“Prayer turns ordinary mortals into people of power. It brings power. It brings fire. It brings rain. It brings life. It brings God.”
[This quote is from Samuel Chadwick, a Wesleyan Methodist minister who served as President of the Wesleyan Methodist Conference, 1918–1919.]
At Mid-America Christian University, prayer is important to us, which is why we have a “Prevailing Prayer Wall.” (See Above.) You may recognize immediately the symbolic connection to the “Wailing Wall” in Jerusalem–both in the way the walls are made of stone and in the way prayer requests are folded up (or rolled up) and stuffed into the seams between the rocks. Our students, faculty and staff all believe that prayer changes things, and placing a request in the wall is an act of faith. It affirms that we believe God hears and answers our prayers. But, one might ask… “Is there a difference between simply “wailing” and offering a prevailing prayer?
A preacher who lived and taught at the beginning of the Nineteenth Century, Charles Grandison Finney, described prevailing prayer in this way: “Prevailing prayer is that which secures an answer. Saying prayers is not offering prevailing prayer. The prevalence of prayer does not depend so much on quantity as on quality.”
Yet, one might ask, “What is meant by quality?” In this context, quality most certainly means prayers that are accompanied by steadfast faith. After all, it was James, the brother of Jesus who said, “But when you ask, you must believe and not doubt, because the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind. That person should not expect to receive anything from the Lord” (James 1:6-7).
Renowned devotional writer Oswald Chambers had something significant to say about prevailing prayer. (As a “chaplain” myself, I especially relate to him because he moved to Egypt in 1915 to work as a YMCA chaplain ministering to British Commonwealth troops during World War I.) Here is what he had to say:
“When we lean to our own understanding and do away with prayer, we will fail in the eternal, because in the eternal we succeed only by prevailing prayer.
I agree wholeheartedly. We tell our students that the prayers they write and place in wall are confidential–and that is true. But one thing I do is collect three or four of them every day when I am at the college and I walk around with them in my pocket. Every time I feel them or look at them, I offer my own prayers to the ones of our students and employees.
While there will always be mysteries surrounding prayer, I choose to believe that the Lord our God hears and answers… sometimes his answer is “yes.” But other times it is “wait.” There are times when his answer is “yes, but not in the way you have requested it,” and sometimes his answer is “my way is better.” Truth be told, there are some prayers that we may not know the answer to until we have the veil torn away from our eyes in heaven. Even so, I pray. I believe many of you do, as well. No one said it more succinctly than the famous evangelist of the late 1800s D.L. Moody:
“Seek by prayer ‘to move the Arm that moves the world.”
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