Ezekiel 4:4-5–Then lie on your left side, and place the punishment of the house of Israel upon it. For the number of the days that you lie on it, you shall bear their punishment. 5 For I assign to you a number of days, 390 days, equal to the number of the years of their punishment. So long shall you bear the punishment of the house of Israel.

Jesus in Matthew 10:6, gave us a framework of what the Christian desire should be with the verse, “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”  However praying for the will of God to be done on earth, starts with us surrendering our will.  Because Jesus wasn’t expecting us to pray for His will to be done, while we do our own…

Jesus with His Church, is like any of us who we are considered to be “one” with in a marriage.  That we cannot pray for someone to change according to God’s will, while we never consider needing to change as well.  God like us, expects partnership, co-laboring, and unity in fulfilling His cause in the earth.  That to expect change to happen all around us, without us needing to change, is to arrogantly see ourselves as not possibly part of the problem…

The prophet Ezekiel found out quickly how much he was going to be apart of bringing God’s will “on earth as in heaven”.  Strangely, God has the prophet embody the kind of judgement Israel was going to face by re-enacting it!  Ezekiel wouldn’t able to self-righteously “pray” about the issues surrounding Israel, and not be involved with actively promoting change in the earth according to God’s will…

I’ve tried to live by a principle, “that if something is troubling me, maybe God is stirring me up to be a solution?”  Though He may only have me pray about it, truly praying or being burdened to pray, should have with it an open heart to action.  Because if we don’t act upon what God is burdening us to do like Ezekiel, we are settling in our own will, even if we are “praying about it”.

I’ve noticed that the longer we remain Christians, without acting upon burdens God places upon us, the better we get at sounding concerned by saying, “I’m praying about it”.  Sadly what ends up happening, is that we become more in-tune with “crying out for change”, but not eager to put ourselves at the center of the change.  Because when we do, we prove we have surrendered our will for God’s like the prophet, who bore the burden of God’s will, not just in spirit but in action.

In His Love, Ld