The Prayer Of Faith - James 5:15-16 Series

One more example. A couple weeks ago Tom Moller was just telling us at the last elder meeting about a time when it happened to him, back when he was an elder at another church. A friend of his was in a coma after a bad car accident back in 1977. Here’s what Tom said: “One night … about a month and a half after the accident, I couldn't sleep and the words, ‘Rita, it's time to wake up now’ kept going through my head. … I was very fearful that I might be hearing God wrong and giving a new believer a false hope. So I tossed and turned, praying all night, but the words wouldn't leave my head.” The next morning he went straight to the hospital, and by the time he entered the hospital room, Tom said “there was no doubt whatsoever.” And here’s what happened: “In the hospital room, she seemed to give me signals that she could hear and understand what I was saying as I spoke to her about Jesus, and she signaled her agreement to receive Him for the forgiveness of her sins. And I delivered the words, ‘Rita, it’s time to wake up now.’ She started a real deep crying,… producing tears which flowed down her face (previously she had been basically motionless and unresponsive for over a month, so the tears were definitely something new.) For the next two and a half months she made regular progress up and out of the coma, coming fully out in January expressing the fact that she knew Jesus. I got to wondering not too long ago, actually, if ‘It's time to wake up now’ meant the coma, or salvation. Through this her husband also came to the Lord, and both are serving the Lord to this day.”

And for Tom, that was also a one-time event, so it seems to be fairly rare. Nothing like that has ever happened in my life that I can remember. But that may be because I wasn’t looking for it. I never used to believe that God worked this way, so I haven’t really been open to it. But now I am.

And I will say this – there have been times when it was clear to me that it was time to stop praying for something, because it wasn’t God’s will. I remember when we were all praying for my dad. There came a point when we all just kind of stopped asking for healing and started talking about heaven. God just seemed to make it clear to us that this was not an illness he was going to recover from.

If You Don’t Have the Certainty, Pray Anyway

One other observation - in each one of those stories we see something that matches what happened with Elijah, namely, the strong feeling of assurance does not come until after a season of significant prayer. Elijah prays six times, but isn’t confident about the rain until the seventh time. And that seems to be a fairly common experience – that this high level of confidence doesn’t come until after a long, arduous season of earnest, intensive prayer. You pray, and pray, and pray, and wrestle with God, and finally He puts in your heart the thing He wants to do.

I’ll give you an example – one more story. John Piper once asked his father about this. He said, “Have you ever prayed so long and so hard that before you got up off your knees you knew it was going to happen?” His dad said, “Yes, about five times in my life.” He told John about one of them. He was in the middle of an evangelistic crusade and no one was responding to the message. And so he wrestled in anguished prayer until about 2 o’clock in the morning. And he said, “At 2 AM God assured me that five people would respond the next night.” And John said, “Keep in mind - my dad is anti-charismatic. He could write a book titled ‘Power without Tongues’.” He wasn’t charismatic at all, but in this case he was convinced that God had assured him – five people would respond. The next night he preached, gave an invitation, and four people came forward. And he closed the service. Everyone left, but he just waited. And eventually, this person came back. He got halfway home, turned around and came back. And so John asked his dad, “Why don’t you pray like that all the time?” And his dad said, “If I did, I would be dead.” That’s how hard he wrestled that night. This is not the sort of thing you do day in and day out. It comes after significant prayer, which means you start praying before you have that confidence.