Stephen spoke from Psalm 5:1-3 on Sunday morning. He started with some statistics about the world’s population: 6,885,814,406 apparently and every three hours another 28,500 people are added to that total, so it is, of course, already out of date! Yet despite the number of people who may be crying out to God at any one time, God hears and answers each of us.
“Listen to my words, LORD, consider my lament. Hear my cry for help, my King and my God, for to you I pray. In the morning, LORD, you hear my voice; in the morning I lay my requests before you and wait expectantly.”
God listens to all our prayers: the sighings, the ‘moans and groans’, the prayers and petitions. He is both King and God – in a position to help us. 1 Kings 19 reminds us, though, that the answers He brings may well be in a ‘gentle whisper’. We can easily want God in a specific way or form. God is powerful, therefore Elijah may well have expected him to come in the wind or the earthquake or the fire, but sometimes God comes in ways we don’t expect.
In the film ‘Bruce Almighty’ there is a scene with post-it notes which captures this sense of the sheer number of prayers God has to deal with! Bruce may choose to answer all of these with one click of a button, pressing ‘Yes to all’ on his computer, but we actually have the security of knowing that God listens to us as individuals and gives us individual answers. Our part is to ‘wait expectantly’, to set apart that time early in the day to be with the Lord and to listen for His still, small voice.