Stop praying for strength!

I pray it a lot. “Lord give me the strength to get through this week, to endure this temptation, to sustain this whatever it is that I’m dealing with.” I got a pretty clear message from God tonight: Cut it out. Stop praying for strength.

This is not an all out declaration that no one should ever pray for strength, or even that I should never again pray for strength. But for me, right now, I don’t need to be praying for strength. I need to be USING the strength that God has already given me. I am using my prayers for strength as a crutch to avoid going and doing the very things that God has given me strength to do.

So today, in my current season in life, I need to stop praying for strength. Because the strength I seek has already been given to me. I keep asking for it again and again because, to be honest, because I am not fully vested in that thing which God has called me to do. I don’t even know exactly what it is. I never found out. Because I was so convinced that I “needed more strength” and kept on praying for it that I never realized I had all the strength I needed.

It’s a little like praying your whole life asking for some way to get where you need to go, and God says, “Um, you know you’re sitting in a running car, right?”

It’s the perfect way to avoid answering your calling. To answer it, you need strength. And It’s not like you’re doing nothing. I mean you pray for strength ALL THE TIME. And God just hasn’t delivered it yet. So, ya know, it’s kinda like sorta God’s fault, right? But we don’t say it that way. We say churchy things like, “God will deliver me in his time and I need to be patient and wait.”

Hey that’s true. If God wants you to wait, you better. Just be sure you’re right about that and I would even go as far as saying I’d pretty seriously doubt it. There is not a ton of Biblical support for God wanting people to sit around doing nothing while they wait for God to deliver what they need. Even during the forty years in the desert the Israelites KEPT MOVING. Yeah they needed to wait to enter the promised land, but God didn’t leave them just sitting around doing nothing. He kept them moving with a pillar of fire.

Side note. Being led around by a pillar of fire would be pretty awesome these days. Can you imagine? “Traffic on I-355 is backed up with delays of over an hour.” Ummm… not after me and God show up with our flippin’ pillar of fire yo!! Okay I digress.

So here’s the bottom line. Yeah God makes us wait for stuff. The Bible is FULL of stories about droughts and other times when we had to wait for God. But I think, at least for me, that I sit around waiting when God actually wants me moving all under the pretense that I’m waiting on God to do some amazing thing to set me on my way when in reality.. he already has.

So if you’re spending a lot of time praying for strength, at step back for a day and think about whether you’ve already got all the strength you need. You probably do, and God may just be sitting there with something AMAZING for you waiting for you to step into the strength he built into you years or even decades ago.

Just my two cents…

Now go be awesome, would ya? It’s what you’re MADE FOR!! Later dudes.