A Lesson on Prayer Requests
A Lesson on Prayer Requests
Joshua 10:12 At that time Joshua spoke to the LORD in the day when the LORD gave the Amorites over to the sons of Israel, and he said in the sight of Israel, “Sun, stand still at Gibeon, and moon, in the valley of Aijalon.”
Aren’t you grateful that God doesn’t fix all of our misconceptions before answering our prayers? There isn’t a confused courier system in heaven, with a box of ‘return to sender’ prayers that pile up because the address line was scribbled illegibly, or the postage wasn’t quite right, or a word was misspelled. God knows precisely what we mean to say. He hears the clear cry of our need long before we attach words to it. And even when our praying doesn’t quite come out right, His answer does.
I point that out here because Joshua doesn’t know any better than to assume that the earth is the center of the universe. He’s a man of his time. It’ll be centuries before astronomers are able to better map out the inner workings of our divinely engineered solar system. But he recognizes man’s central place in the cosmic drama nonetheless. From Joshua’s vantage point looking up, the sun does rise for us in the morning and set for us in the evening. From where he stands, earth seems to be the one stable, immovable force in all the universe, and all other celestial marvels dangle over our lives like chandeliers above a dining room table, lighting and beautifying our feast.
But if we believe what scientific advancement has shown us that the sun is the focal point of our Milky Way, if we believe those images brought to us by satellites and spacecraft, then the miracle God performs on Joshua’s behalf of keeping Gibeah bathed in afternoon sunlight for an entire day isn’t technically by stopping the sun from setting overhead, but rather by stopping the earth from spinning underneath. Yet, either way, the result has the same effect for Joshua. When he looks up to the sky hour after hour, he finds that the sun is in exactly the same spot! And all he needs to know in that moment is that God heard his prayer, supplied his need, and did so in the most outlandish, impossible-to-explain fashion.
And He does the same for us still today!