A Plea for Fervent and Prevailing Prayer
My nephew called me as they loaded my brother into an ambulance.
“He fell about 15 feet from a scaffolding and hit his head. He’s conscious now, but it looks bad.”
I was one of my nephew’s first calls. He knew we needed to ignite a fervent prayer movement on behalf of his father.
After extensive X-rays, the hospital in Marquette, MI, determined the need to airlift him to Green Bay, WI, to deal with his trauma. In the time it took to assess him, I had texted friends and sent out a request through our church prayer email list of about 150 people. Fervent prayer was set into motion and spread like wildfire as people kept forwarding the request.
When you deal with such an urgent need, you are consumed with the immediate. Suddenly, I didn’t care if I met a writing deadline or kept an appointment. All my energy and emotion were poured into intercession—and inviting others to join me.
The need for fervent and prevailing prayer is often ignited by personal tragedy. But should we not pray in the same way for a desperately broken nation and world? Should we not be consumed with crying out to God in sustained prayer for His mercy?
In This Issue
Bill Elliff describes this kind of prayer as a “Divine Exception.” It is unusual prayer that brings dramatic reversals and spiritual breakthroughs.
According to Kie Bowman, a recent survey shows that most Americans do indeed pray in quick spurts. But most do not pray with any urgency that moves the hand of God. He writes about the need for relentless persistence and outrageous faith.
Donna Gaines looks at the prayer life of Jesus and how He employed persistent and fervent prayer. She writes that if we could understand the reality of the spiritual realm and the warfare that envelops us, we would battle more intensely. If Jesus prayed with fervency and tears, so should we!
Spectacular Answers
God answered prayers for my brother in spectacular ways. Although he had surgery to replace shattered bones around his eye socket, he did not suffer major brain trauma. He broke eight ribs but had no other significant skeletal damage.
We took a family caravan to Green Bay when he was released from the hospital. Because there was a winter storm on the way, we booked ourselves into a hotel while we waited to get on the road toward home in Minnesota.
At the breakfast buffet the next morning, a woman who was staying at the hotel commented on my nephew’s t-shirt that said “Marquette, MI.” She was also from Marquette, and so was curious about why we were in Green Bay. She could not contain her surprise as she looked at my brother while we told her the story about his fall and recovery.
Get this—she was the X-ray technician in Marquette who took all the pictures of my brother’s broken body! And now we were eating breakfast at a table next to her in Green Bay. A God-moment.
She looked at my brother and could not believe he was the same man that she had cared for just a few days earlier. She testified to the power of urgent and fervent prayer!
May we embrace a renewed passion and zeal for prayer that yields spectacular answers. Let’s step up and persistently ask God to pour out His Spirit in our day.
CAROL MADISON is editor of Prayer Connect and author of Prayer That’s Caught and Taught.
