Online Reporter
Salima Mangani
A few months ago, I found myself on my knees, face pressed to the floor, begging God to strip away every worldly desire that still had its claws on me.
I was desperate. And I kept repeating His words back to Him, as if He needed reminding: “Until now you have asked nothing in my name. Ask, and you will receive, that your joy may be full” (John 16:24).
I had been told to stay in prayer. So, I stayed. I knocked, because He said the door would be opened. I sought, because He said I would find (Matthew 7:7). I was doing everything right, or so I thought. But nothing was moving.
I wrestled with the obvious question: What is happening? God is the most powerful being I know. I refused to believe the devil was winning, how could the Creator lose a battle to His own creation?
I clung to the truth that has carried me through every storm: “They overcame him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony” (Revelation 12:11). The Word of God is true. There is no truer truth. So, if I was standing on truth, why was I still stuck?
Then the answer came, quietly, from a passage I had come across:
“Since, then, you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things. For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God.
“When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory. Put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed, which is idolatry” (Colossians 3:1–5) “Which is idolatry”. There it was.
I had forgotten that exactly a year earlier, I had preached to a prayer group on WhatsApp about idolatry. The revelation had come from a story I thought I already understood; the woman at the well.
I had always read that story and seen it as a demonstration of Jesus being the great prophet He is. You can’t hide anything from Christ. And that’s true. But last year, when I read John with fresh eyes, something else stood out to me.
The woman asks for the living water. Jesus says, “Go, call your husband and come back” (John 4:16).
Now, if I were writing this story, I would have had Jesus say, “I am the living water.” It seems obvious. But He doesn’t. He asks about her husband. And that’s when the spirit connected something I had never seen before.
In the Hebrew Scriptures, the word ba’al can mean “husband,” but it can also mean “lord,” “master,” or “owner.” And throughout the prophetic books, God refers to Himself as Israel’s husband.
Hosea 2:2 thunders: “She is not my wife, and I am not her husband.” Isaiah 54:5 declares: “For your Maker is your husband, the Lord Almighty is his name.”
So, when Jesus tells this woman to go get her husband, He is not just exposing her romantic history. He is naming her spiritual reality. She has had five husbands, five lords, five masters. And the one she is with now is not her husband either.
Before He gives her the living water, He asks her: Who are you serving? Where is your God?
That hit me like a freight train.
I started looking at my own prayer life. Have you ever noticed how we pray? We come to God and immediately launch into the agenda: fix my marriage, give me a job, help me conceive. Break this addiction. Make this person forgive me.
We even find the verses that match our situation, and we pray scripture-based prayers, still centred on the thing. We are so focused on what we want that we forget we are speaking to our father, our husband, our maker.
But God sees the posture of the heart. And He is a jealous God. He will not share His glory with another. Not even with a good thing. Not even with a need. Not even with our desperation to become better.
I had to face an uncomfortable truth: I was obsessing over the changes I needed to see in myself. The lack. The desire to be free. I was asking persistently, but somewhere along the way, persistence had curdled into obsession.
Let me clarify what I mean. Persistence is the widow who keeps knocking because she trusts the judge (Luke 18:1–8). Her eyes are on him. She knows he is the only one who can act, so she refuses to stop coming.
Obsessiveness is when you cannot function unless you get what you are asking for. The thing becomes the focus. You are no longer resting in the Giver; you are frantic for the gift. And when a good thing, even a spiritual thing, becomes the thing you cannot live without, it has become your husband. It has become your lord. That was me. I was idolising my own deliverance.
So, I asked God: How do I lay this down and not pick it back up? How do I let go in a way that is actually letting go? Because every time I try, I just end up clutching it tighter.
His answer came, simple and direct: “Acknowledge that I am God. Enter my gates with thanksgiving. Pray for the people with the same problem you have.”
At first, I baulked. I was the one drowning in unforgiveness, and He wanted me to pray for other people struggling to forgive? It felt backward. But obedience, I have learnt, is its own kind of freedom.
So, I did it. For a full month, I went into my prayer closet and interceded for everyone I could think of who was trapped in the same cycle I was in. I ended up praying for everyone who was trapped in the same cycle, not only the ones I knew. – tgcafrica.org
