“Call to me and I will answer you, and I will tell you great and mighty things which you do not know.”  Jeremiah 33:3

The Discovery Zone

Tell – The English Bible translates six different Hebrew words with “tell”.  That’s a lot of territory with a lot of shades of meaning, lost under the umbrella of a single English word.  Sometimes the shades are important.  In this verse, the verb is nagad.  The important nuance is this:  nagad is a verb that implies that what is told was previously unknown or unknowable.  To “tell” it is to reveal it for the first time.

Do you see how comfortably this nuance fits into the verse?  God is going to reveal an answer that you didn’t know.  He is going to tell you something that you could not have known beforehand.  This is your time for divine discovery.

Most of us don’t call on God with an attitude of discovery.  We come to God with an attitude of confirmation.  “God, I’ve almost got all this worked out but I just need Your push to make it happen.”  We really don’t expect God to tell us something that we never knew.  We expect God to answer along the lines that we have already figured out.  We want God’s endorsement, not His disruptive revelation.

Of course, God is not in the endorsement business.  He doesn’t go around stamping His approval on things that we think up.  Those are not His plans.  God doesn’t do things according to human anticipation.  That’s why we need the nuance of nagad.  God promises to answer us with something that we never could have imagined.  He is going to give us specific information that will simply blow us away.  We should come away from prayer shaking our heads and saying, “Oh, Father.  I never thought of that!”

Does prayer surprise you?  Do you get on your knees expecting that God will whisper things to you that you never even suspected?  Are you trembling before Him because He is going to give you a glimpse of what He is doing?  Or is prayer the boring (vain) repetition of your own thoughts and carefully contrived plans?

If you value what God says, you will pray with your own plans on hold.  After all, if you could think it up, it can’t be nagad, can it?