I am not good at hints. My wife knows this… I would think God also knows this, seeing that He created me (Psalms 139:16 “You saw who you created me to be before I became me!”)
But this last few weeks He has been sending me things about fences and walls. It is a topic that keeps popping up.
For instance, I was reading the book “Praying like Monks, Living like Fools” by Tyler Staton, and he starts his story by telling how he would walk the boundary of his school, praying for students and teachers… nice and theological…
But then also… South Africa has no Northern border to speak of, people are illegal immigrants are walking through dry river beds into the country.
Or, did you know that… Solar panels in the US are now so cheap that people are using it to build fences instead of using fencing materials!
Then, in between, I meet a remarkable lady who shares a testimony from Jeffrey’s Bay and how a sermon about Nehemiah’s wall-building project in Jerusalem impacted the lives of their community.
And then a day later, my good friend Redge shares about anointing the boundaries of his son’s school with oil. (…did we go full circle?)
Not to mention the prayers surrounding the entry and exit of our missionary friends over the borders of Ukraine… another wall (or boundary) to contend with!
This morning though, I understood why God was preparing me weeks in advance… I have fallen into the habit of waking up in the night, bending over my wife and praying for her and my children until I fall asleep again. But this morning, I started praying and a thought came into my head: Why? Is it really doing anything? All the struggles are still there. Why bother?
When a solid voice responded: You will never know that a wall is working if it is working…
And that was the end of it. But I couldn’t really get back to bed after that, because the truth is so profound! If you build a 4-meter high wall around your property, you will never know whether it kept intruders out or not, because there are no intruders. You cannot prove a negative.
But think for a minute… what did God possibly protect you from? Which accidents didn’t occur because I prayed over my children? What onslaught could we repel because the house is a place of worship? How bad could things have been if the ” interceding wall of prayer” had not been erected around my family? We can probably never know until we get to heaven and ask… but dare we stop?!
The people of Nineveh prayed and nothing happened. Their city wasn’t destroyed.
So go ahead. Carry those around you in prayer. Start like Nehemiah with your own house, rebuild the wall right in front of you…
”When all our enemies heard about this, all the surrounding nations were afraid and lost their self-confidence, because they realized that this work had been done with the help of our God!”
(Nehemiah 6:16 NIV)
“Most of all, I’m writing to encourage you to pray with gratitude to God. Pray for all men with all forms of prayers and requests as you intercede with intense passion”
(1 Timothy 2:1 TPT)
