Pray with Faith / Michele Pitre

Michele Pitre

Secretary at Providence Baptist College

Northwest Bible Baptist Church

Elgin, IL

Pray with Faith

There are so many sermons, messages, and books on prayer that what I have is miniscule in comparison. What can I say that hasn’t already been written or preached. Except to say that you can’t have prayer without faith. Do you truly trust God to answer your prayer? And are you okay with his answer even if it’s not the one that you expected or the time you expected it to come. We always ask God for healing or answers to questions that go in a direction that makes it easier for us to bear. We forget that God is the one that knows what is best for us. “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways. And my thoughts than your thoughts.” Is. 55:8-9

We forget that God is trying to grow us into the Christian lady that He wants us to be. He only wants us. He desires only that we look to Him for everything and trust Him in everything. I know it’s easier said than done sometimes, but the Lord is the only one who can do anything about what we are going through. So let us stop complaining to everyone who can’t do anything about it, and take it to the one that can do everything about it.

In February 2017 my husband admitted that he no longer believed that there was a God. I had already noticed a decline in his spirits and had been fasting and praying for him once a week before that day. I hadn’t realized that it had gotten that bad. I continued to fast and pray, expecting a miraculous change because of my efforts. I thought that surely the Lord wanted my husband to change and that He would bless the Biblical principle I had set in my life. I think I lost sight of the reason God set that up in the first place: to draw the fasting and prayerful to Himself. I would get frustrated and want to quit each time I thought God would do something big and it didn’t happen the way I expected it to.

About nine months after that dreadful day, my husband decided out of the blue that He wanted to come back to church. I hadn’t pushed him to come, nor had I made him feel bad for not attending. I simply fasted and prayed, and begged God to change my husband’s heart. The entire time wondering if that was even possible, because I thought that my husband was the only one who could decide to change his own heart. God is the one that is in control of everything, even the hearts of his children. He is the one who decides when and where He will do the changing. If God can change the heart of Pharaoh, then He can change the heart of anyone He chooses.

I did not get the huge bells and whistles, but they were huge bells and whistles to me. Because the Sunday that my husband shined his shoes and trimmed his beard in preparation for evening service was the day that God revealed to me just how important the prayers of this unworthy sinner are to Him. I could hardly contain my excitement as we drove to church together that night. My husband didn’t all of a sudden quit his job to serve the Lord full time, or miraculously change. It’s been a slow progression. But it’s all in God’s time, and not my own. I am having fun just watching God work in my life. Though it’s still not easy to endure that “refiner’s fire”, I do know that God is on my side; and He knows what’s best and when it’s best to move in my life, whether hardship or no.