In proverbs 31, the mother of King Lemuel, likely King Solomon, calls him the answer to her prayers as she implores him to listen to wisdom. How precious to be the answer to someone else’s prayer, their deep longing poured out to God as a request, perhaps many times over.
The notion that perhaps I could be the answer to someone else’s prayer hit me most clearly in Richard Stearns’ book, The Hole in Our Gospel, where he shares of an encounter with a widowed mother in the Andes Mountain named Octaviana. In debt for diseased and dying livestock, she worried about how she would provide for her three children with her husband gone. Knowing she was a woman of faith, he asked her what she prayed for. She said she asked God to help her carry this burden and send help.
Stearns writes, “And as I held her hand and prayed for her, God revealed to me a profound truth-that I was the answer to Octaviana’s prayer. Eight thousand miles from my home in Seattle, 14,000 feet up in the Andes Mountains, she had cried out to God for help, and he had sent me.”
The idea resonated with every fiber of my being. Of course, God sends his children to become the answer to someone else’s prayer.
In fact, I believe that’s what happened in Afghanistan when the Taliban were toppled in 2001. The cries of the oppressed people had risen to God’s ears and he answered by dispatching his people from around the world to help them in all they ways they suffered. Workers poured into the war-torn country from South America, Europe, South Korea, China, the US, and even Africa iand poured themselves into addressing all kinds of human suffering—high infant and maternal mortality rates, poverty, illiteracy, forced marriage, homelessness, unemployment, tuberculosis, and drug addiction, among them.
Perhaps when Jesus said to his disciples, “…the harvest truly is plentiful, but the laborers are few. Therefore pray the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into His harvest” (Matthew 9:38, NKJV), he was asking them to till up the soil of their own hearts so they could become the answer to God’s longing themselves. Perhaps this prayer is meant to lead to another, “Lord here am I, send me” (Isaiah 6:8b, NIV).
If we are indeed the representatives of the kingdom of heaven, his emissaries to this lost world, doesn’t it make perfect sense that God would send us as the answer to someone else’s prayer?
As Christians (literally, “little Christs”), we are to be God’s hands and feet on earth. If our hearts beat with his and we pray as Jesus did, “Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6:10, KJV), we will lean into doing his business on earth, not grudgingly or out of obligation, but because we too long to see heaven come here.
God’s will is that his lost ones be reconciled to himself, that none of his image-bearers perish. When our hearts beat with our Maker’s, we will ache for others to know him as we do, to experience the unconditional love, forgiveness, and head-to-toe peace that became our birthright when we were born again.
We truly are — or can be — the answer to someone else’s prayers. To the degree we are filled with and governed by the Spirit of God which lives in us, we will be ready to see and respond to such opportunities.
Journal prompts:
- How would it change your day-to-day existence to believe that YOU might be the answer to someone else’s prayer? With your giftings and unique design, what form might that take?
- No doubt, Queen Esther was the answer to the prayers of the Jewish people in Persia when they earned they had been given over to slaughter. What other examples from the Bible come to mind?
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