Have you heard the phrase, “God answers prayers in three ways: yes, no, and not yet?” It’s fairly accurate and a good way to comfort those who feel like they aren’t hearing from God at a time when they feel lost or are asking something of Him.
But sometimes God doesn’t answer our prayers the way we expect. Sometimes, His yes looks different than our own. Occasionally, He points our lives in directions we never even considered to go. Often, when we expect giant miracles, we overlook the small, but equally useful, ones God provides. And when that happens, we can respond one of two ways: we can accept His direction and receive the blessings that come, or we can rebel against it because it’s not what we thought he was going to do.
This is the situation that a man, Naaman, in 2 Kings found himself in when he went to the prophet Elisha to be cured of a skin disease. Naaman’s story is a classic example of how we often find ourselves dealing with God.
When Naaman heard of a way to have his skin disease healed, he immediately took off to find Elisha and receive that healing, but when he got there, Elisha told him something he didn’t expect.
2 Kings 5: 10-12 says, “Then Elisha sent him a messenger, who said, ‘Go wash seven times in the Jordan and your flesh will be restored and you will be clean.’ But Naaman got angry and left, saying, ‘I was telling myself: He will surely come out, stand and call on the name of Yahweh his God, and will wave his hand over the spot and cure the skin disease. Aren’t Abana and Pharpar, the rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel? Could I not wash in them and be clean?’ So he turned and left in a rage.”
Naaman’s expectation was that of a showy miracle the likes of which Elijah had performed when he called down fire in the challenge against the prophets of Baal. As the Bible says, he was expecting Elisha to make a big show of things to heal him. He was expecting something different, out of the ordinary. But what he got instead was, essentially, “go take a bath.” It would have been considered a ritualistic bath, but it was a bath nonetheless. And, contextually, the river Jordan might not have been the cleanest river to go bathe in, anyway.
So, because Naaman didn’t get what he expected, he basically stormed off in a rage. For a lot of people, the story would end here. Many of us would likely have a prayer answered in a way we didn’t like and we’d ignore the answer, missing out on all the blessings that would have come from it. Thankfully for Naaman, he had some very good servants.
Verse 13 says, “But his servants approached and said to him, ‘My father, if the prophet had told you to do some great thing, would you not have done it? How much more should you do it when he tells you, ‘Wash and be clean?’’”
They basically called him out on his idea of what a miracle should look like. The weird thing about all this is that if Elisha had asked him to do something ridiculous to be healed, like, for example, to catch and kill 37 chickens and cut off one toe from each foot, slather them in oil, pin them together and wear them as a headdress for three years, Naaman would likely have done it without hesitation. But because it was something so simple as “go take a bath,” he thought it wouldn’t do anything and wasn’t worth his time.
But his servants convinced him, and verse 14 says he went, dipped himself in the Jordan seven times, and was healed of his skin disease.
But it’s not just one person, or even just a few people, who do this. When Jesus, the son of God was born and walked the Earth, people refused to believe he was who he said he was, not because he didn’t perform miracles, but because they expected God to grant them a warrior king who would slaughter Israel’s enemies and bring about the restoration of the Israelite nation. But because they got the Jesus who wanted to save and not the Jesus who wanted to destroy, they refused to acknowledge his claim as the son of God.
I’ve said similar before, but as believers, we are far too willing to lean on God working miracles in the fashion of deus ex machina, wherein He does these massive miracles that are grandiose and spectacular in every way when, really, God works intricately for the good of those who live Him. We expect God to step in and fix all the bad things that go on in the world like he didn’t place millions of tiny miracles, His people, on Earth to do it for Him.
We are all too ready to ignore the small things because they don’t necessarily look like what we expect God to do for us. And we are all so reluctant to do small things because they don’t seem grandiose enough. But what if we didn’t? What if we stepped up when we were called? What if we stopped looking for what we want God to do and start looking for what He is actually doing?
If you change your mindset about how God works, you’ll find that you’re far more blessed than you think you are. You’ll see God doing so much that you never would have noticed. He’s always working; you just need to be looking in the right place.
As a final note, take a listen to the song attached below. Strive to change your mindset to think of life this way, to realize that you are one of God’s miracle workers who is here to do the good He has called you to do. Do something with that.