Pray Purposefully Series

HoHum:

Story from Bob Hostetler in Red Letter Prayer Life: Two of my dearest friends in the world, Dave and Becky, told me the amazing story of their mission trip some years ago to the mountain town of San Luis, Honduras. They traveled as part of a combined medical and evangelistic team that served the people’s medical and spiritual needs with clinics and evangelistic services. One night after their arrival, Dave and Becky lay down to sleep on a couple of air mattresses in the back of a pickup truck covered with an old camper shell top. Suddenly, Becky heard a sound, like a snap or a click. She elbowed her husband, “What’s that?” “It’s just an animal,” Dave answered. He flipped on the flashlight and sat up. He pointed the light out the tiny camper window and looked out but saw nothing. He told Becky that everything looked quiet. He shut off the light and lay back down. A few seconds passed, and they heard the sound again. “There it is again,” Becky said. “There are animals out there, Becky,” he said, letting the irritation he felt creep into his voice. IT had been a long, tiring day, and they just needed sleep. Becky accepted his assurances, and they both eventually fell asleep. They finished the mission trip and returned home. Three months later, the missionary who had hosted them was back in the US on furlough and had come to a nearby church to speak. Dave and Becky went to see him. After the service, when the missionary saw them and greeted them, he said he wanted to talk to them. He led them to a private room and told them to sit down. “I have a story to tell you,” he said. He said that a few months after the mission team left San Luis, he returned to hold more evangelistic services there. One night, as he finished preaching and gave the invitation, 3 men walked forward together and and surrendered their lives to Jesus Christ. Afterward, one of the men stood in front of the congregation and told his story. He said that a few months earlier when a group of gringos had come to San Luis from America, he and his 2 friends had been drinking. The more they drank, the angrier they became at the outsiders who had invaded their town. “I got my gun,” the man said. “I went to where the gringos were staying. I saw a truck camper and was going to shoot whoever was sleeping in that camper. I snuck up to it and looked in the window. I saw a couple lying inside. I pointed my gun through the window at the man’s head and pulled the trigger. But the gun misfired.” He continued, “I heard them talking inside the truck and then a light came on. I ducked under the window and skirted against the side of the truck until the light went off. Then I stood and looked in the window again. I aimed at the man’s head and pulled the trigger. It misfired a second time! When that happened, suddenly a rush of fear came over me, and I ran away.” As the missionary told the story, Dave and Becky both remembered the night they hear the strange sounds outside their camper. Dave looked at Becky, then turned back to the missionary. “That’s exactly how it happened!” The man’s story fit exactly with their experience on the other side of that truck camper window, except that neither of them suspected that the sound they heard came from a gun that had twice been pointed at Dave’s head, only to misfire each time.

WBTU:

When Jesus taught His followers to pray, He told them to pray, “Deliver us from evil.” Recite the Model Prayer. This phrase is a 3 fold acknowledgment.

1. “Deliver us from evil” acknowledges the existence of evil. Jesus doesn’t pretend that evil is a state of mind or something we must rise above. On the contrary, Jesus tells us that we live in a fallen world- a world in which people try to kill one another. A world where a woman’s womb is a dangerous place to be. A world where people use planes as missiles to blow up buildings. A world where terrorists behead Christians and even people trying to help the Christians, where young girls are kidnapped from school and given as wives to terrorists. A world where militants use civilians as shields to protect them from gunfire. A world in which people steal from others, lie to others, hurt others.

2. “Deliver us from evil” acknowledges that we need deliverance. We don’t need to deny the evil that surrounds and threatens us. We don’t need to detach ourselves from the real world where evil seems all too prevalent. We need deliverance from it. We need to avoid and escape it. We need to be shielded from it or through it. We need something like David’s stones to defeat evil or the presence that protected the 3 Hebrews and enabled them to emerge unharmed from the fiery furnace.