It is too easy to presume that if something happens or does not happens then it has something to do with one prayer have precedence over the other. I do not think the result has to necessarily be dependent on whether or not one person's prayers are more correct or stronger than anothers. I also do not think that God is so casual in answering prayer. What I do see amazes me.
How does God decide what to do in contradictory prayers? God does not pick and choose to answer prayers at random and He does not merely look at contradictory prayers and try to deal with them as they come. Instead God works in each of us all the time. His work is so complete in us we have no idea it happens and cannot often see the result until after the fact. It is not that God reacts to our contradicting prayers. It is that God works through our lives and causes us to pray the prayers we each pray.
Now clearly, if you are praying only for yourself, there is a good chance your heart might not be in the right place for that prayer. Usually I have found that when you are praying for others is when your heart is right. But that does not preclude prayers for deliverance and self. I can see where it looks like God answers one person's prayer and not another's and it can be confusing. That is until we realize we are not God, can never be, and must not try to contain God in human reasoning.
What I realize now is that I know for an absolute fact of the universe (as given to me through the Holy Spirit in my daily walk with Him) is that God allows terrible things to happen to people at times, not to reward some and punish others, but to accomplish His will. It is part of His discipline of those whom He loves.
This disciplining process can be very thorough and will remove sin and impediments to our walk with Christ. But we don't necessarily like discipline. Consider Hebrews 12:11
No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it.So when a person can look at a situation and see beyond their own hurt and realize that God is not punishing them, but everything that happens is somehow "sequenced" as part of a bigger plan of God, then we can see Him at work. That is when we began to look with eyes that we did not have previously.
Through all of my discipline and personal experience, God showed me many errors I had. I have been refined as we all are being refined in our lives. And through that refining fire I came to see passages of the Bible that I never saw before. Not because I had not read them, but because I could not see until then. I know there are still some scales on my eyes, and that is why I seek God daily and read and absorb the Scriptures not from a standpoint of my own foolishness, but of God's purpose, love, justice, and mercy.
I feel that it was needed to be said: not all things can be fixed. Some things God destroys. But God does not leave holes in the lives of His followers. God replaces what is destroyed so that He may fill it with something better that suits His purposes.
So then, on the other side of those experiences, we can look back and say "it was terrible, I never want to go through that again, I will do anything and everything to avoid it in the future, but yet I know that God is in control". That is when God meets us at the place He brings us to.
Think of Hebrews 12:7
It is for discipline that you endure; God deals with you as with sons; for what son is there whom his father does not discipline?
Copyright 2006, Kevin Farley (a.k.a. sixdrift, a.k.a. neuronstatic)
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