A Wide-open Prayer

A Wide-Open Prayer

Open your mouth wide, and I will fill it with good things. Psalm 81:10

“PRAYING HYDE” PLEADED PERSISTENTLY for God to answer the promise of Psalm 81:10—to fill the mouth wide open with answers to its requests. Hyde was thinking beyond food, of course. He saw the wide-open mouth as a sign of spiritual hunger and a vessel of bold requests. One year he prayed for at least one soul a day, and by the end of the year more than four hundred people had come to Christ through his ministry. The next year he doubled the request, and God answered. The year after, he doubled it again, and God answered again. Hyde saw no limit to the wide-open mouth. He was convinced that the wider a saint opens it, the more God is able to fill.

Sadly, too many of God’s people live with closed mouths, closed hands, and limited expectations. God is good to us anyway; he meets our needs and fulfills many of our personal requests. But when we open our hearts and our expectations to fit the wideness of his mercy and the abundance of his Kingdom, we find extraordinary responses to our persistent faith. We become agents of a divine overflow, with heaven’s graces pouring into the world through our prayers. The irreligious people of the world do not know such agents exist and will probably never recognize any validity to our prayers, but recognition is never the point. We serve God and respond to his ways. And his way is to reveal himself through the petitions of those who love him.

One of the greatest things you can do for this world, and one of the greatest marks on history you can make, is to devote yourself to the divine discourse in which God’s people appeal to him and he accomplishes his will. We cannot do that with small expectations. We serve a big God. His agenda is enormous, and so are our prayers if we get a glimpse of his purposes. Open your mouth wide and see how God responds. Be persistent, and don’t lose heart. The most effective place to be a world-changer is on your knees.

Thou art coming to a king; large petitions with thee bring. For his grace and power are such, none can ever ask too much.