What a powerful statement and great reminder to me. It’s can be so easy for me to fall into a rut in my prayer life. Yet the words “prayer” and “rut” shouldn’t even be in the same sentence. Not when we realize how truly powerful prayer is. God’s Word tells us that the fervent or earnest prayer of a righteous person has great power and produces wonderful results (James 5:15, NLT).
That means you can have powerful and effective impact on your world through your prayers.
So often people say “there’s nothing I can do but prayer.” I know I’ve said it. But I always feel a little squeamish when I do – because the Holy Spirit reminds me that prayer is everything. It is doing more than anything physical I could do. (Don’t hear what I’m not saying – I’m not discouraging you from physical actions, I’m just remind myself (and you) that the power of prayer is beyond those physical actions.)
I get caught up in the “doing” sometimes when I should be in the “praying” sometimes.
This quote from Jared Brock reminds me of the power of prayer.
Let me give you an example of the reality of this quote. In May 1934, a group of businessmen began to pray in Charlotte, North Carolina. They held their third prayer meeting in a pasture belonging to William and Morrow Graham. The pasture usually corralled the Graham family dairy cows, but this day a group of businessmen gathered to pray. “Lord,” one of them prayed, “raise up a man out of Charlotte, North Carolina, who will preach the Gospel to the ends of the earth.”
No one at the time imagined that the answer would come in the form of Billy Graham, the oldest son of William and Morrow. He was a teenager at the time, more interested in baseball and girls. He wasn’t even aware of the prayers happening in his family’s cow pasture. But someone prayed and God moved.
Within just a few months, an evangelist came through their town. Billy and his friends were bored and went to the crusade to ridicule the evangelist. The Holy Spirit had other ideas. Billy wrote in his autobiography “I was spellbound…The next night, all my father’s mules and horses could not have kept me from getting to that meeting.”* He attended each night and soon came to Christ. The rest, as they say, is history.
The power of prayer. Each one has the potential to change the world. Scripture is full of answered prayer. Which is your favorite? Which motivate you to pray more diligently?
* From Just as I am, The Autobiography of Billy Graham (New York: Harber Paperbacks, 1997), pages 27-28 by Billy Graham; as quoted in Top Ten Most Influential Christians Since the Apostles (Franklin, IL: Truth Books Publishers, 2012), page 98, edited by Ken Lambert & Abby Matzke, chapter written by Sandra Parks Hovatter
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