There is a difference between us having the ability to change God in some substantive way, either by our righteousness or our sin, and our ability to move God.
We cannot change God. He is the Lord God and He changes not. But He is not impervious to our needs or wants or desires. It is important to note this distinction.
Scripture shows us over and over, God is moved by the prayers and cries of His people, even sometimes those who don’t technically seem to be His.
Recall how, in Genesis 21, the cries of Ishmael reached the Lord as he was about to expire as they were cast into the wilderness. Then the Lord caused Hagar, his mother, to see a well and to give her son water thereby saving their lives.
Why is it important for us to understand this distinction, that while we cannot change God, He is moved by us? I believe to not understand this causes us to take offense at God and what He chooses or does, and to even become hardened in our hearts because we think He is unmoved… please allow me to elaborate.
My daughter passed away from a brain tumor in October 2023 after fighting this tumor for 7 years. After three surgeries and chemo and radiation, what began as a slow growing category 2 tumor mutated into an aggressive stage 4 tumor, that took her life.
Complicating this battle was having hormone increases because of childbirth (she delivered two children during this timeframe, accelerating that tumor’s growth.)
As believers and prayer warriors we all , with friends around the nation and even world, prayed, petitioned, declared, strategized and beseeched the Lord for healing and deliverance from this adversary.
After such a lengthy battle with three different surgeries, our daughter passed and we were exhausted, confused, disappointed that our prayers seemed to go unanswered, and basically we felt like even after 25 years in full-time ministry we knew nothing! We were empty. We felt like we had failed to move God in our prayers. We were wrong.
By His grace, more than a year later He has restored us, revealed to us many things and has set us back upon our spiritual feet again. We are moving forward in Him.
From that time of breaking and crushing, we are changed greatly. In that regard I read the words of Mary and Martha in John 11:
“Lord if You had been here, my brother would not have died.”
Jesus was not unmoved by their words or their sorrow. In fact, He wept! But I do not see this as has been portrayed in many commentaries as Jesus being angry at the destruction and evil in the world.
I see this instead as Jesus, knowing all things and seeing all truth, realizing the limit of their faith in Him like a boundary set in stone. He faced their ignorance and unbelief and challenged it head on….
Yet He wept. For me this is about the event having an impact on Him personally, and it moving Him in His emotions, yet Him not allowing it to deter Him from the greater work that the Father wanted to manifest of Jesus being the Resurrection and the Life. I can’t imagine a more difficult time for Jesus (except for the Cross of course), in that the situation precipitated His full feeling yet also full obedience to the Father.
We see this type of situation unpacked in Hebrews 5:7.
“In the days of His flesh, [Jesus] offered up definite, special petitions ]for that which He not only wanted but needed] and supplications with strong crying and tears to Him Who was [always] able to save Him [out] from death, and He was heard because of His reverence toward God [His godly fear, His piety, in that He shrank from the horrors of separation from the bright presence of the Father].”
What was the singular motivation of Jesus in this and every situation? Certainly obedience was part, He said it Himself in Hebrews 10: 7,& 9…
“Here I am, coming to do Your will oh God…”
But also He shrank from any separation from the Father – that had to mean in any departure from the Father and His will.
Beyond any desire of His own to give comfort to Mary and Martha in their grief, He was called to strengthen and challenge the borders of their faith – without which no one can please God. He denied His own grief at their lack of faith and belief, and acted as the intermediary with the Father that He was called to be.
It was more profitable eternally, for Him to have allowed this loss, than to waive the opportunity to really stretch their faith to the specifications of the Father.
I see this same work having taken and still taking place in my husband and I. On so many levels we could justify our prayers as “giving the Lord the most glory’” if He healed our daughter. Only later could He show us many reasons why that linear plan was not in His will. And that is what all things have merged into for me, is understanding that I am called to be conformed to His will in purpose, thought, and deed.
That is the true litmus test of my servanthood and discipleship. Am I willing to be conformed like that…
May this short narrative provide a spark of understanding for each reading it…
God is moved by your heart and needs and prayers…He is moved, just as Jesus wept.
But, often, there is more being worked of eternal consequence than can be understood in the situation temporally.
But if we allow the Lord, he can expand our understanding as we allow our faith in Him to arise and take flight!
This year, 2025, allow that as never before! Take down every obstacle to believing Him by faith! To do so means an opening to pleasing Him, living by faith, gaining greater access to grace, making us well, restoring us, gaining credit as righteousness, and walking into the full destiny before you as a descendent of Abraham
Do a quick word study of faith and begin to see it is the umbilical cord of your Christian walk! And then be willing as Christ was to lay down your own perspectives and to pick up the very will of God in conforming to His will in thought, perspective, and action.
As it was in Jesus, this was the place where righteousness and peace kissed,
As He is, so are we in this world. Amen.
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