Prevailing Prayer: What Hinders It?Moody, Dwight Lyman
Religion
Prevailing Prayer: What Hinders It?
Moody, Dwight Lyman
Christian life; Prayer -- Christianity
In Scotland, a good many years ago, there lived a man with his wife and
three children--two girls and a boy. He was in the habit of getting
drunk, and thus losing his situation. At last, he said he would take
Johnnie, and go off to America, where he would be away from his old
associates, and where he could commence life over again. He took the
little fellow, seven years old, and went away. Soon after he arrived
in America, he went into a saloon and got drunk. He got separated from
his boy in the streets, and he has never been seen by his friends
since. The little fellow was placed in an institution, and afterward
apprenticed in Massachusetts. After he had been there some time, he
became discontented, and went off to sea; finally, he came to Chicago
to work on the lakes. He had been a roving spirit, had gone over sea
and land, and now he was in Chicago. When the vessel came into port,
one time, he was invited to a Gospel meeting. The joyful sound of the
Gospel reached him, and he became a Christian.
After he had been a Christian a little while, he became very anxious to
find his mother. He wrote to different places in Scotland, but could
not find out where she was. One day he read in the Psalms--“No good
thing will He withhold from them that walk uprightly.” He closed his
Bible, got down on his knees, and said: “O God, I have been trying to
walk uprightly for months past; help me to find my mother.” It came
into his mind to write back to the place in Massachusetts from which he
had run away years before. It turned out that a letter from Scotland
had been waiting for him there for seven years. He wrote at once to
the place in Scotland, and found that his mother was still living; the
answer came back immediately. I would like you to have seen him when he
got that letter. He brought it to me; and the tears flowed so that he
could scarcely read it. His sister had written on behalf of the mother;
she had been so overcome by the tidings of her long-lost boy that she
could not write.
The sister said that all the nineteen years he had been away, his
mother had prayed to God day and night that he might be saved, and that
she might live to know what had become of him, and see him once more.
Now, said the sister, she was so overjoyed, not only that he was alive,
but that he had become a Christian. It was not long before the mother
and sisters came out to Chicago to meet him.
I mention this incident to show how God answers prayer. This mother
cried to God for nineteen long years. It must have seemed to her
sometimes as though God did not mean to give her the desire of her
heart; but she kept praying, and at last the answer came.
The following personal testimony was publicly given at one of our
meetings lately held in London, and may serve to help and encourage
readers of these pages.
A PRAYER-MEETING TESTIMONY.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account