There are so many things in life that we want to change. We change our hair color. We change the paint in our living rooms. We change our cars when we get tired of driving the one we have. We change churches when the pastor says something that challenges us. We change our clothes. We change our jobs. We change friend circles as our life stages change. But sometimes we want bigger changes. 

In life we all have challenges and it seems at times like the challenges we face are harder, more difficult than everyone else. And all we want is for the situation to be different. We pray for God to take it away and make things different.

We want that loved one to be alive. We want the illness to go away. We want the friendship to go back to the way it was. We want our lives to return to what we call normal. We want different but only our version of different.

The prayer of the follower of Christ isn’t quite like this. The person who follows Christ and finds their identity in Him is less about changing the situation and the circumstances – it’s about changing me in the midst of the circumstances. In the Old Testament, Moses couldn’t speak in public so God put him in a situation where that had to change. Saul was hell-bent on killing the church, but God knew something different was inside him.

God uses what we want changed to change us. Share on X

In what areas of your life are you begging, maybe even demanding, God to change? What do you want him to just take away? Perhaps today, instead of wagging our finger at God and telling him to change the circumstance, we can fold those fingers and pray that God would use the circumstance to change us.

Our prayer as followers of Jesus is that God would make us different. Today look for ways that God might be shaping you through the circumstances and situations in which you’re found. Let’s pray this prayer today: God can you change me so that I can handle the things that you’re walking me through. Amen.