Moses wasn’t out on the mountain looking for God, asking for his help. He wasn’t in the wilderness, working through a rescue plan for the nation of Israel. Nope: Rescue was God’s idea from the start. God came looking for Moses, not the other way around.
Not that this is unique to Moses. In all the great movements in the Bible, it’s God who takes the initiative, never some man or woman who says, “OK, God, it’s time for deliverance, and here’s the plan. Here’s how I need you to help me.” Those kinds of situations always turn out badly. God always takes the initiative, calling a man, woman, or group of people to his purposes for his glory.
I could wear you out with examples, but to prove my point, here are a few:
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- God suddenly appeared to Abraham, saying, “I have chosen to bless you and make you a great nation” (Genesis 12).
- In the book of Judges, each story starts with God saying something like, “And the Lord raised up Ehud” or “the Lord raised up Gideon.”
- David, a shepherd boy, was watching sheep in a field when Samuel the prophet suddenly appeared to him and said, “God has chosen you to be his king and is going to build an eternal kingdom through you” (1 Samuel 16).
- Paul was literally headed in the opposite direction when God said to him, “I’ve chosen you to be my apostle to the Gentiles” (Acts 9).
I challenge anyone to find a single instance in Scripture where the initiative lies with a human being rather than with God. In every instance I can see, God gets the action going.
The I AM is always the initiator, but most of us don’t think like that. We see ourselves as initiators, and we try to get God to come alongside and bless our plans. But we’ve reversed the process: God is the initiator, and rescue belongs to him. He merely invites us into what he’s doing. In the divine dance, God always plays the lead.
We can only join God in what he’s doing, but it’s also true that God moves in response to our prayers. (Of course, in his sovereignty, even those prayers are a result of his initiative!) In prayer, we plead with God to move in our midst, saying, “God, your people need you. People in this community need you. People in my family need you. I need you. O Yahweh, hear my cries of distress and come to rescue us!”
God truly does respond to his people’s cries. He did it, for instance, in the book of Exodus, “hearing” the cries of his people and moving in power to free them. Which is why we have to be serious about prayer.
Jon Tyson draws a fascinating contrast between two villages in Jesus’ life, Nazareth and Bethany, that shows us the importance of prayer. Nazareth was the village where Jesus grew up. His relatives lived there; his elementary school teachers and first Sabbath instructors lived there. He must have had a lot of natural affection for that place. But he was consistently questioned and doubted there. And as a result, Matthew 13:58 tells us, Jesus did very few miracles in Nazareth.
Bethany, on the other hand, was where he did a lot of his miracles, including where he raised Lazarus and where Mary poured the ointment on Jesus’ feet. He was loved and cherished there. He even returned there before he ascended into heaven.
So you have to ask, “Why Bethany, and not Nazareth?”
Nazareth was where Jesus grew up, but Bethany was where he showed up—because that’s where he was wanted. There were some dead people left in graves in Nazareth because Jesus wasn’t wanted there.
We have to ask ourselves, “How much do we want Jesus here?” I don’t want dead people “left in graves” in my church, in my community. Because how much we want Jesus is shown by how diligently we pray. As Jim Cymbala said, “You can tell how popular the pastor is at a church by who shows up on Sundays to hear preaching. You can tell how popular Jesus is at the church by who shows up at prayer meetings.”
Prayer isn’t a performance. We cry out to God because we’re desperate to see him work. We have seasons of fasting and prayer because we want God to move, and we want to be sensitive to where he’s moving. Fasting doesn’t put God in a better mood to hear us (the blood of Jesus is all we need for that); it puts us in a better posture to hear from him, so we can pray more effectively—because the prayers that start in heaven are the ones heard by heaven.
God is eager to move, looking for people who are desperate for him. He is searching the earth for signs of people who want him to show up. Let’s be those people. Because his arm is no shorter today than it was in Moses’ day, or even in Jesus’ day. Miraculous power still awaits those of us who are bold enough to plead with God to move.
J.D. Greear is the pastor of The Summit Church, in Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina. He leads the Summit in a bold vision to plant one thousand new churches by the year 2050. Pastor J.D. completed his Ph.D. in Theology at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. He has served as a member of the Board of Directors of Chick-fil-A since January 2022 and recently served as the 62nd president of the Southern Baptist Convention. Pastor J.D. and his wife Veronica are raising four awesome kids: Kharis, Alethia, Ryah, and Adon.This article has been republished with permission from the J.D. Greear website and is under copyright law. It may not be republished without express written consent by J.D. Greear Ministries Team. J.D. Greear is the author of 27 Books including his newest book, Everyday Revolutionary: How to Trancend the Culture War and Transform the World.
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Blessed is the nation whose God is the LORD,…………(Psalms 33;12).
Your Friend- His Servant,
Isaac Otieno