(2444)
Those who wait on the Lord shall renew their strength. How many of us really expect an answer to our prayers? How many of us wait for God as they who wait on the morning? Yet it is this expectant attitude of the soul resting upon the divine promise that triumphs over hindrances. There is an example of this in the life of Charles Kingsley. When a young man, he had become engaged to a beautiful girl to whom he had given his whole love. But her parents deemed him an unsuitable match, and they forbade absolutely all communication between the two young people for two years, which were to Kingsley the darkest and most terrible in his life. But in his diary he tells us that during that period he lived on one verse, Mark 11:24, “Therefore I say unto you what things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them.” Before the two years were over, Kingsley’s prayer was answered, and the girl became his wife.—Donald Sage Mackay, “The Religion of the Threshold,” page 296.
(2445)
PRAYER, AVAILING
In the first parish where I labored lived a man who was not only agnostic in his attitude toward things religious, but even derided them, and was wont to chaff his wife on her devotion to her Church. The wife, however, went on her quiet but earnest way, living out her religion in the home. One morning very early the husband awoke and discovered his wife beside his bed absorbed in whispered prayer. Her pale, upturned face was fixt with intensity upon the Invisible, and her warm hand was resting upon his own, she supposing him to be asleep. As the husband’s eyes opened on the unexpected scene, the suggestion came like a flash to his soul, “My wife’s God is more real to her than her husband is. If she is so earnest for my welfare as to rise at such an hour and pray alone for me, it is time I had some care for my own soul”; and he instantly arose from his bed, knelt beside her and added his own prayer to hers. He gave his heart to God on the spot, and that very morning came to the early meeting at the church and announced his change of heart; the next Sabbath he united with the Church.—H. C. Mabie, “Methods in Evangelism.”
(2446)
PRAYER BY GREAT LEADERS
The following is from The Saturday Evening Post:
At the critical hours of American history when the noonday sky was midnight and the atmosphere saturated with murk—where do we find our great American leaders unable by human eyes to see before them? We find them, do we not? on their knees beseeching divine guidance and groping for a clasp of the Unseen Hand which would lead them and this people into the light again. The whole winter of the American troops at Valley Forge is an historical panorama of heroism, self-denial, and sacrifice. Yet every noble incident of that season of doom and dread furnishes but details of the background for the great central picture which the American mind loves to dwell upon—Washington on his knees at Valley Forge. It was Lincoln who in 1864 declared: “God bless the churches, and blest be God who in this hour giveth us the churches.” And Washington, in 1789, immediately after he was made the first President of the republic, wrote to the bishops of the Methodist Church: