Moses found that he had no choice but to return to God in prayer. God was the source of his direction and promises and when they both seemed not to be in sync, Moses had to find his way back to God for clarification.

Then Moses turned to the Lord again and said, “Lord, why do you mistreat your people? Why did you send me here? ²³ Ever since I went to the king to speak for you, he has treated them cruelly. And you have done nothing to help them!” – Exodus 5:22-23 GNT

He wanted to be reacquainted with his call and to present the facts as he saw and felt them. He knew the blame that was being put on him belonged to God and so he spread the words that were directed to him and laid them out before God so He could address them. I find myself doing this and love the biblical example of not only Moses but Hezekiah as well and find myself laying my case before God in faithful and fervent prayer. If I retreat, I retreat to Him and no further.

Is there another way to reconcile the promise with the directions? When I am to be a blessing and somehow it is coming out that I am a curse, what am I supposed to do? Where is the help that God committed? I find that God does not necessarily do things directly. Moses could have crossed the desert to the promised land in days, not forty years. God takes us through methods where it may look like trouble and distress. Sometimes the instant deliverance hinder and become traps. God wants to eliminate the entire need to look to someone and depend on them to be rescued. God wants to be the one to bring us to wholeness and not just deliver us. In His time all things are made beautiful and it starts with me returning to Him in prayer whenever I find myself in such circumstances.

I read this powerful insight from Job this morning and it sounded a lot like Joshua 1:8 and Psalm 1:1-3, changing the words from study to prayer.

Let Almighty God be your gold,
and let him be silver, piled high for you.
Then you will always trust in God
and find that he is the source of your joy.
When you pray, he will answer you,
and you will keep the vows you made.
You will succeed in all you do,
and light will shine on your path. – Job 22:25-28 GNT

It cannot be made any clearer. Dump all my earthly possessions (not literally) and trust in Me and when I pray, He will be my light and I will succeed with Him by my side as He walks with me. I need to find myself returning to God in prayer. It is He that sits on the throne of grace, it is in Him that I find grace and mercy in my time of need and it is with Him that I find success.

The promise is that He will answer me. He is a God who hears and in His time gives and fulfills my wants, needs and desires as I return to Him in prayer.

If we leave the Bible out, we may plumb our impressions and feelings and imagine God saying various things to us, but how can we be sure we are not self-deceived? The eighteenth-century Anglican clergyman George Whitefield was one of the spearheads of the Great Awakening, a period of massive renewal of interest in Christianity across Western societies and a time of significant church growth. Whitefield was a riveting orator and is considered one of the greatest preachers in church history. In late 1743 his first child, a son, was born to he and his wife, Elizabeth. Whitefield had a strong impression that God was telling him the child would grow up to also be a “preacher of the everlasting Gospel.” In view of this divine assurance, he gave his son the name John, after John the Baptist, whose mother was also named Elizabeth. When John Whitefield was born, George baptized his son before a large crowd and preached a sermon on the great works that God would do through his son. He knew that cynics were sneering at his prophecies, but he ignored them.

Then, at just four months old, his son died suddenly of a seizure. The Whitefields were of course grief-stricken, but George was particularly convicted about how wrong he had been to count his inward impulses and intuitions as being essentially equal to God’s Word. He realized he had led his congregation into the same disillusioning mistake. Whitefield had interpreted his own feelings—his understandable and powerful fatherly pride and joy in his son, and his hopes for him—as God speaking to his heart. Not long afterward, he wrote a wrenching prayer for himself, that God would “render this mistaken parent more cautious, more sober-minded, more experienced in Satan’s devices, and consequently more useful in his future labors to the church of God.” – Timothy Keller