Purpose in PrayerBounds, Edward M. (Edward McKendree)
Religion
Purpose in Prayer
Bounds, Edward M. (Edward McKendree)
Prayer -- Christianity
“Yes,” said Daniel, “you were expecting something remarkable to-day.”
“What do you mean?” said the friend.
“Why you prayed that you might be kept sweet and gentle all day long.
And, by the way things have been going, I see you have been greatly
disappointed.”
“Oh,” said the man, “I thought you meant something particular.”
Prayer is mighty in its operations, and God never disappoints those who
put their trust and confidence in Him. They may have to wait long for
the answer, and they may not live to see it, but the prayer of faith
never misses its object.
“A friend of mine in Cincinnati had preached his sermon and sank back in
his chair, when he felt impelled to make another appeal,” says Dr. J.
Wilbur Chapman. “A boy at the back of the church lifted his hand. My
friend left the pulpit and went down to him, and said, ‘Tell me about
yourself.’ The boy said, ‘I live in New York. I am a prodigal. I have
disgraced my father’s name and broken my mother’s heart. I ran away and
told them I would never come back until I became a Christian or they
brought me home dead.’ That night there went from Cincinnati a letter
telling his father and mother that their boy had turned to God.
“Seven days later, in a black-bordered envelope, a reply came which
read: ‘My dear boy, when I got the news that you had received Jesus
Christ the sky was overcast; your father was dead.’ Then the letter went
on to tell how the father had prayed for his prodigal boy with his last
breath, and concluded, ‘You are a Christian to-night because your old
father would not let you go.’”
A fourteen-year-old boy was given a task by his father. It so happened
that a group of boys came along just then and wiled the boy away with
them, and so the work went undone. But the father came home that evening
and said, “Frank, did you do the work that I gave you?” “Yes, sir,” said
Frank. He told an untruth, and his father knew it, but said nothing. It
troubled the boy, but he went to bed as usual. Next morning his mother
said to him, “Your father did not sleep all last night.”
“Why didn’t he sleep?” asked Frank.
His mother said, “He spent the whole night praying for you.”
This sent the arrow into his heart. He was deeply convicted of his sin,
and knew no rest until he had got right with God. Long afterward, when
the boy became Bishop Warne, he said that his decision for Christ came
from his father’s prayer that night. He saw his father keeping his
lonely and sorrowful vigil praying for his boy, and it broke his heart.
Said he, “I can never be sufficiently grateful to him for that prayer.”
An evangelist, much used of God, has put on record that he commenced a
series of meetings in a little church of about twenty members who were
very cold and dead, and much divided. A little prayer-meeting was kept
up by two or three women. “I preached, and closed at eight o’clock,” he
says. “There was no one to speak or pray. The next evening one man
spoke.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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