Our text tells us of a certain crisis point in the life of Isaac. The Bible says that for 20 years Rebecca was barren, and for 20 years Isaac her husband did not do anything about it. A lot of us have done nothing about the situations in our lives because we do not know what to do. We want life to work out for us, and when it does not work out, we murmur and grumble.
You might be at a crisis point in your career, your marriage, where you are located; you don’t know whether you are in the right place and you are thinking of which way to go. There are certain situations in your life that unless you do something about them, nothing will happen about them.
Life will resist you until you conform to the laws of life. You cannot treat life anyhow. The pain that you are going through today may be the reaction of life to your action or to your inaction. Most of us make decisions early in life and we spend the rest of our lives managing those decisions that we have taken.
Friends, there are some destiny-changing prayers. Isaac was without child for 20 years; then one day, he discovered a prayer that could change the destiny of his wife. All you need is one word that will change your destiny. There are some scriptures that if you do not know them and apply them, your life will remain as it is, and there are some prayers that if you do not pray, your life will not change.
The first destiny-changing prayer is in the first book of the Bible (Genesis). It is a prayer of divine revelation, a foundational prayer. In Genesis 1:1-3, the Bible says “In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep. And the spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. Then God said, Let there be light, and there was light.” The first prayer that you need to do is to ask God for light. If you are not born again, your life is in the darkness and your life can never turn around. Once you give your life to Jesus and you follow Him diligently, you will begin to see the miracles in your life.
You will find the second destiny-changing prayer in Genesis 1:28-30. It is a prayer that takes you back to the beginning; it takes you back to how things should have been. The Bible says, “Then God blessed them, and God said to them: be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth. And God said, see I have given you every herb that yields seed which is on the face of all the earth, and every tree whose fruit yields seed; to you it shall be for food. Also, to every beast of the earth, to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, in which there is life, I have given every green herb for food, and it was so.”
You have to go to God and say, “Father, in the beginning, what you said was that you blessed me and therefore I am blessed, because the Bible says who God has blessed can never be cursed, so I am blessed.”
There is the prayer for the right types of spirit. The reason some of us are going through challenges and problems is that, we have the wrong spirit in us. A lot of us have demonic spirits; spirit of Satan. A lot of us have the spirit of our forefathers etc. But there is a prayer for the right type of spirit and you will find it in Genesis 2:7 where the Bible says that the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground and he breathed into his nostrils the breath of life (the right type of spirit). You need to ask God, “breathe over me, O Lord”. A lot of people have no life; they are half dead, they are corpses that are on their way to the grave; so it is difficult for them, for anything to happen and nothing seems to be happening.
There is a prayer of appropriate location. The Bible tells us in Genesis 2:8, “And the Lord God planted a garden, eastward in Eden, and there He put the man whom He had formed.” Some things are not happening in your life because you are in the wrong place, you are not appropriately located. Where you are will determine what you will become.
There is also a prayer of the right occupation and the appropriate career. The Bible says that “the Lord God took man, put him into the Garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it. It was God that gave Adam a career. A lot of us are in a wrong career, suffering and struggling. God knows what you are made for. You cannot become the best unless you locate that thing. A lot of people are frustrated because they do not know what to do.
Finally, there is the prayer for right companionship. In Genesis 2:23, Adam saw Eve and he said “this is now the bone of my bone and the flesh of my flesh”. It is a serious prayer because a lot of us might fall into mistakes. There are some businesses that have failed today because of the wrong type of employees or partners. 2 Chronicles 18 tells us that a king called Jehoshaphat was a good king, but he always had the wrong kind of business partners. He joined together with Ahab and almost lost his life. Ahab said “let us go to battle against Ramoth-Gilead”. Jehoshaphat says “why are we going to battle?” Ahab answers “I just feel like; but you should dress like a king while I dress in disguise” because Ahab knew that if they saw Jehoshaphat, they would kill him as the king. The Bible says that they came towards Jehoshaphat to kill him, but all of a sudden, Jehoshaphat began to cry and said ‘have mercy upon me because they have tricked me’. A lot of us have joined forces with the wrong kind of business partner(s) and you are about to lose your business. Something good can become something bad if you have the wrong companion.