This past week at Annual Conference, The Reverend Sue Nilson Kibbey, Director of Connectional Ministries for the West Ohio Annual Conference was our keynote speaker. Reverend Kibbey spoke twice during the conference. Both of her addresses were powerful and inspiring but the second, Tuesday afternoon, particularly spoke to me when she talked about prayer in general and breakthrough prayer in particular. As I listened to this talk, the basic outline for a sermon series on breakthrough prayer began to form in my mind. It has yet to fully take shape. I know it will during the next few weeks so we are going to begin moving forward with what I have thus far.
Reverend Kibbey defined breakthrough prayer as prayer asking God to break through in a particular life or situation and challenged us to pray for breakthrough situations. She challenged us to imagine what it would look like to see God sized breakthroughs in even the most difficult situations. Can you even imagine what it would look like to see God breaking through in even the most difficult situations in all our lives? I for one can give a great deal of thought to how great that would be but do you know what? No matter how vivid my imagination, God breaking through to do great things in my life and in the lives of the people I know and love would be greater than anything my imagination could arrive upon. That is because, God’s power is so much greater than human imagination. We all have our hopes and dreams but God’s plans for our lives are so much greater than what we could ever imagine. What we need to do is let go and let God take control. What we need is a breakthrough. We need to pray that God breakthrough in our lives in a mighty and powerful way.
Betty owned a small, startup horse-training farm. She took in wild mustangs that had gotten into difficulty living in the desert plains. She would then gentle them enough to be put up for adoption.
As she tried to settle one particular mustang, Harpo, named for Harpo Marx, her voice was a lot steadier than she felt. Running a horse ranch isn’t easy and can be expensive. Betty’s husband Chuck had a trucking job that subsidized the horse ranch and things were not going well between Betty and Chuck and hadn’t been for a very long time even though they had been married for over 20 years.
When Harpo bolted from Betty’s approach, again, she decided it was time to call it a morning. Though it was noon, Chuck was making breakfast. He had worked all night and had slept in that morning. The two hadn’t hugged or kissed or even said a loving thing to each other in so long Betty couldn’t remember. Sometimes days would pass without them saying a word to each other.
The two had met in a singles Bible study at church. Chuck was a complete gentleman, unlike most of the men who had been in Betty’s life previously, including an abusive ex-husband and an abusive and womanizing father. Chuck listened and seemed to like Betty for Betty and when they were dating they never seemed to run out of things to talk about. After one date Chuck took Betty home and stood at the door talking for another hour before he finally said goodnight.
Betty had been a mess. After she and her first husband had split up she had gotten a restraining order against him. He responded by doing the unthinkable. He came to the house while Betty and the kids were away and committed suicide. She and the kids found him. As you can probably imagine, that left deep emotional scars on all of them.
From that moment Betty took on an attitude that said she was on her own. She tried to warn Chuck away but he was patient and persistent. They did get married and that is when things turned south. He thought she was too permissive with the kids. She thought he didn’t have enough appreciation for all they had been through. She thought he spent money too freely and he thought she was too controlling. Many of us know the story.
The hardest part for Betty was Chuck’s long road trips. There were overnight trips and trips where he would be gone for days at a time. Her imagination and memories of her womanizing father and all her mother went through crept into her mind. Her dad used to tell her mom he was working when he was really with another woman. Whenever Chuck was gone, she would wonder and many times would investigate bank statements, credit card statements and receipts, searching for clues of Chuck’s unfaithfulness. Though she never found anything, she continued to look.
Even after years of marriage, Betty still didn’t really trust Chuck and he hated it. They got into shouting matches when he came home. Even a grocery list could start an argument. As a result, they finally just stopped talking.
After Chuck had left the kitchen Betty went back in to make her a quick lunch that she took outside to eat. She stood, eating and watching Harpo run around the corral. Why couldn’t she reach this horse? Usually by this point she had at least gotten a hand on a horse’s shoulder. When that happened, she knew it was over. The horse trusted her. It just wasn’t working with Harpo. The horse didn’t trust her. “Trust me,” Betty whispered.
She suddenly stopped and realized, she didn’t trust Chuck. She never had. She was scared that Chuck didn’t love her, that he had never loved her and he would leave her just like her father and so many men who had been part of her life. Lord knows she had given him plenty of reason to go. In their last telephone conversation, another fight, she blurted out, “Why don’t you just leave? You know you want to.” First there was silence from Chuck. Then he simply said, “We need help,” and that was the end of their conversation. Now she was scared. Had she put an idea into Chuck’s head?
What Betty didn’t know, had never paid any attention to, Chuck was a man of prayer and, as we all know, prayer makes a difference. It makes a difference in our lives, in our families’ lives and in the lives of people we don’t even know.
Our lesson this morning is a story about the prayers of one woman. Hannah was childless. For women in the Biblical era, their whole identity, their whole personhood was tied to their husband and their children. A blessed woman was a woman not only with children but a woman with sons. Hannah had neither. Her husband Elkinah had two wives, Hannah and Pinnenah. Pinnenah had children. Not only did she have children, she had male children. She was blessed and she knew it and she never ceased in teasing and making fun of the childless Hannah. As I read this story I think what Pinnenah did is what today we might call bullying.
At the very least, Hannah was sad. She desperately wanted children. She wanted God’s favor. She wanted God’s blessing.
She was with her husband in Shiloh, the place where the tabernacle was located at the time, and after eating and drinking she rose and went to present herself to the Lord. She went to pray. The high priest, Eli was there and sat and watched as Hannah prayed, at first thinking her to be drunk but when learning she was not, in essence asks God to grant her request.
In many ways, when we read Hannah’s prayer, it sounds like a prayer for herself but it really isn’t. She prays that God will bless her with a son, but if she has such a son, she is going to turn around and give that son back to God. I can’t help but think, if she was praying for herself she would have asked God to give her a son to protect her life from what she was receiving at home. That was not her request. “Give me a son that I may give him back to you” was Hannah’s prayer to God.
What Hannah was asking for was, “breakthrough prayer.” Hannah wanted God to break through and change things in her family in ways that only God could break through and do something miraculous, something life-altering, life-changing. There is only so much a woman can do in order to have a baby and Hannah was already doing those things. She needed a God-sized intervention.
Hannah was praying for a breakthrough and that is exactly what she got. She prayed for a child she would give back to God and God granted her Samuel, a child for Hannah, a child she would raise and prepare for the service of God, a child she would give back to God, a child who would grow up to one day lead his people. If we continued on reading 1 Samuel beyond our lesson we can quickly see all these things that come to pass.
Breakthrough prayer can happen like that for any of us. We only need to ask God to break through, to break through to change our family, to break through to change lives around us, to break through to change us. What would it look like for God to change our families, for God to change our church, for God to change our friends, for God to change our city, for God to change us? What would it look like for God to break through?
What Betty didn’t know was Chuck had been praying for her for a long time. Chuck had prayed for God, in essence, to break through in Betty’s life. It wasn’t that Chuck thought he was beyond a break through himself, it wasn’t that he saw his own life as lacking fault, even in their relationship. Chuck knew Betty needed a breakthrough so she could find the ability to trust. Chuck wasn’t like Betty’s father or her ex-husband. He wasn’t planning on going anywhere and he needed Betty to know she could trust him. So he prayed.
For years Chuck prayed for a breakthrough. The breakthrough came that afternoon in Betty’s horse corral. Betty looked up at Harpo. “Trust me,” she whispered. As she stared into the horses’ eyes she understood why he was afraid. She understood because she was scared too.
Betty was scared Chuck didn’t love her and would leave and she would find herself alone and miserable. Mostly she was scared to let God have control. To her way of thinking God hadn’t protected her before, why should she trust God now?
She stared at the horse. If only Harpo could understand what she meant. That thought made her wonder. Was she misunderstanding things too? After 20 years, Chuck was still there. Surely if he wanted to leave he would be gone by now. And, he had said they needed help… Could that mean he thought their marriage was worth saving?
What other signs of Chuck’s faithfulness had she been missing? What other signs of God’s support had she ignored? Though only she and Harpo were there, it was as if she heard another voice in the corral echoing her words to Harpo, “Trust Me.”
She said the words again, gently to Harpo. Then she took a step toward the horse. Then another and another until she finally stood next to the horse with her hand on his shoulder. Harpo didn’t move. It was a start. Harpo was slowly trusting her.
In that moment Betty also realized if she wanted her marriage to work, she was going to have to trust too. She and Chuck went to their pastor for help. It wasn’t long before they were in marriage counseling. They also found a marriage-themed Bible study and these things started making a difference. It didn’t all happen overnight but it wasn’t long before these two were in a totally different place. It all started with Rick’s break through prayer.
Breakthrough prayer can happen for any of us. Things may not happen immediately, but they will happen, in God’s time. For Betty and Chuck it took years, but it happened.
I want to get you to do something. Take out your cell phone. I know, you have probably never been asked to do that in church before, but take it out. Most every cell phone has an alarm function on it. Take your cell phone out and set an alarm, a daily alarm for 6:36 P.M. When that alarm goes off, stop and pause for a few minutes to pray. In all our families there are situations we can’t fix, at least not by ourselves. We have family members who are sick. There are those who have wandered in various ways. Marital difficulties abound and so much more. It is time to ask God, no, let me rephrase that, it is past time to ask God to breakthrough and do work only as God can do the work, accomplishing what you and I never could.
We are about to come to the Lord’s Table. We are going to celebrate Holy Communion each week during this sermon series. This is a good place to start asking God for that breakthrough prayer. As you take time to pray at the altar after you receive this means of God’s grace, ask God to break through in your family. Pray that God will enter the scene to fix what is broken in ways only God can fix them. We all need to pray that God will break through the junk in all our lives to do work in a profound and mighty way.
I don’t know all the situations in your families that could use a God sized breakthrough. I don’t even know all the situations in my own family. But God does know every need before we even ask. And you know, I can’t even claim I know why God wants us to pray but I know God does ask that we pray. I also know prayer works. There are needs in and around us all, God sized needs where only a God breakthrough can make a difference and bring real change. Stop, drop, and pray. Ask God to break through. And, I also know this, when God does break through, you are going to know it because when God breaks through, everything is going to change.
