How often have you found yourself praying for safety? For smooth travels or for quick healing? I can’t even count how many times I’ve heard people pray for good health, or for protection.

Is this really what we should be praying for?

What if our prayers became more about wanting to know God in every situation, and less about seeking personal safety? How many people in the Bible lived in safety? How many had good health? Not many! Instead we see wars, lion’s dens, and crosses on the pages of Scripture. Shouldn’t this be a wake-up call to us?

What if we spent our prayer times asking God to take us into the most dangerous, and the deepest, darkest places to bring light in His name? What if our desire to obey Him overshadowed any desire to “play it safe” in our own lives…whether financially, physically, or emotionally? What if we asked Him to use every painful moment in our lives to give us a platform to share His Gospel with the world? What if we answered the call to suffering with joy because we know that will bring Him glory?

Last week in our DTS, the speaker was a dear friend of ours named Mark Britt. He spoke to the students about “fearing” God. This word “fear” in reference to God has the idea of living and walking in an understanding of the bigness, the greatness, the holiness of God. When we fear God we have a deep, life-changing respect for who He is that trumps anything this world could throw at us. As part of his teaching, Mark shared the following quote by the writer Oswald Chambers:

“The remarkable thing about God is when your fear God, you fear nothing else, whereas if you don’t fear God, you fear everything else.”

When we are walking with the living God, the great and holy God, then the things of the earth don’t matter the way they used to. But if we are spending our life trying to figure out how to “stay safe” then we are missing out on the freedom that comes from knowing God. Obviously, God wants us to make wise choices and we are not called to be idiots, and He does want us to bring our requests to Him, BUT we are also called to dangerous places. We are called to the inner cities, the rough neighborhoods, the foreign countries,and the cancer wards of this world to make His name known. It will cost us…emotionally, financially, and physically. It may even hurt us…but it is worth it.

What if every prayer for protection became a prayer for courage? What if every prayer for safety became a prayer for faith to go farther, and do more for the cause of Jesus?

Well, then we just might change the world.