Prayer Miracles

 

 

In Africa

 

                   Prayer is not the positions you are in, prayer is an attitude of mind that you practice every day.  I praise the Lord for the prayer relationship I have with Him.

       “When with earnestness and intensity we breathe a prayer in the name of Christ, there is in that very intensity a pledge from God that He is about to answer our prayer ‘exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think.’ Ephesians 3:20.” Christ’s Object Lessons. P 147.

             I could tell you many fantastic stories about answered prayer.  I have canoed at midnight down rivers with hippos and crocodiles.  I really prayed.  There were about fifteen Africans in the canoe with me, and they were so scared that they left marks of their fingernails in the gunnels of the canoe.

              Many times God has preserved my life in answer to prayer.  I will tell you one of my experiences.  I had been in Dar es-salaam, I worked in the Union Office and it was my job to help with the ingathering.  I had been soliciting the Asian merchants, gathering the funds for harvest ingathering.  I had been gone from home almost a month.  There was no air-conditioning in the room where we stayed, and it was stifling hot and humid.  Each night I put a little can of kerosene under each bed leg to keep the bugs off me at night.  After about thirty days of this.  I had taken all I could take.

                 I said to the Union Publishing man, who was with me: “Look, we are not finished, but I have had enough.  Let’s go back to the Union Office.  “So the next morning the three of us (we had an African with us) packed up and traveled in my car.  The shortest way home was through the Serengeti National Park, the biggest zoo in the world.  We had found a little short-cut to our homes.  All you had to do was cross a river that usually runs dry or nearly dry.

                   However, on this particular day, there had been a cloudburst and the river was running four feet high.  From experience, I knew that sometimes you could stand beside a river for days, waiting for it to go down so that you could get across.  We looked at the river for a while, and I said, "we are not going to get home tonight unless God works a miracle.  Let us pray.”  So we knelt down on that river bank, and we prayed that God would make the river go down.

         About an hour later the river was down two feet and we crossed over.  My Volkswagen bus drowned out just as we were going up the other side.  We dried the engine off and went on our way.  The main road went through the camp headquarters; the shortcut went down and around.  On that route, the grass was up to the windshield.  But we were so anxious to get home, we decided to take the shortcut anyway.

       We were going along and suddenly there was a tremendous rainstorm.  We were in red mud clear up to the axles and we were stuck!  It was late afternoon and we were in elephant and lion country!  It is not a place to spend the night!  So we climbed out of the car with our machetes.  We chopped some brush and put it under the wheels.  We could go just a little ways, then we would get out again and repeat the process. 

           But the sun was going down and I said, “We are not going to make it unless God works a miracle.  He helped us at the river, the only way we are going to get out of here tonight is if we get another miracle."  We were covered with red mud, by this time, from lying on our backs jacking the car up.  It was not a very comfortable situation and besides that, there were tsetse flies.

           Do you know anything about tsetse flies?  They are the meanest things the devil ever made through amalgamation.  They sting!  They carry sleeping sickness.  They leave a welt on you as big as your thumb.  After twenty or thirty of those bites, you get a headache and become nauseated.  And all of us had already been bitten quite a few times.  We were way off the main track, and no one knew where we were.  Walking through the bush at night in lion and elephant country is not an intelligent thing to do, so we knelt down in the red mud and asked God to work another miracle for us.  When I stood up, there was a bulldozer coming straight toward us!  I had never seen a bulldozer in the Serengeti national Park before, and I had been there hundreds of times (and I have not seen one since).  I ran over the little hill and down on the other side where he was and jumped up on the track.  I told him our plight and he pulled us out.

     The three of us made it to our homes that night.  We slept in comfortable beds.  We had nice baths.  We ate some good food that our wives prepared for us.  We also praised the Lord for the marvelous miracles.

       That is just one example of what prayer can do.  I could tell you more stories, but I just want to emphasize to you what it says in Christ’s Object Lessons, P 174,  “Amid the anthems of the celestial choir, God hears the cries of the weakest of human beings.”

 

Ron Spear