The coolness of prayer

Last spring, our church had a missions conference, and the main speaker was a man named Paul Kooistra. He is the head of the mission sending branch of our denomination, called Mission To the World. He is an amazing speaker, and our church had to book him, literally, several years in advance to get him to come speak. One of the sermons he preached was about prayer, and how often we Christians forget what an amazingly powerful thing it can be. Well, he really spoke to me that night and I want to share a little bit of what he spoke about. It had a profound impact on my prayer life. Maybe it will on yours too.

This was the verse that just hit me so hard:

James 5:17 "Elijah was a man with a nature like ours, and he prayed earnestly that it would not rain; and it did not rain on the land for three years and six months. And he prayed again, and the heavens gave rain, and the earth produced it's fruit."

Now, several things about that verse are very noteworthy, but this was the thing I could not get over Elijah had "a nature like ours." That means he was just like us! He had doubts, he had fears, he probably wondered if God could really make a difference. In fact, it didn't rain for such a long time (3 and 1/2 years!!!) that he probably wondered whether God had anything to do with it at all! Aren't we all just like that? Something miraculous happens, and we don't see that it was God, we just see it as the way things worked out that day. I know I have been guilty of that.

When I heard the sermon on prayer, I had been spending a lot of time studying through the Old Testament. So although I had not been reading about Elijah in particular, I had become well aware that the people recorded in the Old Testament were not superheros. They really were just ordinary people that God chose to use in extraordinary ways. And most of them had some pretty big problems in their lives. They were far from perfect people. (By the way, why do we give our kids the impression that the people in the Bible were somehow perfect and abnormaly great? I'll save that for another time :))

So there it was, Elijah, who was just a person like me, kept rain from the land for 3 1/2 years by praying. Stop and think about that for a little while. My daughter is 3 1/2 years old. That really put it in perspective for me. Prayer can do amazing, unexplainable, miraculous, extraordinary things. And we have the power to access prayer anytime, anywere for any reason! I hope all of you realize that I am not trying to tell you that God will do whatever you want Him to just because you prayed about it. Certainly not! But you can ask, and God can do it. And sometimes He will do it, just because we asked Him.

And Elijah's story gets even better. Picture this with me. Here is Elijah who has prayed every day for 3 and a half years that it would not rain. And it hasn't. Now all of a sudden he needs it to rain. Big time. I don't know about you, but I think I would be tempted to think that it might not rain again, ever. And I certainly would have issues of doubt about whether I could call down the rain anytime I needed just by praying. But that is EXACTLY what happened. No rain for three and a half years because Elijah prayed. Then, Elijah prayed one day, and it poured, the "heaven gave rain". Wow! How cool is that!

I was so encouraged by this. It inspired me to pray for really big things. And because this is already too long, I won't tell you my great story about an impossible thing that God did for me because I prayed about it. I will save that for another time when I just can't help myself. But let me tell you, it was really cool too.

Phillipians 4:1 "Therefore my beloved and longed for brethren, my joy and my crown, so stand fast in the Lord, beloved."