Amaka kept a small blue exercise book in the drawer of her bedside table. On the first page, in her neat teacher’s handwriting, she had written the date and one line: Lord, please remove Mrs Bamidele from this school.
Mrs Bamidele was the new principal at the secondary school in Surulere where Amaka had taught chemistry for eleven years. Within a month of her arrival, she had rearranged the timetable without consulting anyone, embarrassed two senior teachers at the morning assembly, and given Amaka a query letter for a lesson note that was one day late. The staff room went quiet whenever her heels sounded in the corridor. Amaka began to dread Monday mornings. She would sit in the danfo on the way to work with her stomach in a knot, rehearsing replies she would never dare to give.
So she prayed. Every night for weeks, she knelt by the bed and asked God to transfer the woman. She wrote the request in the blue book, sometimes underlined twice. She asked her prayer partner to agree with her. She even listed the schools in Ikorodu and Badagry where Mrs Bamidele might be happier.
Months later, Amaka took the book out one evening and read it from the beginning. She told me afterwards that she hardly recognised the woman who had written the early pages. Somewhere along the way, without deciding it, the entries had changed. Lord, give me wisdom before I answer her. Then: Help me not to gossip in the staff room tomorrow. Then, to her own surprise: Father, I don’t know what this woman is carrying. Show me.
Mrs Bamidele had not been transferred. The query letters had not stopped. But the person kneeling by the bed was no longer the same person who had begun.
That is what this article is about. When you pray, God is concerned with the circumstance you bring. He is also concerned with you, the one bringing it. And very often the first place His answer becomes visible is in the person who prays.
Prayer is more than a delivery service
We need to keep the whole picture in view, because it is easy to fall off on either side. Some believers think of prayer almost entirely as a way of getting things done outside themselves. They bring a list: the rent, the visa, the contract, the child who has wandered, the pain in the knee. They wait for each item to be ticked. If the outward situation has not moved, they conclude that nothing has happened.
Others go to the opposite extreme. They have been disappointed so often that they quietly decide prayer is mainly a technique for adjusting one’s own attitude. God, in this view, does not really act in the world. Prayer simply calms us down.
Scripture refuses both. The God of the Bible acts in history. He opens prisons, heals the sick, provides for widows and turns the hearts of kings. We are right to ask Him for outward things, and we are right to expect Him to answer. Nothing in this article should make you ask for less.
Yet prayer is also a meeting between the Father and His child, and in that meeting the child is being formed. Paul tells us that God’s purpose for those who love Him is that they should be “conformed to the image of his Son” (Romans 8:29). That purpose does not pause while we wait for the answer we have requested. It is often at its most active then.
So the title of this article describes a pattern, not a timetable that we impose on God. Sometimes the circumstance changes immediately, before you have even finished praying. Sometimes the inward work takes months. Sometimes both happen together. The point is that you do not come to the Father merely as a messenger carrying a list of conditions outside yourself. You come as someone He loves and is shaping, and He is free to begin His answer wherever His wisdom chooses.
The garden where the Son was strengthened
The clearest window into prayer that forms the one praying is the garden of Gethsemane. Jesus took Peter, James and John a little further into the olive grove, told them to watch with Him, and then went on alone. Luke, the physician, gives us details the other Gospels do not:
And he was withdrawn from them about a stone’s cast, and kneeled down, and prayed, Saying, Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done. And there appeared an angel unto him from heaven, strengthening him. And being in an agony he prayed more earnestly: and his sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground.
Notice what Jesus asked for. “Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me.” This was a real request. The Son of God was not performing a prayer for our benefit. His soul was, as Matthew records, “exceeding sorrowful, even unto death” (Matthew 26:38). He asked for the circumstance to change.
And it did not. The cup was not removed. Judas was already on his way with a crowd carrying swords and staves. The cross was still ahead.
But look at what did happen. “And there appeared an angel unto him from heaven, strengthening him.” Luke places the strengthening before the agony reaches its height. Jesus prayed “more earnestly,” and the sweat fell like great drops of blood. The Father did not answer by removing the cup. He answered by strengthening the Son to drink it.
The writer to the Hebrews looks back on that night and says something remarkable. Jesus, in the days of His flesh, offered up prayers and supplications with strong crying and tears unto Him that was able to save Him from death, and was “heard in that he feared” (Hebrews 5:7). He was heard. The prayer was not wasted. The answer came in a form that prepared Him for the obedience on which our salvation depends, and three days later the Father did save Him out of death, gloriously, in resurrection.
Now compare the end of the prayer with the end of the disciples’ sleep. Jesus came back to them three times and found them sleeping. He had told them, “Watch and pray, that ye enter not into temptation” (Matthew 26:41). They did not pray. When the soldiers arrived, Jesus stood up and said, “Rise, let us be going” (Matthew 26:46). He walked toward the crowd with settled purpose. Peter, who had slept instead of praying, drew a sword in panic and then, a few hours later, denied that he had ever known Him.
The circumstance was the same for all of them. The same soldiers, the same night, the same danger. The difference lay in what prayer had done in the one who prayed.
PunchlineIn Gethsemane the cup was not removed, but the Son rose from prayer strengthened to drink it. Prayer had reached the one who prayed before it reached the circumstance.
Jacob at the river
Long before Gethsemane, there was another night of prayer beside a river, and it shows the same pattern from a very different starting point.
Jacob had spent twenty years away from home. He had left after cheating his brother Esau out of their father’s blessing, and Esau had sworn to kill him. Now God had told him to return, and word came that Esau was coming to meet him with four hundred men. Jacob was terrified. He divided his household into two camps so that one might escape. He sent wave after wave of animals ahead as presents to soften his brother. And he prayed: “Deliver me, I pray thee, from the hand of my brother, from the hand of Esau: for I fear him” (Genesis 32:11).
That was a good prayer. It was honest, it remembered God’s promises, and it asked for a specific outward change. But look at what Jacob did next. He sent the presents across the river in separate droves, with careful instructions for each servant: when Esau asks, say these belong to Jacob, “and, behold, also he is behind us” (Genesis 32:18). Moses even lets us hear Jacob’s private reasoning: “I will appease him with the present that goeth before me, and afterward I will see his face” (Genesis 32:20). Jacob prayed, and then arranged to stand at the very back, behind the animals, the servants and his own family, where he would be the last to be reached.
That night, alone by the ford of Jabbok, God came to deal with Jacob before He dealt with Esau. A Man wrestled with him until the breaking of the day. Jacob would not let go without a blessing. He was asked his name, and he was given a new one, Israel, and the place was called Peniel, “for I have seen God face to face.” Scripture adds a quiet detail about the next morning: “as he passed over Penuel the sun rose upon him, and he halted upon his thigh” (Genesis 32:31). He limped. The self-reliant schemer walked out of that night leaning on a weakness God had given him.
Esau’s four hundred men were still on the road. Nothing outside had changed yet. Now watch what the changed man did:
And Jacob lifted up his eyes, and looked, and, behold, Esau came, and with him four hundred men. And he divided the children unto Leah, and unto Rachel, and unto the two handmaids. And he put the handmaids and their children foremost, and Leah and her children after, and Rachel and Joseph hindermost. And he passed over before them, and bowed himself to the ground seven times, until he came near to his brother. And Esau ran to meet him, and embraced him, and fell on his neck, and kissed him: and they wept.
“And he passed over before them.” The night before, Jacob had placed himself behind everyone. Now he walked out in front of his wives and children, limping, and went to meet his brother first, bowing to the ground as he came. The man who had planned to hide at the back went to the front. Nobody had told him to. Peniel had done it.
Then the circumstance changed too: “And Esau ran to meet him, and embraced him, and fell on his neck, and kissed him: and they wept.” God had been at work in Esau’s heart all along. But the order is worth noticing. The night of prayer came first, and the man who met Esau was no longer the man who had cheated him. Jacob even said to his brother, “I have seen thy face, as though I had seen the face of God” (Genesis 33:10). The encounter with God had changed how he saw the very person he feared.
That is often how the Father answers. Before He moves the brother, He meets the one who is praying about the brother.
Hannah’s face before the answer
Hannah’s story is another, gentler picture of the same thing.
She was loved by her husband Elkanah, but she had no children, and his other wife, Peninnah, provoked her year after year, especially when the family went up to worship at Shiloh. Scripture tells us that on those visits Hannah “wept, and did not eat” (1 Samuel 1:7). Her pain was sharpest in the very place where she had come to meet God.
One year, after the meal, she went to the house of the Lord alone. She was “in bitterness of soul, and prayed unto the LORD, and wept sore” (1 Samuel 1:10). She prayed silently, only her lips moving, and the old priest Eli watched her and assumed she was drunk. When he rebuked her, she answered him:
And Hannah answered and said, No, my lord, I am a woman of a sorrowful spirit: I have drunk neither wine nor strong drink, but have poured out my soul before the LORD . Count not thine handmaid for a daughter of Belial: for out of the abundance of my complaint and grief have I spoken hitherto. Then Eli answered and said, Go in peace: and the God of Israel grant thee thy petition that thou hast asked of him. And she said, Let thine handmaid find grace in thy sight. So the woman went her way, and did eat, and her countenance was no more sad .
NuggetRead the last verse slowly. “So the woman went her way, and did eat, and her countenance was no more sad.”
She was not yet pregnant. There was no child in her arms, no visible sign that anything had changed. Peninnah would still be at home with her sons. Yet Hannah rose from prayer, ate the meal she had been unable to touch, and walked out with a different face.
What had happened? She had poured out her soul before the Lord. That phrase matters. She did not tidy her request into the correct religious shape before bringing it. She brought the bitterness, the longing and the shame exactly as they were. And having poured it out, she was able to receive the word that came back through Eli and leave the matter with God. The weight had been transferred.
Samuel was born the following year, and Hannah’s song when she brought him to the house of the Lord begins, “My heart rejoiceth in the LORD” (1 Samuel 2:1). The outward answer came, and it was wonderful. But her heart had begun to rest before her womb had begun to carry.
Some of you know what it is to weep and not eat in the place of worship. You sit through the dedication of other people’s babies, or the testimony of other people’s promotions, with a hollow ache that nobody sees. Hannah gives you permission to pour it all out before the Lord. She also shows you what that pouring out can do. You may rise from your knees with the same empty arms, and still find that your face has changed.
Peace that stands on guard
When Paul wrote to the Philippians, he was in chains. He tells them so early in the letter: “my bonds in Christ are manifest in all the palace” (Philippians 1:13). He did not know whether his trial would end in release or execution. If anyone had reason to make prayer simply a request for a changed circumstance, it was Paul.
And Paul did pray for release. He also wrote these well-known words: “Be careful for nothing; but in every thing by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God” (Philippians 4:6). Requests are made known. Specific things are asked for. There is nothing passive about it.
But then look at what Paul promises as the result: “And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus” (Philippians 4:7). He does not say, “and God will give you everything on your list by Friday.” He says that the peace of God will keep your heart and mind.
The Greek word translated keep is a military word. It describes a garrison guarding a city. Philippi was a Roman colony, and its citizens would have known exactly what it meant to have soldiers stationed at the gates. Paul himself was, at that very moment, chained to a soldier. The picture is vivid. When you bring your requests to God with thanksgiving, His peace takes up its post at the gate of your heart and mind. Anxiety still knocks. It does not get in.
That peace “passeth all understanding” because it does not depend on the circumstance having been explained or resolved. It is the peace of a person who has handed the problem to God and is being guarded while the answer is on its way.
Later in the same chapter Paul describes where that guarding had brought him:
Not that I speak in respect of want: for I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content. I know both how to be abased, and I know how to abound: every where and in all things I am instructed both to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and to suffer need. I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me.
“I have learned.” Contentment did not drop on Paul from heaven in one moment. He learned it, in prison cells and shipwrecks, in seasons of plenty and seasons of hunger. And the famous line that so many believers quote, “I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me,” comes in exactly this context. It is not first a promise that Paul could achieve anything he set his heart on. It is his testimony that Christ had strengthened him to face both abundance and need without being ruled by either. Prayer had formed a man who could not be shaken by his circumstances, whatever they did.
Strength within the unanswered request
Paul gives us one more window into his own prayer life, and it is perhaps the most personal:
And lest I should be exalted above measure through the abundance of the revelations, there was given to me a thorn in the flesh, the messenger of Satan to buffet me, lest I should be exalted above measure. For this thing I besought the Lord thrice, that it might depart from me. And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness. Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me. Therefore I take pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in necessities, in persecutions, in distresses for Christ’s sake: for when I am weak, then am I strong.
We are not told exactly what the thorn in the flesh was. People have suggested an illness, an eye condition, a persistent opponent, or the persecution that followed him from city to city. The text does not say clearly enough for us to be certain, and it is wiser not to build doctrine on a guess. What is clear is that it hurt, that Paul wanted it gone, and that he asked the Lord three times to remove it.
His request is not condemned. Nobody tells him he lacked faith for asking, or for asking more than once. He was heard. But the answer came in a different form from the one he requested: “My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness.”
That answer was a real provision, as real as any healing, and it changed the way Paul understood his weakness. The thing he had wanted removed became the place where the power of Christ rested upon him. He came out of that prayer with a new way of seeing his own life.
We must handle this passage carefully, because it has been misused. It does not give us permission to tell every suffering person that their illness is a thorn they must simply accept. Many times in Scripture God heals, delivers and removes. Jesus healed every sick person who came to Him in faith. Keep praying for the healing, the provision and the deliverance you need. Paul’s experience is one part of the picture, not the whole of it, and we should never use it to silence another person’s petition or to declare that we know why their difficulty remains.
But Paul’s experience does teach us to recognise grace when it comes in a form we did not order. You may be praying about a responsibility that has exposed limits you would rather hide. Prayer brings those limits into a relationship where receiving help is possible. You can admit that you are tired, uncertain, or unable to carry everything alone. Sometimes the change that follows is a willingness to share the load. Sometimes it is accepting a boundary you had resisted. Sometimes it is finding the courage to continue an obedient course that remains costly. The circumstance still needs attention. But you are no longer facing it as though you were your own source of strength.
That is why it is good to ask for the help that reaches you directly. Father, give me patience for this conversation. Give me discernment before I answer. Help me receive care instead of hiding the need. Requests like these make room for the Father’s work in you to become part of the prayer.
What prayer brings into the light
There is a less comfortable side to all this, and Amaka discovered it in her blue book. When we stay in the presence of God with a request, He sometimes shows us something about ourselves that we had not intended to discuss.
David invited exactly that:
Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts: And see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.
“Search me, O God, and know my heart.” That is a brave prayer. It gives God permission to shine His light not only on the situation but on the person describing the situation.
You may discover that your request for another person’s change has concealed your own refusal to listen or apologise. You may find that the anger you have been bringing to God every night has turned into something harder, a quiet determination to be proved right. You may realise that you have assigned a motive to someone without any real evidence.
Such a discovery should lead to honesty, not to the conclusion that prayer has been interrupted. The Father is addressing the person who has come before Him, and He is answering in the place where the answer needs to begin.
Paul prayed for the Philippians “that your love may abound yet more and more in knowledge and in all judgment” (Philippians 1:9). Love without discernment can be manipulated. Discernment without love becomes cold and self-protective. Prayer seeks the growth of both together.
And here we must add an important guard-rail. Inward change does not always mean becoming more willing to endure the same situation. Sometimes growth means patience. Sometimes it means a wise change. A woman praying about a husband who frightens her does not need to be told that God wants her to become more submissive to danger. The Father may strengthen her to seek protection, to involve her pastor or her family, or to contact the authorities. Prayer never requires you to call an unsafe arrangement loving. If you are in danger, the formation God is doing in you may well be the courage to get out and get help. Scripture and wise, careful counsel will help you discern which response belongs to your situation.
Keep asking, and keep watching
None of this means that you should stop praying about the circumstance. The believers in Jerusalem, when they were threatened by the council after the healing of the lame man, prayed about the threats. They asked God to “behold their threatenings” and to stretch out His hand to heal. They also asked for something inward: “grant unto thy servants, that with all boldness they may speak thy word” (Acts 4:29). They did not leave that prayer meeting to find a world emptied of opposition. They left filled with the Holy Ghost and strengthened to speak, and Luke goes straight on to describe a community so generous that nobody among them lacked (Acts 4:32-35). The prayer reached the circumstance, the people who prayed, and the life they shared together.
So continue to bring the outward need. Ask for provision, healing, justice and reconciliation as your situation requires. Your Father is concerned with real life. He knows about the school fees and the scan results and the court date. Ask Him boldly, and expect Him to act.
At the same time, remain available to His work in you. It can help, every so often, to look back and ask what has changed while you have been waiting. Have you become more honest? Have you learned to listen? Has another believer’s support become something you can receive without shame? Are you sleeping a little better, even though the matter is unresolved? Do not dismiss those mercies because the wider answer is not yet complete. They are not a substitute for the answer. Very often they are the first part of it.
You may rise from prayer with the same bill unpaid or the same difficult conversation ahead. You may also rise with the courage to make a necessary call, the humility to accept help, or the clarity to stop an unwise course. Those changes deserve to be recognised as part of God’s care. Like Jacob, you may walk out with a limp and a new name. Like Hannah, you may walk out with a different face.
About seven months after Amaka started her blue book, she stayed late one Thursday to mark scripts. The school was almost empty. As she walked past the principal’s office she heard a sound she did not expect, and when she looked through the half-open door, Mrs Bamidele was sitting at her desk with her head in her hands, crying.
The Amaka of the first page would have walked on, and perhaps told the staff room the next morning. The Amaka of the later pages knocked gently and went in. It came out slowly. Mrs Bamidele’s husband had been on dialysis for a year. The transfer to this school had taken her further from the hospital. She had been driving to Ikeja three evenings a week after work, sleeping four hours a night, and taking her exhaustion out on everyone she managed.
PunchlineAmaka asked if she could pray with her. They prayed together in that office until the security man came to lock up.
Mrs Bamidele was transferred the following year, as it happens, to a school closer to the hospital. Amaka was sorry to see her go. On her last day, the principal hugged her at the gate and said, “You were the only one who treated me like a human being.”
When Amaka told me the story, she showed me the blue book. “God answered my prayer,” she said, laughing. “She left. But He answered me first.”
Bring Him the circumstance. Bring it honestly, as Hannah did, and keep bringing it. And as you do, let Him reach you too. He may be strengthening you for the cup, renaming you at the river, setting His peace on guard at the gate of your heart. The Father who loves you is not only changing what is around you. He is forming His Son in you.
Teaching Companion
For Reflection
- Which circumstance in your life have you been praying about most? What, if anything, has changed in you while you have been praying?
- How does the strengthening of Jesus in Gethsemane change the way you think about prayers that are not answered in the form you asked?
- Before Peniel, Jacob placed himself “behind us”; afterwards he “passed over before them.” Where might prayer be moving you from hiding to facing what you fear?
- Hannah’s countenance changed before her circumstances did. What would it look like for you to pour out your soul before the Lord and leave the weight with Him?
- Where might prayer be calling you to make a wise change or seek help, instead of simply enduring more?
This Week
Keep a simple prayer notebook this week, like Amaka’s. On the left-hand page, write the outward things you are asking God for. On the right-hand page, each evening, write one sentence about anything you noticed God doing in you that day: a word of patience, a conviction, a moment of peace, a fresh way of seeing someone. At the end of the week, read both pages. Thank God for the answers on both sides.
A Prayer
Father, I bring You the circumstances I long to see changed, and I ask You to act in them. I also bring You myself. Strengthen me as You strengthened Your Son in the garden. Meet me as You met Jacob at the river, and give me the courage to walk out in front and face what I have been hiding from. Let me pour out my soul before You as Hannah did, and rise with a different face. Set Your peace on guard over my heart and mind through Christ Jesus. Search me, and lead me in the way everlasting. Form the life of Your Son in me while I wait. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Truth received brings freedom. Truth believed establishes the heart.
Scripture quotations are from the King James Version. · Illustrations using first names only are composites unless stated otherwise.