In his book, If You Want to Walk on Water, You’ve Got to Get Out of The Boat, Pastor John Ortberg tells a wonderful true story about the power of prayer.
It involves a Christian leader in Washington, D.C. named Doug Coe. Doug became a spiritual mentor to a new Christian whose name was Bob.
One day, Bob came in all excited about the verse in the Bible where Jesus says, “Ask whatever you will in my name, and you shall receive it.” “Is that really true?” Bob asked. Doug answered with a qualified yes, it is true. Christ answers prayer. “Great!” Bob said. “Then I gotta start praying for something. I think I’ll pray for Africa.”
Doug thought that was pretty broad and suggested Bob narrow his prayer to just one country. Bob decided on Kenya. So Doug challenged Bob to pray every day for six months for Kenya. Then Doug made an extraordinary challenge to Bob. He said that if Bob prayed every day for six months for Kenya and nothing extraordinary came from his prayers, Doug would pay Bob five hundred dollars. But if something remarkable did happen, Bob would pay Doug five hundred dollars. And if Bob did not pray every day, the whole deal was off. Now, that’s quite a wager on God!
Well, Bob began to pray, and for a long time nothing happened. Then one night he was at a dinner in Washington. He met a woman there who helped run an orphanage in, where else(?) Kenya. It was the largest orphanage in that country. When she discovered how excited Bob was about Kenya, she invited him to pay a visit to her orphanage.
When Bob arrived in Kenya, he was appalled by the poverty and the lack of basic health care. Upon returning to Washington, he couldn’t get the place out of his mind. He began to write to large pharmaceutical companies asking them to send some of their surplus drugs to Kenya. And some of them did. This one orphanage in Kenya received more than a million dollars worth of medical supplies.
The woman who ran the orphanage was overwhelmed with excitement and gratitude. She called Bob and invited him to come to Kenya for a big celebration. So Bob flew back to Kenya. While he was there, the president of the country came to the celebration, because, after all, it was the largest orphanage in the land. The president of Kenya offered to take Bob on a personal tour of Nairobi, the capital city. In the course of the tour they saw a prison. Bob asked about a group of prisoners there. “They’re political prisoners,” he was told. “That’s a bad idea,” Bob said brashly. “You should let them out.” Absurd thing to say to the president of a country, wouldn’t you agree?
Bob finished the tour and flew back home. Sometime later, Bob received a phone call from the U.S. State Department. It seems that the State Department had been working for years to get the release of a certain group of political prisoners, to no avail. But now the prisoners had been released, largely because of Bob’s intervention. The government was calling to say thanks.
Several months later, the president of Kenya made contact with Bob again. He was going to rearrange his government and select a new cabinet. Would Bob be willing to fly back to Kenya and pray for him for three days while he worked on this very important task? So Bob--who was not politically connected at all--boarded a plane once more and flew back to Kenya, where he asked God to give wisdom to the leader of the nation as he selected his government. (1) Wow! All that from one man praying for six months!
Next Sunday we will celebrate one of the most important days on our church calendar. It is, of course, the Day of Pentecost, the day the Holy Spirit fell upon the church. Pentecost occurs fifty days after Easter. But an important event took place ten days before Pentecost. Ten days before Pentecost Christ ascended to be with the Father.
Before he left, he said to his disciples, “Do not leave Jerusalem, but wait for the gift my Father promised, which you have heard me speak about. For John baptized with water, but in a few days you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit . . . you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:4-5, 8). So, we have Christ bidding his disciples farewell and promising them that the Spirit would come upon them. Ten days later we have the Holy Spirit coming upon them and transforming them into a tremendously powerful force in the world. What did the disciples do during those ten days as they awaited the gift of the Spirit? The writer of the book of Acts tells us:
“Then they returned to Jerusalem from the hill called the Mount of Olives, a Sabbath day’s walk from the city. When they arrived, they went upstairs to the room where they were staying. Those present were Peter, John, James and Andrew; Philip and Thomas, Bartholomew and Matthew; James son of Alphaeus and Simon the Zealot, and Judas son of James. They all joined together constantly in prayer, along with the women and Mary the mother of Jesus, and with his brothers.”
Ten days they spent in prayer, preparing to receive the gift Christ had promised them. Ten days they shut out the concerns of the world including their fear of the authorities. For ten days they humbled themselves, surrendered themselves, emptied themselves of anything that might impede their service to Christ. No wonder they were so responsive to the Spirit when Pentecost came. They were prepared. They were focused. They were united in a common cause.
It would be easy to imagine that Pentecost would not have happened if that early group of Christ’s followers had not humbled themselves for those ten days in prayer. I wonder what might happen to this church if each of us would enter into an intense season of prayer. Do you pray for your church? Do you ask for God’s guidance as we seek to be God’s people in this place? Do you pray about God’s plan for your own life? I’m not talking about frivolous prayer, selfish prayer, unrealistic prayer.
Some of you Baby Boomers probably remember Janis Joplin’s song, “Lord, please give me a Mercedes Benz; My friends all drive Porsches, I must make amends; Worked hard all my life with no help from my friends; O Lord, please send me a Mercedes Benz.” Come to think of it, that was the perfect Boomer prayer. Of course, Boomers are not alone in frivolous, self-centered prayer. It is a universal phenomenon.
Some years back in Britain the national lottery inspired so many Brits to pray that the BBC in its coverage at one stage included what it called “The Lottery Prayer”: “Lord, I know I’m a sinner, but make me a winner.” That’s pretty catchy, come to think about it. “Lord, I know I’m a sinner, but make me a winner.” It’s catchy, but that’s not what prayer is about. Prayer is about opening ourselves to the purposes of God. Prayer is about humbling ourselves before God. Prayer is about opening ourselves to the power of the Holy Spirit. The disciples praying in the upper room for those ten days were asking for the gift of the Spirit. What would it mean for our lives if we were to seek that same gift with that same kind of intensity?
First of all, it would give us a new purpose for our lives. So many people lack a sense of purpose. They may be extraordinarily successful by society’s standards, but inwardly they know themselves to be empty vessels, rudderless ships tossed and turned by every wave.
Barbara Brown Taylor sought a purpose for her life at a young age. She was a seminary student at Yale. She was by her own admission lonely, afraid, and desperate for some answers.
Next door to the divinity school, on the highest hill in town, stood an old deserted Victorian mansion. The sagging porch was overcome with weeds, the slate shingles were crumbling off the roof, and all the doors and windows were boarded up. A metal fire escape ran up one side for a full three stories and ended in a little metal platform outside an attic dormer window. The whole place was plastered with No Trespassing signs and the campus police patrolled it regularly.
One night, at the end of her rope, young Barbara decided that if she braved all her fears--including a considerable fear of heights--and climbed up to the top of that mansion, perhaps she would be able to pray a prayer that would give her some direction for her life. So she did. She climbed to the top, one shaky step at a time. Her heart was in her throat, but once she calmed herself, she began to pray--asking God to reveal His purpose for her life; asking God to point her in the right direction, to give her a sign.
At first, there was nothing but silence. This made her angry. What good was God if he would not even answer a simple prayer? But she kept praying. She prayed until her words ran out, and she was reduced to wordless moans. It was not until she came to the end of those moans that she had her answer. It was nothing specific, but the answer she got was the deep conviction that she was loved, and what she was called to do was to love back in whatever way she could. (2) God spelled out no specific plan, but she left her perch on that platform with the knowledge that God was with her and with the courage to live as God’s person.
That would be a beautiful thing to happen to any of us. The first thing that would happen to us if we asked for the gift of the Spirit would be a new sense of purpose.
Praying intently for the gift of the Spirit would also give us power to be what God wants us to be. Isn’t it true that our biggest problem isn’t our lack of knowledge about what God wants us to do? Our biggest problem is the power to live out what we already know. The problem is one of motivation, of will. We know what we ought to do, what we lack is the power to follow through.
Motivational expert Zig Ziglar tells about a woman in Dallas named Antelma Arroyo who one day stopped for gas at a service station. A man came up to her car and demanded her purse. She said no and he jumped into her car intending to steal it. The man screamed at her to jump out of the car. She did. Her older two children jumped out too, but her 18-month-old daughter was still strapped in the car when the man began pulling away. This spurred Mrs. Arroyo into action. She ran alongside the car fighting for control of the steering wheel. The robber gunned the car and tried to pick up speed but this determined mother would not let go. She was dragged along beside the automobile, still trying to rescue her little girl. Somehow she pulled herself to the window of the car and began clawing at the man who was trying to drive off with her child. The man somehow stalled the car and fled the scene. Obviously he had had enough. (3) No one looking at this humble mother would think that she had that much power in her body. But she did. She simply needed a situation that called that power from her.
You and I have much more power than we are aware of. Our problem isn’t one of knowledge or of good intentions. We need the Spirit of God to come into our lives and to transform us into the kind of dynamic men and women God has created us to be. The secret, of course, is prayer. Intensive, determined, persistent prayer that the Holy Spirit will come into our lives to give us a sense of purpose and to fill us with power.
But praying for the gift of the Spirit will do one thing more for us: it will give us a sense of peace. So many times Christ promised his disciples peace. In John 14 we read: “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world gives, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.” That’s what Christ promised us when the Spirit came upon us; not only power, but also peace. That does not mean that Christ will lift us out of a troubled world. It does mean that his Spirit dwelling within us gives us a sense of calm, a sense of deep assurance that we are loved, that we belong to God.
A man who was over 100 years old was interviewed and was asked about his earliest experiences. He remembered as a child being introduced to his great-great-grandmother.
“I’ll never forget that day,” he said. “It was a hot, humid Sunday afternoon, and it was a long trip. I had never met her before, and I wasn’t real excited about going all that way just to see some old woman. To make matters worse, when we finally got to her house and went inside, I saw that not only was she old but blind, and not only blind but actually kind of mean looking. And so, at first, I was afraid of her.
“‘We brought Bernum along to see you,’ my father said. She turned in my direction with outstretched arms and long, bony fingers, and said, ‘Bring him over here.’ They practically had to push me across the room,” Bernum told the interviewer with a chuckle, “but when I got there I saw that those same hands, which I had been so frightened by, were surprisingly gentle. She carefully traced the outline of my face and ran her fingers through my hair. And then in a voice filled with love and acceptance, I heard her whisper: ‘This boy is one of ours. This boy is part of our family. This one belongs to us.’” (4)
And that’s the message that the Spirit whispers to us when it dwells in our hearts. You belong to God. Nothing can defeat you. You can meet every challenge by God’s might. All this and more is promised to the person who prays intensely and continuously for the gift of God’s Spirit. Purpose, power, peace. These are promised to all who would humble themselves, open themselves and pray.
1. (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2001), pp. 92-94.
2. Mixed Blessings, (Cambridge, MA: Cowley Publications, 1986), pp. 99-100.
3. Zig Ziglar, Better Than Good (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, Inc., 2006 ).
4. Robert S. Crilley; Dallas A. Brauninger; Gary L. Carver, Sermons On The Second Readings, “Series I, Cycle C” (CSS Publishing), p. 56.