Power of Prayer

The morning after Hurricane Helene pummeled the eastern seaboard of the U.S., Thomas Witherspoon inspected the damage to his western North Carolina home. The night before, he listened to the wind whip down trees and snap power lines along the two-mile access road connecting his family to their few neighbors in Buncombe County.

Like the tens of thousands of other North Carolina residents, the power to Witherspoon’s neighborhood was completely out. It was impossible to communicate with the house down the road, let alone anyone several miles away. Unable to send text messages or make phone calls, radio became the one form of communication left in rural North Carolina. After fixing what he could on his own property, Witherspoon, a lifelong amateur radio enthusiast, began distributing handheld radios to his neighbors.

There are more than one million licensed radio amateurs in the U.S. like Witherspoon, according to an FCC spokesperson. Some amateur radio bands are short bands, reaching only small communities of people, while others cover hundreds and even thousands of miles. When communication infrastructure fails, like cellular networks, the FCC allows for amateur radio operators to assist in recovery efforts.

“Amateur radio is one of those things you get into because of your love of radio communications and the technical aspects of it or the community and the challenges that you can overcome,” Witherspoon says. “It's a lot of fun, but underlying all of that is this prime directive with amateur radio that it’s always there as emergency communications when all else fails.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

In times of disaster or tragedy, when all else fails, God is always accessible through prayer. He is attentive to our needs, possesses infinite resources, and offers comfort through his Word, as expressed in: Psalm 34:6 “This poor man cried, and the LORD heard him and saved him out of all his troubles.” 1 Peter 3:12 “For the eyes of the Lord are on the righteous, and his ears are open to their prayer.

It might be hard to imagine a world without cell phones, but there was most definitely a time when they remained the stuff of science fiction. That is, until 50 years ago (4/3/23), to be more exact. April 3 marks a half century of cell phones, albeit it took a little while for the technology powering Motorola engineer Martin Cooper’s DynaTAC cell phone to become a ubiquitous facet of everyday life.

Affectionately dubbed “the Brick,” the DynaTAC—short for Dynamic Total Area Coverage—contained 30 circuit boards, stood nine inches tall, and weighed 2.5 pounds. As Smithsonian Magazine notes in its own retrospective, the first truly mobile phone took approximately 10 hours to fully charge. Even then, conversations were capped at around 35 minutes before the Brick needed to refuel.

It would take another decade for Motorola to release a commercial cell phone. Not many could afford it at a $3,500 price point (roughly $10,600 by today’s standards). Four decades on, and there are now more phones than humans, with 18 billion devices estimated in service by 2025.

After 50 years and billions of phone calls, it might still be difficult to beat the very first cell phone chat from Cooper himself. As Smithsonian Magazine also recounts in its look back, the engineer and inventor allegedly called up the lead cell phone engineer at Motorola’s rival, AT&T. “I’m calling you from a cell phone. But a real cell phone! Personal, hand-held, portable cell phone.” His competitor’s reported response? Stunned silence, along with allegations that the phone call never took place.

Possible Preaching Angle:

The 50th anniversary of the cell phone reminds us of the tremendous communication opportunities now available to us. This technological marvel gives us instantaneous access to people all over the world for a monthly fee. This April also marks the 1,990th birthday of our superior connection to God (April 5, 33 AD). We have instant around the clock communication to confidently speak directly to God through our risen Lord (Heb. 4:14-16), with the added benefit of it being a lifetime prepaid plan (Heb. 9:11-27).

Ajanay Barnes and her roommate were craving ice cream one night, they used the grocery-shopping app Instacart to load up a basket at Walmart. They asked for strawberry shortcake ice cream. They received sausage, egg, and cheese breakfast rolls. After delivery, Instacart issued a refund. The breakfast rolls are uneaten in Ms. Barnes’s freezer. She said, “I was craving this one specific ice cream. I guess Walmart had other plans.”

Global supply chains are in turmoil and supermarket shelves are looking sparse. So, order packers are winging it. Roses swapped for bell peppers. A thermometer switched for mac and cheese. A rapid COVID test traded for Halls lozenges.

An Instacart spokeswoman said high demand and supply-chain issues have troubled many of its grocery partners. Instacart gives replacement recommendations, the spokeswoman said. Online shoppers have been left amused, puzzled, and annoyed. Rhett Mitter said, “As there’s been different supply-chain issues and shortages, you notice some weird, weird substitutions.”

Mr. Mitter said he needed horseradish to make a sauce for shrimp with his wife, Jenna. Despite ordering it from Whole Foods, the product wasn’t available. The substitute delivered? Beets. She said, “We joked about it. You can’t make cocktail sauce with Ketchup and beets.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

Delivery services are making some off-the-wall substitutions. But God never substitutes inferior products in answer to our prayer requests and there is never any supply issues with God. “If his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? (Matt 7:7-11; Luke 11:11-13). If God does substitute it is for our good and “immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine” (Eph. 3:20).

Author Skye Jethani tells the story of how Billy Graham modeled praying continually:

In 1982, the Today show in New York City scheduled an interview with Reverend Billy Graham. When he arrived at the studio, one of the program’s producers informed Graham’s assistant that a private room had been set aside for the reverend for prayer before the broadcast.

The assistant thanked the producer for the thoughtful gesture, but told him that Mr. Graham would not need the room. The producer was a bit shocked that a world-famous Christian leader would not wish to pray before being interviewed on live national television.

Graham’s assistant responded, “Mr. Graham started praying when he got up this morning, he prayed while eating breakfast, he prayed on the way over in the car, and he’ll probably be praying all the way through the interview.”

Breathing is not an activity that anyone is feeling confident about right now. We spend our days covering our mouths and noses with masks, struggling to inhale and exhale. COVID-19 has turned us into a planet of breath-obsessed people. But as hard as it might be to fathom now, there is a silver lining here: Breathing is a missing pillar of health, and our attention to it is long overdue.

Most of us misunderstand breathing. We see it as passive, something that we just do. Breathe, live; stop breathing, die. But breathing is not that simple and binary. How we breathe matters, too.

Inside the breath you just took, there are more molecules of air than there are grains of sand on all the world’s beaches. We each inhale and exhale some 30 pounds of these molecules every day—far more than we eat or drink. The way that we take in that air and expel it is as important as what we eat, how much we exercise, and the genes we’ve inherited.

Neurologists and pulmonologists at Stanford, Harvard, and other institutions found that breathing habits were directly related to physical and mental health. Breathing properly can allow us to live longer and healthier lives. Breathing poorly, by contrast, can exacerbate and sometimes cause a laundry list of chronic diseases: asthma, anxiety, hypertension, and more.

Possible Preaching Angle:

You wouldn't try to go through life holding your breath. So don't go through life without Bible reading and praying. Let your soul breathe. Oxygenate with the Bible; and breathe out the CO2 of prayer as you speak back to God your wonder, worry, and waiting. Keep the back and forth communion with him all day long.

George Wood was a superintendent of the US Assemblies of God. He shared the following story in a Preaching Today sermon:

When I was a boy, my sister left our home in Pennsylvania, and traveled to Central Bible College. She had a lifelong problem with her eyesight. She had 20 percent vision in one eye and 50 percent vision in the other, and wore thick, Coke-bottle glasses.

During a fall revival at Central Bible College, she had been praying at the altar and saw a vision of Jesus on the cross. She felt a voice, saying to her, "Doris, take off your glasses." In those years, if you wore glasses, you were prayed for on a regular basis—that you would be healed. My sister had had enough of that, so she said, "No."

Again, she felt the voice say to her, "Doris, take off your glasses."

Again, her response was, "No."

A third time, while she was having the vision of Jesus on the cross, she felt this voice say to her, "Doris, take off your glasses." She sensed it might be the Lord, so she prayed, "Lord, if I take these glasses off, I don't want to ever put them on again."

The vision disappeared, she opened her eyes, and she had perfect sight. It's been 50 years. She has never put on a pair of glasses to this day.

Dr. Helen Roseveare, missionary to the Congo, told the story of a mother on her mission station who died after giving birth to a premature baby. They tried to improvise an incubator, but the only hot water bottle they had was beyond repair. So, they prayed for the baby and for her little sister who was now an orphan. One of the girls responded, “Dear God, please send a hot water bottle today. Tomorrow will be too late. And dear Lord, send a doll for her sister so she won't feel so lonely.”

That afternoon a parcel arrived from England and the children watched as they opened it. To their surprise, under some clothing was a hot water bottle! Immediately the girl who had prayed dug deeper into the parcel. She was sure God would provide the doll she prayed for. And she was right! The Heavenly Father knew of the child's faith. Five months before that morning prayer, he had led a women’s church group to include both of those specific items.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Perhaps you have prayed many times for something. You have waited for the answer, but none has come. God knows your every need. be assured, an answer will come. “I will answer them before they even call to me. While they are still talking to me about their needs, I will go ahead and answer their prayers.” (Isa. 65:24)

In northeast Portland, Oregon, hope takes the form of a horse chestnut tree. It grows on the corner of Morris Street and 7th Avenue, and its branches are full of wishes. The tree grows on the property of Nicole Helprin, who first granted the tree its wishing status in 2013. Before leaving town, Helprin wrote out a few wishes and hung them on the tree, according to a story by a Portland news station. When she returned from her trip, the entire tree was covered in wishes like paper tinsel.

After that, Helprin posted instructions to the tree on a wooden clipboard. The note read, “This is a wishing tree. Please find a blank tag. Write your wish for you, a loved one, the neighborhood, etc.” Some wishes posted on the tree include, “I am wishing for … a year full of crepes,” “I wish for everlasting love,” “I wish for everyone to have what they need,” “I wish my dad was nice,” and “I wish to find my purpose and love for life again.”

Since then, the tree’s branches are never bare of wishes. The tree seems unaffected by its status as a stockpile of yearning. Sometimes, the tags blow off its branches and scatter around the neighborhood, perhaps an indication that they’ve just come true.

People of all ages scribble out desires, both public and private, and hang the tags on the tree in hopes that some greater power will fulfill them. But the majority seem to do with love--wishing for new love or longevity in the love they have. All the wishes are anonymous, making it easy to write something down and walk away.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Attributes of God; Love of God; Omniscience of God; Prayer to God – People have great longings and unmet needs but can only wish for fulfillment. The Christian has a loving Father in heaven who constantly hears our prayers and can do “far more than all we ask or imagine (Eph. 3:20-21).”

Good vibes have abounded over a viral video of two high school football players kneeling in prayer after the game. And while football players praying isn’t quite as novel a sight as it used to be, the jerseys told the story. Instead of teammates, the two young men had been opponents on the field.

Wide receiver Gage Smith had just led Sherman High School to a rousing victory over Mesquite West. But afterward, he knelt to pray with Mesquite’s Ty Jordan, whose mother was battling cancer. The two opponents had known each other from having played on a select 7-on-7 squad, and the final score was the last thing on either of their minds.

Smith said, “When you're playing the game, you're playing to win, and the other team is the enemy. But afterward, you still have respect for the other opponent. Football brings people together in so many different ways, and that was just one example of it that night.”

Possible Preaching Angle: We embody the love of Jesus when we can overlook petty differences to serve each other in times of need.

In C.S. Lewis’ book, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, a young girl Lucy, her brother Edmund, and their cousin Eustace are taken to Narnia where the Christ-figure is a lion named Aslan. The three of them go on a voyage and come to the island Where Dreams Come True. This is where nightmares come true. The ship’s crew is overcome by fear and begin to wildly row in the darkness. Each sailor hears a different terrifying noise: huge scissors, enemies crawling up the side of the ship, and gongs.

So what does Lucy do? She prays: “Aslan, Aslan, if ever you loved us at all, send us help now.” The darkness did not grow any less, but she began to feel a little—a very, very little—better. “After all, nothing has really happened to us yet,” she thought.

A ray of light falls on the ship and Lucy sees something in it like a cross. It is an albatross. The albatross circles them three times, lands on their mast, and then flies ahead of them leading their ship out of the darkness. But no one except Lucy knew that as [the albatross] circled the mast it had whispered to her, “Courage, dear heart,” and the voice was Aslan’s.

In a few moments the darkness turned into a greyness ahead. Then, almost before they dared to begin hoping, they had shot out into the sunlight and were in the warm, blue world again. And all at once everybody realized that there was nothing to be afraid of and never had been.

Possible Preaching Angles: May we never lose heart. May we hope that God will answer our prayers even when we’re tired and afraid. We pray so that we never lose heart and we never lose heart because we pray.

John Piper writes: “My own serious consideration of fasting as a spiritual discipline began as a result of visiting Dr. Joon Gon Kim in Seoul, Korea. ‘Is it true,’ I asked him, ‘that you spent 40 days in fasting prior to the evangelism crusade in 1980?’ ‘Yes,’ he responded, ‘it is true.’”

Dr. Kim was chairman of the crusade expected to bring a million people to Yoido Plaza. But six months before the meeting the police informed him they were revoking their permission for the crusade. Korea at that time was in political turmoil and Seoul was under martial law. The officers decided they could not take the risk of having so many people together in one place. So Dr. Kim and some associates went to a prayer mountain and there spent 40 days before God in prayer and fasting for the crusade. Then they returned and made their way to the police station. “Oh,” said the officer when he saw Dr. Kim, “we have changed our mind and you can have your meeting!”

David Fitch shares how the prayers of a church vanquished Satan's grip on a neighborhood:

In 2010 a group of eight people from two churches felt called to the Detroit Boulevard neighborhood of Sacramento. It was known as one of the most notorious crime-ridden neighborhoods in all of Sacramento. Each house in that neighborhood was a place of danger. Nonetheless this group of eight decided to walk through the neighborhood praying over each home and praying for the presence of Christ to reign over violence, addiction, and satanic oppression. They began walking through the neighborhood, praying over each home and rebuking the demonic strongholds of addiction and violence.

One of the eight, former Sacramento police officer and gang detective Michael Xiong, reported that "each time we prayed over the houses, we felt the weight of oppression becoming lighter." A woman from one of the houses confronted them. When she discovered they were praying for the community, she asked for healing, and God healed her.

The group soon physically moved into the neighborhood and started what they called Detroit Life Church. A couple years later a local newspaper, the Sacramento Bee, reported that there were no homicides, robberies, or sex crimes, and only one assault in Detroit Boulevard between 2013 and 2014. Detroit Boulevard had been transformed by a small group of people who began their ministry in the neighborhood by praying around houses, streets, and parks for the power of Satan to be vanquished. Kingdom prayer in body is what it means to be faithfully present to his presence in the world.

Charles Galbreath, a pastor of Clarendon Road Church in Brooklyn, tells the story of a black man gunned down by police in his neighborhood. Anger seethed in the neighborhood. Frustration from years of racial oppression was about to erupt in violence. Many people lined up to march down the main street while police gathered, expecting violence.

Charles and a group of pastors rushed to the gathering place and found themselves caught in the middle between the police and the people. Tensions were rising. Insults were being hurled across the divide. One side picked up rocks, the other side clutched their guns. The pastors feared for their lives; bullets could fly at any moment.

Galbreath said that some of the pastors spontaneously walked into the middle of the street between the two warring parties, bowed their heads, and started to pray. They implored God to visit this place. As Charles tells it, slowly the tension died down, the people put down the rocks, and the police took their hands off their holsters. Those who cared stayed. And without a shot fired or rock thrown, conversations began and God's presence appeared that night in that community. It was the beginning of something new God was doing to bring justice and reconciliation to a street corner.

Possible Preaching Angles: David Fitch adds, "Kingdom prayer does not remove us from the world but places us firmly in the middle of it even in the most violent, awkward, and hopeless circumstances, kingdom prayer open space for God's presence and strengthens those praying to walk faithfully in that presence."

Robert Morgan writes that as President William McKinley lay dying from an assassin's bullet in Buffalo, New York, in 1901, the Lord's Prayer was on his lips. Prayer had been a lifelong practice that guided McKinley through his political career and into the presidency. McKinley had been born into a devout Christian home fifty-eight years before, and born again at age fourteen. According to his pastor, A. D. Morton, young McKinley stood up during a youth meeting and said, "I have sinned; I want to be a Christian ... I give myself to the Savior who has done so much for me."

McKinley's mother, a woman of deep prayer, taught him to pray by example and encouragement, but his greatest lessons in prayer were forged under the pressures of his duties as President of the United States. One of his heaviest decisions arose in 1898 regarding the status of the Philippines after the Spanish-American War. One day, a delegation of church leaders came to the White House, and McKinley told them how he had decided to resolve the crisis in the Philippines.

"The truth is, I didn't want the Philippines," he said. "I did not know what to do. … I sought counsel from all sides—Democrats as well as Republicans—but got little help. … I walked the floor of the White House night after night until midnight, and I am not ashamed to tell you, gentlemen, that I went down on my knees and prayed Almighty God for light and guidance more than one night. And one night late it came to me this way."

McKinley relayed the strategy that developed in his mind as he prayed: that the Philippines should be taken seriously and helped, that the United States should "by God's grace do the very best we could by them as our fellow-men for whom Christ died." McKinley added, "And then I went to bed, and went to sleep and slept soundly."

Some say that prayer, and "the spiritual life", or "the inner life", or the soul's private love affair with God, is an unaffordable luxury today, or an irresponsible withdrawal from the pressing public problems of our poor, hurting world. I say just the opposite: that nothing, nothing is more relevant and responsible; that nothing else can ever cure our sick world except saints, and saints are never made except by prayer.

Nothing but saints can save our world because the deepest root of all the world's diseases is sin, and saints are the antibodies that fight sin.

Nothing but prayer can make saints because nothing but God can make saints, and we meet God in prayer. Prayer is the hospital for souls where we meet Doctor God.