I’ve made a decision to pray before eating each morning. Before looking at my phone, before playing with my kids, before anything, pray. The Lord convicted me two days ago that I need to pray in this last month of 2024, and pray with all my heart, soul, mind, and strength believing that God will act this year. I have this reservation in my heart and mind that keeps me from expecting great things from God because I don’t want to be disappointed. But it’s like an uncontainable fountain in my heart to want to pray and almost demand God to do all that I ask, which I believe is according to his will. And if he doesn’t answer as I want when I want, so be it. I will trust him still. 

I’m so hungry and thirsty to see God move in me, through me, around me, so hungry for his presence and for his kingdom to come in all those I have been praying for. It makes me want to drop everything, as if nothing else matters, and indeed the only thing that does matter is that we love the Lord, we seek his kingdom, and we obey him. I cry out, “Lord! Change my heart to desire you, open my eyes to see you, strengthen my heart and body to obey you. Touch and wake up our hearts to live each day for the kingdom, knowing that the King is indeed coming soon. Let us not live for ourselves and this world but for the eternal kingdom of God. Shake away all that is shakeable – these worries of life and the future, these temptations of the material, these desires of the flesh – and let the unshakeable kingdom of God alone remain and gain ground in our hearts and in this world.” This has been my constant prayer.

But today, a little whisper of doubt came into me mind. It came as I was reading my dad’s manuscript for his message last Sunday, about Jesus calming the storm (Mark 4). In this passage, a storm hits Jesus and his disciples while they are out on the lake of Galilee. Jesus is sleeping and all his disciples are panicking in fear. They wake him up and he rebukes the winds and the waves, and they become suddenly calm. He rebukes the disciples for having so little faith. The point of my dad’s message is that Jesus is both human (evident by his sleeping) and divine (evident by his authority to command creation). “Even the wind and the waves obey him!” cried the disciples. But this doubt said to me, “Even? What do you mean even? God only has the power to command inanimate things. He has no power to force obedience in things that have free will. Why do you pray for people’s heart to be changed, when God does not have the power to change anyone? It’s a useless battle. The Creator is not so mighty after all. Stop praying for people to be changed.” It was more like a shout than a whisper, a laugh in the face, a smirk of ridicule. It tempted me to shrink back. So I asked, “Lord, can you change hearts?”

Two words/examples came to my heart. First, Pharaoh. I have been studying Exodus, and it amazes me every time when it says “God hardened Pharaoh’s heart”. Why would he do that?” is my immediate question. But before we get into the theology of why, the more basic implication is that he can do that. God is able to harden hearts. That must mean that he also can soften hearts. The bible expresses that God indeed does have sovereignty and power over our hearts, in a way that cannot and does not impede freewill, for that would go against the very character of God – to violate his creation law of granting freewill. The second example perhaps can clarify as to how God can and does change hearts: King Nebuchadnezzzar. He was, for a time, the king of the most powerful nation Babylon,  appearing in the book of Daniel. He was evil in the most obvious way, destroying the Temple of Jerusalem and initating the Babylonian captivity of the Jews. But what is most striking of his account as recorded in Daniel is how God humbled such a man to acknowledge and give praise to him. Nebuchadnezzar is basically driven to madness and lives like an animal in the wilderness for seven years. The moment he acknowledges God’s power, he becomes sane again, for only man can contemplate God and give praise to him. This is a poignant example of how God can lead one into situations in life that humbles him in order to acknowledge God – not to humiliate but to restore the very image of God in him, which is to praise, worship, and know God. Here, we can go back to the first example, Pharaoh, remembering that God used the 10 plagues (i.e. situational changes) to cause Pharaoh to eventually let the Israelites go. So by working around, he works also to affect within. This is why it is so powerful that God does work miracles in the inanimate, “commanding the winds and the waves”. The very purpose of doing so is exactly to impact our hearts, to make us acknowledge him as God, and that is the greatest miracle of all. If he was able to do that in the King of Egypt and the King of Babylon, then I am convinced he is able to do it to anyone of us. No one is too hardened for God to soften. 

So in response to the voice of doubt I say: I will continue to pray for God to work to change hearts because I know he is able and willing. What he has done before, he will do again.

The prayer of Paul in Ephesians 1 is my prayer today, one that gives me great hope in this God who has the power indeed to change hearts: “I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in his holy people, and his incomparably great power for us who believe. That power is the same as the mighty strength he exerted when he raised Christ from the dead and seated him at the right hand in the heavenly realms.” Amen.