“The Lord said to Moses, ‘Why are you crying out to me? Tell the Israelites to break camp. As for you, lift up your staff, stretch out your hand over the sea, and divide it so that the Israelites can go through the sea on dry ground.'” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Prayer is important stuff. Vitally important. One of the things I find myself telling my congregation more and more frequently lately is that prayer is one of the three essential things you need to be pursuing regularly and intentionally if you want to grow in your faith (the others are engagement with the Scriptures and a local body of Christ). I have several times heard messages about prayer that rightly remind folks that prayer is not a substitute for doing something. In many cases, it is the something we most need to be doing if we want to see positive changes come to a hard situation. Prayer is essentially for getting God involved in a situation to make things happen. What we see here, though, brings a much needed balance to all of this. Let’s check out God’s response to Moses and the Israelites’ panicked cries to Him when they spotted the Egyptian army bearing down on them.

You have to feel just a bit bad for the Israelites in this situation. They didn’t have anything like the perspective on the story that we do by virtue of being able to read the whole thing in one sitting from the distance of more than 3,000 years’ worth of history. They were experiencing it all in the moment. And, in spite of the fact that they should have been able to lean pretty easily into faith at this point considering all they had seen God do for them, when we see something huge and scary heading our way, we have a tendency to let that fill our field of view to the point that we can’t see anything else (most notably God and what He might bring to the situation).

Moses was doing his best to encourage the people and calm their fears, but even he was starting to get a little bit nervous. All he knew to do was cry out to God and hope for the best. His faith was a good deal more advanced than the rest of the people, and he had the benefit of God’s having already told him the whole situation was going to work out to Israel’s favor, but he was no doubt exceptionally eager to see exactly what God had planned. So Moses prayed. And the people prayed. They all prayed and cried out to God. What else could they do?

Well, as it turns out, there was something else they could be doing. And God tells them this rather directly here. As they were all crying out to God, He interrupted their praying to say to Moses, “What are you still doing crying out to me? Get up and get moving.” Moses was to tell the people to break camp and get ready to go. As for Moses himself, he was to go and hold up his staff over the waters of the Red Sea. When he did that, the Sea was going to part, the people were going to be able to cross from one side to the other on dry ground. God was going to be the one doing all the real work, but Moses’ actions and the people’s obedience were going to be the physical manifestations of His working.

Let me just jump right to the point here. As I said before, prayer is really important stuff. So often, prayer is the thing we need to be doing instead of running around and trying to solve a particularly thorny problem on our own. We have such an ingrained tendency to want to fix things ourselves so that we get the credit, that we forget to actually rely on God. We don’t bother to seek out His thoughts on our situations because we are so accustomed to trying to get by on our own. We need to spend a great deal more time seeking God fervently in prayer than we do.

But, as important as prayer is (and, to belabor the point, it’s really, really important), when God responds to our prayers with instructions for action, continued prayer in hopes of a different or better answer isn’t going to make any more difference. Instead, we need to get off our knees (metaphorically or literally) and get to work. Continuing to pray over a situation once God has given us an answer to it is not an act of ongoing faithfulness or a demonstration of our willingness to trust in Him. It can actually become an act of disobedience and a refusal to accept what God has given in favor of what we would prefer.

Sometimes, when my kids don’t like the answer I’ve given them regarding a particular situation, they’ll ask me about it again. And again. And again. The first time or two after I’ve answered that they ask again, I will repeat the answer to them just as I originally gave it. If they persist very long after that, though, they will tend to get a much gruffer response to go and do what they were told. The same thing goes with God. Once He has answered, we need to get moving. More prayer then won’t make a difference.

This is one of those many places in the Scriptures that reminds us that the life spent following Jesus is marked by a whole bunch of “both-ands” rather than “either-ors.” We need to both pray fervently and get off our knees and get to work. So then, give some thought today to the situations you are facing in your life and about which perhaps you have been praying. Are you genuinely still waiting on an answer from God about how you should move forward in them? If all you are doing is praying by yourself and you are not pairing that prayer with an active engagement with the Scriptures and your local church (which are two common sources of God’s answers to our praying), then you are making it harder to hear from Him. You need to add those other two elements to your efforts so you can better stay tuned in to what He has to say.

But it is at least worth asking the other, more uncomfortable, question here: Has God given you an answer that you don’t like, and you are continuing to pray in hopes of a different one? If that’s the case, you need to quit praying about it and start doing what God has already told you to do. You may not like it, but it will be right when you commit yourself to faithful obedience. It always is. Just like God told Moses to get up and get to work, that may be the very thing you need to do as well. Pray fervently, yes, but jump to action when God answers. Anything less is faithlessness.