First Light - Your Monday Devotion To Light Up Your Week: Daniel 9:21-23
I’ll be honest, I often feel like a prayer failure. I’m afraid to say the wrong thing. I worry that my words aren’t articulate enough. Sometimes I’m just so anxious or angry that I simply don’t want to pray. Other times I feel like praying is just another opportunity for God to ignore me. If you’ve felt this way before, or are in the midst of these very complicated feelings - there is something the book of Daniel can teach us about prayer that is truly life changing. At least it was for me.
Prayer begins with humility. Learn more about this in The Hidden Peace.
Daniel 9 has a detail for exactly the fear of saying the wrong thing. Gabriel tells him, "At the beginning of your supplications the word was issued" (9:23). The answer went out before Daniel had finished, while he was still confessing and, as he says, in his "extreme weariness" (9:21). Chapter 10 says it again with a harder edge: "from the first day... your words were heard," and the delay came from the prince of the kingdom of Persia standing against the messenger for twenty-one days (10:12-13). The three weeks Daniel waited had nothing to do with how well he prayed.