Permissive Will (ePub)

As Christians when we are faced with challenges of life, we have two options or approaches to discuss the issue with God in prayer.

First, we can pray that The Will of God be done on the issue. What we are saying by this is that we accept Gods decision on the issue whether it favour us or not. However, friends this is not an easy prayer to pray because most often deeply within we are afraid Gods will may be totally different from ours or that His will may not be what we would like.

To pray that Gods Will be done over an issue requires a strong faith in the Lord and trust that God has our interest at heart and that He will never do anything inimical to our interest.

For example, a couple waiting on God for the fruit of the womb might find it difficult to pray this kind of prayer of absolute surrender to divine will. This is may be because, deep within them, they would want children and they may be afraid that, should they ask God to do His will in the matter, they will not want Him to declare to them that His will is that they should not have children in life.

After all, Psalm 127: 3 says that, Sons are a heritage from the Lord, children a reward from him, hence, the person that is giving out the reward [God] has the prerogative of deciding who He will like to give the reward to. Moreover, the couple may find it difficult to entrust God with this decision because they do not know:

1. the criteria He uses to determine those he will give children to
2. whether they are qualified for the reward or not
3. if He will decide to reward them with another gift that is different from what they desire.

I remember that my wife and I had to face this struggle too when we wanted to pray the prayer of surrender over a major challenge in our marital life.

We had been married for about 14 years and were still waiting for Gods gift of the fruit of the womb. Because my wife and I were nearing the age of 50, we were advised to use donor materials in one of our medical consultations.

In as much as we did not have anything against couples who prefer this option to solve their barrenness, however, it became a struggle for us. The reason being that as deliverance minister, over the years, God had used me to build the faith of and counsel many couples who were having challenges in the area of child-bearing.

They had patiently waited and God had answered them. Hence, if we took the medical option, who then would we say gave us the children when we are sharing the testimony?

Would we say it is God or science? If we explain to these people that the donated sperm of another man was used to fertilize the egg from my wife or that my sperm was used to fertilize the egg from another woman after which the fertilize egg was transplanted into my wifes womb, would that not send a wrong signal?

In addition to the above, we remembered the various promises and messages of God to us through many of His servants [You can read our testimony on this in our book Faithful Waiters] that He will give us our own biological children that will carry on our name as many as we wanted.

We also remembered that when father Abraham tried to help God to fulfill His promise by listening to the counsel of his wife Sarah to go unto their slave girl, Hagar [see Gen. 16], the whole arrangement backfired [Gen. 21] and God even did not allow His promise to Abraham to be fulfilled through the son Ishmael that was born to him by Hagar[Gen. 21: 12].

In fact, the Bible refers to Ishmael as a product of the flesh [Rom. 9: 8, Gal. 4: 22 - 25]. Consequently, we were faced with the choice of either having to wait for the physical manifestation of Gods promised to us at a time we did not know, or used the donor materials.

We eventually decided to wait for God and accepted His will for us. Friends, it took every inch of faith in us to do this especially when it came to the point when we were the only ones within