Note to Intercessors & Visionary Believers.
The maturing arc of a believer, or an intercessor is complex. You’ll feel a burden to intercede for someone or a situation, and you’ll commence your secret service work, write their names down somewhere, study the Word on their situation and keep watching to see the seeds of prayer bear fruits in the place you’ve invested.
The surge you feel whenever you start praying might give you a feeling that the answer will come as soon as you press the throttle some more in the secret place. So you do. You press.
And press some more. But the answers don't come. It's 3 years now since God laid it on your heart to pray for that couple waiting for the fruit of the womb, and till now, they don't have their child in their arms.
It's been a long while since He stirred you to pray for that sick loved one, and till now, they're not getting better.
Its been a while now since He opened your eyes to your ginormous assignment. You’ve been on it; you’re sure you’re in alignment based on His feedback. But the heavens haven’t opened.
It’s been 15 years since God laid it on your heart to pray for a revival. On campus when you first felt that pressing like a movement in your bowels, it felt like the clouds of revival were heavy and thick, so close to your head and all it needed for it to rain down was your intense prayers. So, you prayed. You and everyone in the fellowship. But you’ve been praying since campus days till now that you all have families. Still, what you all saw hasn’t happened.
You sometimes stumble on campus students in their meetings, and their hunger reminds you of yourself and your fellowship comrades years ago. You all believed the same thing. The revival was here. Prophets said it. The Apostles in those campus meetings roared it.
It’s the same way some of our fathers in the faith, patriarchs of faith in this nation, have waited for the national shift that God promised them. Almost every political season with an underdog, swells their hope that this might be it. God made them promises. A new Nigeria. He drew them a graphic picture. Every now and then, they see a sign in the horizon. But it’s been decades now.
There’s the temptation to attribute delays in prophecies to a defect on our side, and this is a valid consideration. Sometimes, many times in fact, man isn’t participating with God and prophecy enough to birth in time what has been declared.
But other times too, it’s just the divine rudiments that every prophecy must go through. You can be doing all the right things and still, it doesn’t come at the time you’d thought in your haste, it would.
So, the writer in Hebrews 10:36 admonishes;
For you have need of endurance, so that after you have done the wil of God, you may receive the promise.
The prophecy is ALWAYS for an appointed time. He presses us to pray, not to accelerate the timing, because it’s not possible to hasten God’s timing, although it’s possible to delay it.
But He presses us to pray because He wants to make us able custodians of His word, people who have mastered the art of sustaining the frequency of their faith through the tumults of time. People who will rise beyond the energy of faith that demands instant answers, and come into the level the Apostle Paul was when he wrote to Timothy, "... for I know whom I have believed, and I’m persuaded that He is able to keep what I have committed to Him until that Day."
Abraham followed God consistently in his lifetime. God made him a promise, and he did not waver at it by unbelief. Yet, he waited 25 years. 25 years until every physical apparatus on the part of Abraham and Sarah that could have birthed that promise waned, and all they had was faithful is He that has spoken.
God promised David the throne as a teenager, and Samuel anointed him for his kingly office at the age of 15. But David became king at 30, not because he didn’t do the right things or position himself to become king sooner. In fact, he would have made an error if he took advantage of the opportunity to kill Saul and hastened his emergence.
The Word is clear; when your cloud is full of rain, it will empty itself. Until then, blessed is that servant who when his master comes, shall find him doing what He asked him to.
Will it really happen, or has God muddled up His promises and forgotten which one ought to have happened?
The answer is in Habbakuk 2:3, and I love the ESV version;For the vision awaits its appointed time; it hastens to the end—it will not lie. If it seems slow, wait for it; it will surely come; it will not delay.
PS: In case I don’t write to you again this year, Merry Christmas in advance. Thank you so much for reading me this year. I truly appreciate it. Happy holidays to you & yours.
With all my love, ❤️
Synclaire.
