In the 2003 movie Bruce Almighty , Jim Carrey portrays a television reporter named Bruce Nolan. Bruce is a man who constantly complains about God. At one point he complains that, \u201cGod is a mean kid sitting on an anthill with a magnifying glass, and I\u2019m the ant. He could fix my life in five minutes if He wanted to, but He\u2019d rather burn off my feelers and watch me squirm.\u201d<\/p>\n
God (played by Morgan Freeman) confronts Bruce and says, \u201cYou\u2019ve been doing a lot of complaining about me, Bruce. Quite frankly, I\u2019m tired of it.\u201d To prove to Bruce that He knows what He\u2019s doing, God offers to let Bruce try to run the world in His place. Feeling confident he is up to the task, Bruce excitedly accepts. He soon realizes, however, the enormity and complexity of God\u2019s work, particularly in answering prayers. In one scene, Bruce is so overwhelmed at the amount of prayers he has to answer, that he has them all put into a database and answers \u201cYes\u201d to every one. As a result, over 400,000 people get the winning lottery numbers, but they only win $17.00 each.<\/p>\n
Intellectually we all understand that God cannot say yes to every request we bring before Him, but I imagine many of us have wondered why he doesn\u2019t say yes more often. We have difficulty understanding why some people seem to have their prayers answered, but when we pray for the same thing, heaven seems silent. We wonder, \u201cDoes prayer really change things?\u201d Yes, it most certainly does! But it might not always bring the change we are expecting.<\/p>\n
In the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus prayed \u201cFather, if you are willing, take this cup from me; yet not my will, but yours be done.\u201d Jesus\u2019 initial request was not granted but the ultimate desire of His heart was. God\u2019s will was done. And His own heart was prepared for what would follow because He submitting Himself to God\u2019s will ahead of time. He went from \u201cdeeply sorrowful\u201d to accepting of His circumstances. God cannot say yes to every request, but desiring His will before our own changes the most important thing .\u2026 us<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In the 2003 movie Bruce Almighty , Jim Carrey portrays a television reporter named Bruce Nolan. Bruce is a man who constantly complains about God. At one point he complains that, \u201cGod is a mean kid sitting on an anthill with a magnifying glass, and I\u2019m the ant. He could fix my life in five […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5499,1209,191],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7604"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7604"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7604\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7604"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7604"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7604"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}