When Thank-You Is not Enough
Most mornings as I wake up before sunrise, I love to go into our back room and watch as the morning sky introduces itself all spectacular and golden. Standing there, looking out the windows, I often begin talking to the Lord about anything and everything. Thanking him for all of his blessings, the good night’s rest, and another day before me, my family near and far, my church family. Always, He is the first One I want to speak to, though I feel during those early moments my thoughts are just ricocheting inside my head, bounding and rebounding across a broad span of topics, some so random, others, really so unnecessary, so I get to the place where I have to shake my head and rein in all of those wild things! Home things and church things and family things and good things and foreboding things; unnecessary and nonessential things and things which happened so long ago… and, well, maybe you can identify. But a profound thought shot to the forefront one morning among all those concerns as I was thinking about someone who was recently saved. It crossed my mind that every single saved person I have ever known was saved because someone prayed for them. Or maybe an entire church was praying. I know, maybe that sounds pretty un-profound because it is obvious, but I stood there contemplating that. Just think of all those people who faithfully prayed that you and I would be saved. Well, who can put a price on that? What I mean to convey is that our devotion to prayer and the power of prayer can never be overrated.
Think about this with me for a moment. My good husband preached at a church in the Philippines years ago. The night he preached a 101-year-old woman attended the service for the first time.
She was brought there by a young woman who cared for her soul and invited her to the preaching. My husband guessed the young woman to be twenty, twenty-one years old. That night the 101-year-old woman was saved. And soon after was baptized. My husband spoke with the pastor six months later and enquired about the woman. “Still faithfully attending church and busy serving the Lord!” was his response. 101 years on her own, a lost Roman Catholic, hoping her good works would gain her heaven. But someone prayed. Who can say how long? But somebody kept praying.
When we think about our own church family, we know each was saved through the grace of God and prayer. Considering the thousands that have walked through our church doors over the 40 years our church has existed and taking into account the names of those God’s people have regularly submitted for prayer all through the years, not to leave out the names we have faithfully asked to be placed on a Revival prayer list or a New Year’s prayer list; it is clear to see God is faithful and prayer is effective when it is fervent.
When my husband enlisted in the US Air Force he was sent to Grand Forks, North Dakota. There was a great church not far from the airbase and a young man from that church began to witness to my then fiancé. That young man told his church about him and they faithfully prayed for him to be saved. Within a few months, my husband turned from Roman Catholicism and was converted. A short while after he knew God was speaking to his heart about the call to preach and he fully surrendered. He was on his way! One problem. There was this “girl” back in New York he was going to marry…(You know girls from New York!) Our pastor confided in me years later he had such high hopes for my husband as a preacher…but this “girl back in New York thing” was so concerning to him! ( I think had I been from Iowa, or Kansas or someplace far away from that menacing East Coast it might not have been so troubling for him…but it was the New York thing…) But the church prayed. We got married and moved up to Grand Forks. I sat under the preaching for a little over a year and was saved. Think about that. Those good people-total strangers-prayed for me.
I can remember families, and individuals, coming into our church here for the first time. A single mother burdened for her grown children, asking on Wednesday nights, “Please pray for all my kids to come to church…” We prayed so hard and saw one after another saved. To say they have been assets to the Lord’s church would be an understatement! Many beautiful, young families with exceptional and adorable children, single guys searching for meaning and purpose in life, who in all reality were only looking for God. Women whose husbands needed to be saved, married couples knowing there had to be more to life, grandmothers bringing their grandchildren. People who had been beaten and battered by life who were searching for one thing: the Truth. We prayed they would find it in Christ and some have. A dying father in another state, who heard the gospel many times and now at the end sought and obtained salvation! We prayed fervently about that. Men and women in Bangladesh, South Africa, Germany-who we will never meet this side of heaven, but we prayed for them and saw them saved. Anyone among these who was saved shares a common miracle-they were prayed for and God delivered them.
Charles Spurgeon once said that we should, “…mind how we pray and make a real business of it. Let it never be a dead formality.” He went on to approach the church on the matter, knowing first- hand the power of corporate prayer: “Keep up the prayer meeting, whatever else flags; it is the great business evening of the week, the best service between the Sabbaths; be you sure to make it so.”
Sometimes the saints can grow weary of praying repeatedly for the same lost person. We may grow frustrated with them as they make excuse after excuse or continue to accuse our Lord with their absurd reasonings. Or maybe they are apathetic toward what God says is the most important thing they must consider, thinking life and the business of it is far more significant. And yet, I am certain there are those who in great error remain unconvinced that the unsaved will spend eternity separated from God. While these beliefs of unsaved people are exasperating for us, let us never forget that these individuals are presently what we were once, lost. But someone prayed for us. Undeniably, in the end, the choice is theirs. Throughout all the ages, generation after generation, it has always come down to the decision to receive or reject Christ, for in truth he will not pressure you to believe on him. Draw you? Yes. Compel you? Certainly. But no lost person has ever been pushed onto the narrow way. I once heard a young woman give a testimony for Christ when I was in South Africa. In her lovely South African/British-English dialect she professed, “My Jesus is a gentleman, He will never force anyone to be saved.”
We are in the season of giving thanks in America. And who could ever argue that as Americans we have so much for which to be thankful and so many to whom we owe a great debt? And yet, can we ever give enough thanks for salvation? What would be “sufficient” for all Christ has done for us? For the goodness of God leading us to repentance, or for those who steadfastly prayed for us? What do we do when a simple thank you is so inadequate? I thought about that for a while and decided the Bible must have the answer and it did.
Those who received the greatest gift took it to others. Many who gladly took Christ as their Lord turned their then-known world upside down with the message of salvation. And God has always had those kinds of people. Let it be said of us and may God help us to be people who have an effect, who make a difference, that Jesus Christ might receive all the glory.
Thank you so much for reading,
– Liz
