Always Ready by Prayer
When a crisis strikes, you don’t have time to build yourself up in prayer and faith. Those who spend their time in the prayer closet with Jesus, though, are always ready.
A couple wrote to our ministry recently in a spirit that revealed they’d been with Jesus. Their 24-year-old daughter had been out with a friend when a madman kidnapped both young women. He murdered their daughter in a grisly fashion. The couple was in shock. Their friends and neighbors wondered, “How could any parent survive this kind of tragedy?”
Within that same hour, the Holy Spirit had come to the sorrowing couple, bringing supernatural comfort. Of course, in the painful days that followed, those grieving parents continued to ask God why, yet all the while they experienced divine rest and peace.
Everyone who knew these parents was astonished at their calmness, but that couple had been prepared for their moment of crisis. They’d known all along that God would never allow anything to happen to them without an underlying purpose. When the terrible news came, they didn’t fall apart because their faith was based on unshakable truths.
This couple lived out scripture’s words: “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear, even though the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea; though its waters roar and be troubled, though the mountains shake with its swelling. Selah” (Psalm 46:1-3, NKJV).
In fact, these parents and their surviving children began praying for the killer. The people in their town couldn’t accept it, but the godly couple spoke and taught of God’s ability to provide strength, no matter what they may face. The townspeople recognized their strength as coming only from Jesus. Soon they were saying about the couple, “They’re a miracle. Those are true Jesus people.”
How many of us are known the same way? How many of us have prepared in our prayer closet for years so that a crisis doesn’t knock us down? Let’s seek the Lord’s face now and strengthen ourselves in him, long before the trials strike.
