A Special Prayer Meeting Four Years Later

A Special Prayer Meeting Four Years Later

Tim’s dad visited from Chicago and came to our men’s bible study. We chatted afterward and he offered his appreciation for our church in various ways. Then he reminded me of a special prayer meeting that was held four years ago this month. It was the prayer meeting when we asked God to bring a young woman back alive from near death.

Tim’s wife Katie, Steve’s daughter-in-law was in a coma after she had gone into cardiac arrest. Waiting for a kidney transplant, she was near death and the prospects were grim.

I was trying to be prayerfully expectant. But I was also preparing myself for the likelihood of performing a gut-wrenching funeral.

Our church’s prayer meeting was held and the sanctuary was full. We all prayed for Katie. We prayed for God to be glorified. But we also prayed that she would live and recover.

At the time someone else might have looked at it and thought that we were just doing the “sending out our thoughts and prayers” sentiment. To someone who doesn’t understand the relationship between God and his people, the prayer meeting would seem to be more about making the congregants feel better about themselves than the meeting being a realistic appeal to Someone who had the power and inclination to do something about it.

But we prayed. We prayed looking to the Lord. We prayed with open hands. We didn’t demand a formula. We didn’t tell God that we were owed anything. We didn’t make grand claims about how God had to act. We asked him to act freely, but to act in a specific way that we were requesting. If he chose to act in that way, he would get all the glory, for his choice would be his alone.

We knew that often in God’s economy, people pray, yet the material things they pray for do not come to pass. We recognize that in his sovereignty, there are other purposes and secret things which God is doing when our prayers don’t appear to be answered in the way that we prefer.

So everyone who prayed was a realist. But in being realists, we had come to see that the unseen God, our heavenly Father, was real. We could speak to him with a degree of boldness unimaginable, because the incarnate Son had made a way of access for us to speak openly and with bare hearts. The Spirit testified to us in the Word that what we were praying for was in keeping with the kinds of prayers God’s children should make to him.

So we prayed.

Two days later Katie woke up.

There were complications. There are ongoing sufferings and trials and pain. But she came back from the brink of death, she got a transplant, and she lives a more ‘normal’ life than she did before.

It’s easy to forget how significant this is. And it’s easy to forget the prayer meeting and the prayers that were offered to God for this sister. After four years, it’s good to remember that God is still God, he hears our prayers and he freely acts in ways beyond our expectation.

[Pastor Rob prayed about this same event at our prayer meeting after I wrote this. It was a special time of remembrance of the Lord’s mercies. It was good for the soul to remember in this way].

ACTIONS🥅🥅🥅🥅

1. Does your church have a prayer meeting? Smalls groups are great and one to one praying is wonderful, but is there a church-wide prayer meeting on a regular basis?

2. Do you go to that prayer meeting? Why or Why not?

3. Are we guilty of “getting so much done with so little prayer” (Sinclair Ferguson)? How would you gauge the quantity of your prayers privately and publicly? 

4. If you see yourself as relatively spiritually mature and that you have the liberty to miss the prayer meeting, have you thought about the significance of your presence there for the spiritual good of others?

RESOURCES 📖📖

The Prayer Meeting - Jeremy Walker (a very practical article that asks the right questions)

Only A Prayer Meeting - Charles Spurgeon. (classic booklet from Spurgeon).