkanah failed to understand why he wasn’t the alpha and omega of his wife’s desires.

Out of her desperation Hannah crafted a prayer, one of the most effective recorded in the Bible [1 Sam. 10-11].  Don’t miss the urgent simplicity of her prayer.  It is summed up in those two anguished words, “Remember me.”

REMEMBER ME

Obviously this was not the first time she had prayed about her barrenness.  Year after year she had made the trip to Shiloh.  Yet her urgency now fused a yearningly specific request: “Remember me, and do not forget your servant, but give her a son.”  She did not merely seek any blessing.  She was not eve asking for a child.  Hannah hammered heaven for a son.

MAKING IT PERSONAL

Notice a few characteristics of this prayer.  These elements could be understood as aids to answered prayer.

1. Purified Motives.
2. Persistent Faith [1 Sam. 1:12]
3. Painful Earnestness [1 Sam. 1:13-16]
4. Petitions with Fasting [1 Sam 1:17-18]

Most of the greatest answers to prayer I have ever enjoyed have come out of times of prayer with fasting.  And that was the result for Hannah [1 Sam 1:19-20].

Maybe you know exactly what you need to happen and where you need God to work.  Yet, God first might work through someone in authority over you.  That person could be a government official, teacher, or pastor or maybe even your boss, coach, parent, or spouse!  But in order to get what you need, God has to move their hearts on your behalf.

As the cupbearer for King Artaxerxes, Nehemiah held a very responsible position; yet he longed to be eight hundred miles away, back with his people in the destroyed city of Jerusalem.  They were facing possible annihilation and Nehemiah needed to return to rebuild the city walls.  More specifically, he needed three years off from his job and enough supplies to rebuild a wall around the entire city of Jerusalem!  First, though, a huge change had to happen in the heart of the man in authority, that is, King Artaxerxes.  Nehemiah’s superior, an unbeliever, had a nasty reputation for cutting the heads off subordinates who upset him.  For Nehemiah to march into the king’s oval office and demand time off and building materials would be signing his own death warrant.  So what could he do?

If you read the story of Nehemiah, you find a man who consistently turned his problems into prayer.  He lived by the advice, “Pray when troubles trouble you.”  We find him turning his problems into prayer in almost every one of the twelve chapters in the book bearing his name (Nehemiah 1:5-11: 2:5; 4:4-5, 9; 5:19; 6:9-14; 9:32; 13:14, 22, 29, 31).  So when the need in Jerusalem was brought to his attention, he did as he always did.  He brought the matter to the Lord.  His prayer, one of the most effective in the Bible, is a tutorial on how to pray.  Let’s see what we can learn from him.

Nehemiah opened with words of praise and perspective.  God’s address is praise.  Praise and thanksgiving are gateways into the presence of God (see Psalm 100:4).  He also mentions the perspective that the God he is addressing is the one who keeps His covenant.  The importance of this will become clear as the prayer develops (Nehemiah 1:5).

Nehemiah did not pray once and quit.  He brought his burden to God repeatedly, day and night.  It may have been weeks or even months from when he first began to pray about the plight of Jerusalem until God granted his request.

Jesus made a promise when He said, “keep on asking and it shall be given unto you.”  He also encouraged us to be as persistent in our prayers as the friend at midnight and the widow who beseeched the unjust judge (Neh. 1:6).

Nehemiah then moved to a season of assessment and confession of sins (Neh. 1:6-7).  He reminded God of the promises He made through Moses (Neh.1: 8-10).  Then he got down to business and offered his petition (Neh.  1:11)

GRANT FAVOR

Nehemiah must have been familiar with the book of Genesis and with the prayer of Abraham’s servant, “Give me success today.”  But he did not stop there.  He told God specifically how he needed success: “Give your servant success today by granting him favor in the presence of this man”  (Neh. 2:1-9).

God is able to change the hearts of those in authority.  God is able to change my heart.  With whom do you need favor if you are going to be able to follow God’s heart?  “Grant me favor” is one prayer we may need to use often.  Start praying it now, and see what God can do for you.

As they say, Jacob was “in a fix.”   Years before he had take the birthright blessing meant for his older brother Esau, and Esau had not forgotten.  Keep in mind that Esau was a burly, roughhewn, angry man.  Not the sort you would want to meet in a dark alley.

Now Esau was bearing down on Jacob with an army of four hundred men.  The best plan Jacob could devise was to use Middle Eastern strategy and send Esau a series of carefully selected gifts, even though he had little hope that this would work.

At that point Jacob did what desperate men should do.  He prayed (Gen. 32:9-12), but he didn’t sound very sincere, apparently even to himself.  Thus, he continued to try and wiggle out of sure disaster (Gen. 32:13-24), and ended up finding himself alone and even more desperate (Gen. 32:24).

A man appeared in the dark to Jacob and a battle began.  Arms were twisted, legs were seized, and necks were wrenched.  All through the night the wrestling war was waged.  When it became clear Jacob could not win, he grabbed hold of the stranger and hung on for dear life.  Then he uttered a small prayer: “I will not let you go unless you bless me” (Gen. 32:26).

BLESS ME

Jacob had taken hold of God—his opponent in the dark—and refused to let go until God had blessed him.  Asking for all the blessing he could get was typical of Jacob.  He had asked his father to give him the biggest blessing his father could give and now he was asking the same of God.

When I first read this story I was surprised at the boldness, the brashness, and yes, the greediness of Jacob.  Come on!  I was expecting God to rise up and blast him for making such a request.  Instead, God gave Jacob what he asked for.  God blessed him with a manifold blessing—one replete with transformation, revelation, direction, protection, and impact (Gen. 32:27-28).

God changed his name from Jacob, meaning “grasper,” to Israel, meaning “prince of God.”  The name change indicated a transformation of heart.  There is a positive side to Jacob’s personality, and God was obviously impressed with his prevailing perseverance.  He had held on, and hung on, until he got what he sought.  When he had a chance to get a hold of God, he refused to let go (Gen. 32:29-32).

When Jacob chose the Hebrew word Peniel, which means “the face of God,” to commemorate the site, he was clearly aware that he had been given a rare and glorious opportunity.  He had a face-to-face encounter with the living God and lived to tell about it.  At Peniel, God reveled Himself to Jacob in a life-changing way.  God touched his hip and changed the way he walked the rest of his life.  More importantly, God touched his heart and changed the way he lived the rest of his life.

READ (Gen. 33:1-11).

REMEMBER

1. God blesses the spiritually aggressive.
2. God is willing and able to bless those who ask.
3. God’s blessing is big enough to go beyond us to others.
4. Receiving God’s blessing should make us the “blessers” of others.
5. God reveals Himself to those who really want to know Him.