Have you ever said a prayer and felt like the answer was being delayed? Has anyone ever said to you, “The delay is over!” If you have been in church or around Christians for any length of time, one or both of these things you have experienced.
When something does not happen in the time frame that we believe it should happen, we see it as delay. There are Scripture verses to back this theory up, in Daniel 10:12-14 we see that the Prince of Persia withstood Michael for 21 days. But is this verse one we can hang our hat on when we pray and it feels like there is a delay?
What if it was not delay, but design?
When we first get saved, God answers our prayers quickly, because we are babies, newborns. A baby when it is hungry, they cry and we feed them, change them or lay them down for a nap. As earthly parents we are quick to respond to the needs of our baby, for they are just a baby.
God, is the same way. When we were newborn Christians, if we tithed we got a quick return, or if we prayed we usually got a quick answer. We were babies, so He came to our rescue immediately. But He, like any parent, does not want us to stay a baby, His desire for us is to grow up. I believe that what we perceive as delay is actually design.
While we are waiting for an answer to our prayer, a door of opportunity to open (that was prophesied to us), or a financial breakthrough we know God told us was coming, we go through a season of waiting, but when the wait goes beyond our ability to wait, we cry out, delay, no more delay. We start declaring, commanding and even demanding an answer from heaven. We think it is something we are not confessing, something we are not doing,= or something we should have done. But actually it is all part of the design.
God designed what we perceive as delay as an opportunity to not only answer our prayer, but to give us more than we asked for. James 1:4 says, “Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.” What we see as delay God calls perseverance and perseverance must finish its work, so we can not only get our prayer answered, our breakthrough that He promised or our prophecy fulfilled, but He also gives us maturity, completeness and a not lacking of anything.
Our God is so generous, that He takes our prayers that we think are going unanswered and He uses that as an opportunity to give us more than we ask for. So it is not delay; it is design, for He knows the exact time when perseverance has finished its work. Your prayer is producing more in you than just an answer, it is design not delay!
Lisa Great, author of Divine Principles of Success, pastored a church in Malaysia. She is a minister and blogger at Mouthpiece Ministries.
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