Don't Make Your Angel Mad When God Answers Your Prayer, Part 3

Greetings friends and new listeners and welcome to The Sound of Faith. I'm Sharon Knotts thanking you for joining us today because we know faith comes by hearing and hearing by the Word of God. Today's message, Don't Make Your Angel Mad When God Answers Your Prayers.

If past disappointments have calloused your heart with unbelief in Don't Make Your Angel Mad When God Answers Your Prayers. You should be jumping with joy. Amen. And I'm going to tell you they are going to come to pass in spite of you. They're coming to pass. Amen.

You want to know how this is going to happen. You want to know you want a sign? Well you just got your sign. Amen.

You just got your sign. So let's see what happened after that. Verse 22. And it came to pass that as soon as the days of his ministration were accomplished, he departed to his own house. So apparently this happened early in the week. And he had to finish his week out. Amen. And after those days his wife Elizabeth conceived and hid herself five months saying, Thus hath the Lord dealt with me in the days when he looked on me to take away my reproach among men.

What a powerful thing. So he went home after his week of service was up. And when he got home he had to get out some of those big yellow legal pads and carry them around with him everywhere. And he had to keep writing everything down.

And writing everything down. Elizabeth was saying, Now honey I want you to tell me exactly what he looked like. I want to know every detail. Don't leave nothing out now.

Zacharias I want to know all about it. I want to know exactly what he said. Tell me what he said. And there he is sitting down there writing it all down over and over and over again. Amen. And now the news is spreading.

And their relatives are coming. They're traveling and they're getting there and they say, What happened? Why can't you speak Zacharias? What happened to you? Did you have a stroke? No. No. Shaking his head no.

Well what happened? Are you ill? Are you sick? What did the doctor say?

No. Get the legal yellow pad out. And write it down again. And write it down again.

Do you see what's happening? Every time he writes down the angel's words, the word of God is like a scaffold that cuts away another layer of his unbelief and another layer of his doubt. That's what God's word will do for you if you get it out and you speak it and you write it down. He couldn't speak anything negative. He couldn't speak his doubt and unbelief. He just kept writing down what happened, what the angel said. He didn't have Microsoft. He didn't have WordPerfect.

He didn't even have a Xerox machine. He had to keep writing it down and writing it down. I want to read to you. You don't have to turn there unless you want to but there's a powerful verses in Habakkuk chapter 2 verses 2 and 3 says, And the Lord answered me and said, Write the vision and make it plain upon tables.

Of course they wouldn't have had paper like we have. Make it plain that he may run that readeth it. For the vision is yet for an appointed time but at the end it shall speak and not lie. And though it tarry, wait for it. It will surely come to pass. And that's what God had Zacharias doing.

He had him writing it down and writing it down. Your wife is going to have a baby. It's going to be a boy. You're going to name him John. He's going to be great. He's going to be a prophet.

He's going to be the prophet that brings the Messiah into his ministry. He had to write it down. And I don't know if you've ever used that but that is a great tool for myself. Especially when I'm trying to memorize scripture that have to do with whatever I'm going through. And sometimes I get hung up and I get mixed up and I leave a phrase out and I reverse the order of the words. But when I write it down, something about writing it down, it gets into my spirit. Amen. It gets into my spirit. That's why to this day I still have handwritten notes for my messages.

I do not do them on the computer. It's something about writing them down. Amen. That when I'm writing them down, it's like I'm writing them on the paper of my heart. The parchment of my spirit. It gets inscribed in my spirit. And then I can say my tongue is the pen of a ready writer. I'm ready to declare and extol the majesty of my king. So every time he wrote it down, I believe another layer, another callous of hardness was removed from his heart. Amen. How many know you can get a callous on your heart?

But he had nine months that he couldn't speak and he had to just keep writing that down. You know how it is when you get a callous. If you go to the salon and you might go there and get a pedicure and you know that they have those things that get those callouses off, you're sitting there, you don't feel nothing. They're just rubbing away and rubbing away. Here you see all that dead skin and you don't feel nothing. But all of a sudden, they start getting where it's alive.

Live flesh there. Amen. They hit that spine.

Wait a minute. That hurts. I feel that. You don't feel it when you're working on the callouses. You don't feel it when you're working on them.

But boy, when you get them callouses off and you get to that living flesh, you feel it. Amen. And you see sometimes you've been saved for so long. You've been saved for so many years and you've seen so many prayers that you felt like didn't get answered the way they should have been answered. And you saw too many people that didn't get healed.

And you saw too many people that didn't make it. And you just feel all of that has disappointed you and let you down. And it's put another callous on your heart and another layer of hardness on your heart. And it hinders you when you pray. So guess what happens? You don't get the answer. And when you don't get the answer because you didn't really believe, you get another callous. And it just perpetuates itself.

You've got to get the callouses off. You have to say, I believe the word of God. Zachariah should have said, this is the most outlandish thing I've ever heard in my life. But I know what God did for Abraham and I know what he did for Sarah.

And he's no respecter of persons. I know what he did for Isaac and Rebekah. I know what he did for Samson's parents.

And if he could do it for them, he'll do it for me. I don't want to hear about people that died. I want to hear about people that lived, that got the victory, that overcame. Those of you who know my situation, someone sent me for my birthday three CDs that go back to 1989 of Joyce Meyer. 27 years ago, she had breast cancer. And it just threw her a curve.

Her ministry was just starting to really launch and become big. And she had surgery. But the question was, they told her her cancer was aggressive.

Now I don't know what it was. That's all I know she said on the CD. But she never had any treatment after that. And she had to walk by faith that she was going to live and not die. And someone said, God is going to bring out of this something great. Your message, your audience is going to be greater because people will know that you've been through this.

Now that's been 27 years ago. Amen. And I want to hear those kind of testimonies. That's what you need to hear. You need to get in the word of God. And what does God's word say that God will do? Amen. And so you have to keep speaking the word of God. And God fixed him good.

Gabriel fixed him good and zipped his lips. And he could not rain on her parade. You see, when you're pregnant with a promise, and I think we can use that word and you know what I'm saying. If you're pregnant with a promise, you've got to go the whole nine months. You don't want to abort early. You don't want to have a miscarriage. You don't want your promise to abort before it's fulfilled. Amen. Even in the natural for someone who wants to have a child and then has a miscarriage, it's devastating. And even today with technology being what it is, a preemie is like, you know, it's come and go. It may or you don't know from day to day whether or not they're going to pull through. Amen.

And so you want to carry it the whole time. Before I had my first child, Scott, right before that, I had a miscarriage. And then I got pregnant with him. And you know that doubt's always in your mind.

You always have that there. And I remember the doctor said, okay, your due date is May the 8th. Guess what day he was born on?

May the 8th. In other words, I went the whole nine months. I didn't have a miscarriage.

I didn't have a preemie. It's like God was saying, okay, this one you're going to go the whole time, right on the due date. Amen. And that's the way it is in the Spirit. You've got to go the whole nine months. And I'm using that as a figure of speech, of course.

So when his course was over, he went home. And we know that she conceived right away. And we know that those next nine months were the most joyful, happy, wonderful days of Elizabeth's whole entire life. Think about it.

I can think of at least five good reasons. Number one, finally she was pregnant. She had never been able to get pregnant before. This says she was barren. So now she's pregnant and she knows already. They didn't have ultrasound back then, but she knew she was going to have a son. And not only that, according to the word of the Lord, he was going to be a prophet. I mean, hey, Mama's going to have a baby. Boy's going to be a prophet.

And not only a prophet, but the prophet. So that's four good reasons. And then number five, I'll throw this one in. Number five was for the whole nine months her husband couldn't talk.

So what does that mean? That means that all he could do was listen to her. For nine months he couldn't interrupt her.

And what should she do for nine months? He heard her going around the house singing songs, singing lullabies. Amen. Going around the house like a silly little schoolgirl giggling.

I'm going to have a baby. Amen. For nine months he had to listen to her and he couldn't say a thing.

And if you think that was enough maybe to get on his nerves. Elizabeth's joys were about to be multiplied and Zachariah's troubles about to be multiplied. Because it won't be very long they're going to get a house guest. And then he's not only going to have to put up with one pregnant woman, but he's going to have to put up with two pregnant women. Amen.

Because somebody else is coming to the house. Let's look at verse 26. And in the six months. That means the six months of Elizabeth's pregnancy. We just read the verse before she was five months pregnant.

Now she's six months pregnant. The angel Gabriel sent from God unto a city of Galilee named Nazareth to a virgin espoused to a man whose name was Joseph of the house of David and the virgin's name was Mary. And the angel came in unto her and said hail thou that are highly favored. The Lord is with thee blessed art thou among women.

And when she saw him she was troubled at his saying and cast in her mind what matter of salutation this should be. And the angel said unto her what they always say fear not Mary for thou hast found favor with God and behold thou shall conceive in thy womb and bring forth a son. And shall call his name Jesus, Yeshua, the Lord's salvation. He shall be great and shall be called the son of the highest Eliona.

And the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his father David and he shall reign over the house of Jacob forever and of his kingdom there shall be no end. So Gabriel gets two assignments in six months. I mean God hasn't sent an angel for four hundred years. It's been over four hundred years since Malachi the last prophet had a word of the Lord.

And now four hundred years they don't get any assignments and it gets two in six months. And it's about having a baby. Now the first one just seemed over the top that old man and old woman were going to have a baby. But now the impossibilities are going up in magnitude because now he's sent to a virgin. And I taught on this last week about the virgin.

How many remember from Isaiah 7 14. So now it's a virgin. You see Zacharias he was struggling with the idea that him and his wife could have a baby at their age but at least they had two to tango.

Right? And they had the right configuration. Male and female.

Very important. When you want to have a baby it's very important you get the right configuration. Male and female. That's how God made them and married them.

Okay I'm getting in another message here. Now look about Mary. She's a virgin. She is engaged. She's espoused. She's betrothed. But they are not married yet. And they're certainly not at the point of consummation.

Amen? And so she was afraid. That's normal as we've already said. You react to that supernatural thing. But here where it says that she was troubled. It doesn't mean she was troubled in the sense of unbelief. It meant she was perplexed. She was confused. Amen?

She was trying to figure out how this was going to be. Amen? Consider now she is not a priest like Zacharias was. She's just a teenage girl. She hasn't been schooled in the word of God like he has been. She's starving before God in the temple at the altar.

She's just a simple teenage girl. Amen? And so she cast in her mind it means she considered. I wonder what he's talking about.

What exactly does this mean? Amen? So let's look what she says to the angel. Verse 34. Then said Mary unto the angel, How shall this be, seeing I know not a man? Now there is a huge difference between her question and the question of Zacharias. Zacharias had asked, How do I know this is really true?

Give me a sign. But hers was different. How is this going to happen? I'm not married yet. You see, she could have assumed, Well, it's going to happen after me and Joseph get married. She could have assumed that that would have been a natural assumption.

After we get married, we're going to have this happen. But that's not what God meant at all. Amen? He was going to be the son of God because he told her he will be the son of Elionah. She knew what Elionah meant. The most high God. She got that much. Amen? She understood Yeshua meant Jehovah's salvation. So she's saying, How is this going to be?

We are not married yet. Now, as I said, Zacharias had three examples. Abraham and Zerah, Isaac and Rebekah, and Manoah and his wife. As far as I know the scriptures very well, and I could be wrong, but as far as I know, there was only one tiny scripture in all the old covenant that might have given Mary something to hold on to. Zacharias had plenty to hold on to, and he did not believe. All that she could have maybe had is what I preached on last week, Isaiah 7-14. Behold, a virgin shall be with child and shall bear a son, and you shall call his name Immanuel, meaning God with us. Did she know that verse? She may have known that verse. And if she did know that verse, that would have been the only thing that she had to hold on to.

Amen? But she wanted to know, How was it going to happen? See, her faith was like Manoah's faith.

Manoah didn't question that it would happen. He just wanted to know, How are we supposed to raise the kid right? And obey your word. And she wants to know, How is this going to happen?

You know, it had to be almost amazing for her to comprehend it. So the angel said, verse 35, and the angel said, The Holy Ghost shall come upon you. The power of the highest shall overshadow thee.

Therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God. You're going to have a baby, and he's going to be God's son. What do you think was going on in her mind? What was she imagining? What was she thinking?

How did she think that this was going to come to pass? And he goes on to say, And behold thy cousin Elizabeth, she hath also conceived a son in her old age, and this is the sixth month with her, who is called barren. Verse 37, He answered whatever thought she may have had in her mind, but she had not spoken, for with God nothing shall be impossible. And Mary said, Behold the handmaid of the Lord, be it unto me according to thy word. And the angel departed from her. So here is Mary, this young girl, and she just asked simply, How is this going to be?

I'm not married yet. And he told her, Something is going to happen to you that has never happened before and will never happen again. The Holy Ghost is going to come upon you, and you're going to conceive in your womb, and you're going to become pregnant, and you're going to become pregnant with the seed of God. This child is not going to have a human father. God himself shall be his father.