God's Purposes and Prayer

A brother in Christ was fond of reminding me concerning God's work, "God does not need us."  This is true.  It is a foolish thought to imagine God's work will not or cannot be accomplished without our efforts.  At the same time, God does choose to use us regular people to do His will.  Scripture shows He is quite particular and persistent to bring people to the place of submission and obedience to Him in faith.  Moses comes to mind, who after 40 years of tending his father-in-law's sheep was reluctant to even entertain the notion of returning to Egypt during a conversation with the living God after doing miraculous signs by divine power.  Praying to God became a life Moses lived continually out of sheer need.

A.W. Tozer provides some useful and edifying observations on this point in his book Going Higher With God in Prayer:

"It is a transforming experience when we realize that God wants to work through us to accomplish His work and goals, particularly through our prayers.  God does not do anything apart from His people.  Certainly, we have the storms and hurricanes and fire and all of that.  But when God wants to accomplish His purpose and goal, He always does it through His people...Moses did not have what he thought he needed to do what God was calling him to do....

That is the problem with Christians today.  They think God is interested in their education and skills in that the more they have of these, the more God can use them.  However, God cannot accomplish His goals through our abilities alone.  He can only accomplish His purposes through us when we yield ourselves completely to Him.  It is only when I as a Christian surrender everything to God, and hold on to nothing bad, that He can accomplish His work through me...God send David against Goliath to show that He uses people regardless of the equipment they have.  David's victory over Goliath wasn't David's victory; it was God's victory, without question.  God's strength is not in our weapons....

Another mistake many Christians make is to believe God wants to use their past to get a present victory.  God does not give us a reservoir of wisdom and power.  If He did, it would soon be stagnant.  God does not come to a man and pipe him full of wisdom and then say, "If you get in any trouble, come see me or call me up and pray, but in the meantime, you have the whole cistern full of power.  You draw on that wisdom because it's yours."  God never did it that way.  Instead, God gives a man a word of wisdom and give to him power, but God is the power in that man.  He is the word of wisdom in that man.  It is God working in the man, not the man working.  God becomes wisdom to us and becomes power to us.... 

The Church of God is going to bless, and the Christians whom God is going to bless will be those who have come to the end of their hoarded resources.  Then they will experience the grace of God in their lives and ministries.  God can only begin to work when we have come to the end of our resources and have nothing to fall back on.  People cannot build the Church.  It takes the Holy Spirit to work in a man who has surrendered everything and allowed God to do the work through the ministry of prayer.  God is not building His Church simply to have a religious organization." (Tozer, A. W., and James L. Snyder. Going Higher with God in Prayer: Cultivating a Lifelong Dialogue. Bethany House Publishers, a Division of Baker Publishing Group, 2022. selections from pages 133-137)