12. IMAGINE THE CREATOR LISTENING TO YOU
An excerpt from Imagine the Future You
By Ada Brownell
God wants you to talk to Him
“And this is
the confidence that we have in Him, that if we ask anything according to His
will, He hears us; and if we know that He hears us, whatsoever we ask, we know
that we have the petitions that we desired of Him.”[1]
A strong wind propelled a raging forest fire up the side of
Grand Mesa in Colorado, leaving blackness and ashes in its wake. Grand Mesa is
the largest flat-topped mountain in the world.
The billowing smoke and hungry flames came into view of a mother
and three children, alone in a white two-story house. The roaring mass of
flames raced directly toward their home.
The father had gone
to help fight the fire, which erupted near Cedaredge. He had no idea the wind
would take the fire to his family—now stranded without a car or any other means
of escape.
Inside the house the mother and children ran to the bedroom,
took the Bible, and read the Ninety-first Psalm, which talks about God’s
protection for His children. Then they knelt and prayed fervently. Still
praying, they went back to the living room and watched the fire, now almost
upon them.
While they stared, the flames turned away as the direction
of the wind changed. Their prayers had reached God, and He answered!
IMAGINE PRAYER POWER
This true experience is one of several miraculous answers to
prayer shared by members of a church I attended in Lakewood, Colorado, several
years ago. I was asked to speak in the youth service about prayer. While
meditating and praying for the service, I felt I should let people in our
church tell from their own experience what prayer can do. I told you
briefly about some of these miracles earlier in this book.
So I began asking individuals to help me. My only problem
was choosing which miraculous answers to prayer to use! I found so many
examples of the power of prayer I couldn’t use all of them.
IMAGINE CONNECTING WITH GOD
One woman said she uttered a simple prayer as their family’s
truck, loaded with apples, rolled over the side of a mountain. Her children
were riding on top of the apple boxes. After she scrambled out of the truck,
crushed by huge boulders, she called her children’s names.
“Tim? Are you all right?”
“Yes,” a voice answered from beneath the boxes.
“Steve?”
“Here!”
“Connie?”
“Here, Mom!”
The entire family escaped uninjured.
“Sometime let me tell how the Lord made an empty fuel barrel
keep the house warm for a week,” she added.
A deacon told how God stopped the rain so he could work on a
road construction project. The deacon had five children to feed and needed all
the work he could get. If it rained, he couldn’t work and didn’t get paid.
One day he noticed big black clouds rolling toward the road
construction area. He prayed the Lord would allow him to keep working.
It was the deacon’s job to send supplies to the men on the
paving machine. For three days the rain followed close behind the road crew,
and although they could see storm clouds dumping rain behind them, it never
reached where the men worked. Occasionally the showers came right up to where
they were, and then would go back again.
Some told of being delivered from alcohol or cigarettes. Outstanding
physical healings were numerous.
A man was critically injured when the Jeep in which he was
riding went out of control and rolled over. He told how doctors gave no hope
for his recovery, but through his family’s prayers and his own conversion, he
recovered so quickly that when he went deer hunting, he scared one of his
friends when they met in the woods.
“I thought you were dead!” the friend gasped. He hadn’t
heard he recovered.
IMAGINE MIRACLES
Another couple told how their baby was healed of water on
the brain (hydrocephalus). The baby’s head began to grow faster than its body.
After X-rays, the doctors told the parents the baby would never be normal and should
be admitted to an institution.
The distraught parents asked their pastor to go to the
institution and pray for the baby.
Within two weeks the doctors informed the parents that the
baby had become perfectly normal. When comparing X-rays of the child’s brain
before and after prayer, the doctor said it was hard to believe they were taken
of the same baby. He wrote “Absolute
Miracle!” across her records.
The baby, Becky, now is married and never showed any
evidence of mental retardation. Her head went back to normal size as an infant,
and it remains normal. Becky was one of our children’s close childhood friends
when we attended the church in Lakewood.
A mother told how her nine-year-old girl suffered a head
injury in a swinging door, and soon afterward, paralysis affected one side. The
diagnosis was a blood clot on the brain. The doctors said she would not live a
year.
Her mother went through agony, watching her beautiful little
girl deteriorate until she could no longer feed herself. When the mother would
try to feed her, often the food would just fall out of the child’s mouth.
“Oh, God!” she cried many times, “I just can’t bear it!”
The child’s grandma, however, kept reassuring the young
mother to believe God for a miracle.
When vacation time came, they asked the doctor whether the
little girl would be able to make a trip.
“You’d better take her,” the doctor said. “It will be the
last vacation she can take with you.” So the parents bundled her up in a
blanket and put her in the back of their station wagon.
Instead of getting worse, the girl began to improve. She
completely recovered and became an outstanding Christian woman, and she’s one
of my close Facebook friends today.
I know all of these people personally. Almost without
exception, they—or at least a family member—served God faithfully before they
had a crisis in their lives. They already were on “speaking terms” with God—and
they didn’t hesitate to ask God for help when they needed it. They’re still
serving the Lord and seeing answers to prayer.
But God hears the fervent prayer of anyone.
God wants us to ask him to supply our needs. “Ask and it shall be given
you,” Jesus taught in his Sermon on the Mount.[2]
IMAGINE THE CREATOR LISTENING
Isn’t it almost too much to think God will listen to humans?
To me? A nobody? A cry for help in our own feeble words, and the Creator
answers?
It happens all the time.
God wants us to bring our needs to Him and believe he
will answer. The Bible
says, “It is impossible to please God without faith. Anyone who comes to
him must believe that there is a God and that he rewards those who sincerely
seek him.”[3]
Also, we should pray fervently. “The earnest prayer of a righteous person has great power and
wonderful results.”[4]
According to
biographers, prayer in Martin Luther’s early years as a monk probably was
confined to what he later called “babble and empty chatter,” which was reading
prayer books, saying memorized prayers, and counting beads.
As he became a mature Christian—who, like David, wasn’t
afraid to challenge the world’s giants because the Lord was with him—Luther
learned to pray so fervently and effectively that he moved the hand of God.
When he talked to the Lord, Luther deeply affected those within hearing range
and was strengthened and lifted up himself.
Luther used his native German and prayed frequently and
fervently, and he fell asleep at night communicating with God.[5]
Luther got his emotions involved.
“Wake up your heart and teach it what kind of thoughts to
think while praying,” he told his followers.
He warned against mechanical prayers, without thinking about
what is being said. He also cautioned people to avoid praying because it was
their duty to do so, saying such prayer would accomplish nothing.
The reformer often prayed facing a window, turning his back
on those in the room with him.
Viet Dietrich once overheard Luther praying alone. “My heart
was inflamed when I heard him speaking so intimately, so earnestly, so
respectfully, confident his petitions would be granted.”
In one of his teachings on prayer, Luther advised Christians
that when Christ said to “ask…seek…knock” it was to encourage Christians to be
persistent when they pray. He advised them to ask, keep seeking after the Lord,
and knock excessively. “Ask and receive means nothing else than, 'ask, call
out, yell, seek, knock, thunder!'”
IMAGINE GOD’S INTERVENTION
This is exactly how Luther prayed himself at times. When his
friend Philip was in a coma and appeared at death’s door, Luther walked in and
began to lay the problem before the Lord. He quoted promises from the Bible
that prayers will be heard. He yelled and thundered the promises until he had
“rubbed his ears” with the truths as well as the ears of other believers in the
room. He continued praying in a loud voice until every listener in the room was
hot with faith, too. Finally, Philip began to stir. They fed him and soon he
was on the mend.
The powerful prayers of Luther were coveted, and even
feared, by those who knew him.
Luther’s advice to keep knocking and asking and never
give up goes along with what Jesus said: “Men ought always to pray and not
faint!”[6]
Jesus then told the story of a widow who wearied an unjust judge by continually
coming to him and asking him to avenge her of her adversary, until the judge
granted her request.
“Shall not God avenge his own elect, which cry day and night
unto him, though he bears long with them?” Jesus asked.
Years after I collected answers to prayer in the Lakewood
church I asked a Sunday school class in Pueblo, Colorado, to share their
answers to prayer.
Everybody wanted a chance to share their answers to prayer.
A young couple told how their premature baby’s life was spared because of
prayer. A young lady told how God touched her heart condition.
There were many others, but one I especially remember was a
young married couple who had recently become Christians.
“My parents became Christians not very long ago,” one of
them said, “and began requesting prayer for our salvation in the church they
attend in another state. At the same time, for some reason, we decided to buy a
Bible so we could read it. We started at the back and when we read Revelation,
we got scared. We didn’t understand all of it, so we thought we’d better find a
church. The Lord led us here, where we accepted Christ. Then we discovered our parents
had been praying!”
The parents didn’t know how to approach their children and
tell them they committed their lives to Christ, so they just prayed. When the
children were born again, they hesitated to phone the parents and share what
happened. But God already had worked a miracle.
Another lady, Julie, who attended our church, impressed me
when she testified about how glad she was that she didn’t give up praying when
she got discouraged.
Julie had prayed for her husband, Dan, several years when
she finally persuaded him to attend a revival crusade in Denver. When Dan
didn’t go forward to accept Jesus, Julie got mad at God.
If Dan’s god is more powerful than mine, she thought, maybe
I should sell my soul to him.
Then she realized it was an awful thought, and she repented.
Quickly she focused her mind once again on the promises of God’s word and
decided she would not give up hope.
A little more than a year later, Dan surrendered his life to
the Lord, and Dan and Julie were mightily used of the Lord to win others.
Not only was Dan saved in due time, but others were also
saved as a result. Some of her relatives and several friends came to the Lord
also.
Sometimes our prayer lives become like the miner who stuck
it out several years picking and digging for gold in the Colorado mountains
about the turn of the twentieth century. The miner found only enough nuggets to
keep from starving.
Finally he got disgusted. “If I don’t find gold in a few
more days, I’m quitting.”
He didn’t find gold, and he quit. He sold his claim for
almost nothing.
The next owners dug only ten feet from where the miner quit
when they hit a big vein of gold ore and struck it rich!
We can’t stop believing in the power of prayer.
If you’d like to know for yourself what prayer can do, read
the Bible. See what God did for Elijah, Gideon, and Daniel in the Old
Testament. Find out what He did for the apostles in the New Testament. Then ask
believers you know what God has done for them.
The churches I have
been in are not unique—except that they still believe and teach that God
answers prayer. You can find testimonies of miracles everywhere.
Pray. Prayer is just talking to God. You will find the Lord
hears and answers—even a whisper.
[1] 1
John 5:14–15
[2] Matthew
7:7KJ
[3] Hebrews
11:6
[4] James
5:16
[5] H.G.
Haile, Luther (Garden City, NY:
Doubleday, 1980), 278–279.
[6] Luke
18:1KJ
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