Turn - Max Lucado [6]
The paralytic might be gulping. (“Don’t drop me!”)
The homeowner might be groaning. (De-roofing is decidedly antisocial.)
But Christ? Don’t you think He is smiling? Their faith stirs His strength. He heals the man. The paralytic leaves the house with a clean soul and a strong body, all because friends brought him to Christ.
FAITHFUL FRIENDS DO THIS. FAITHFUL FRIENDS CARRY STRUGGLERS INTO GOD’S SHADOW. WHEN THEY DO, HE RESPONDS.
How? When? The four men didn’t know. We don’t know. But we know this:
“When a believing person prays, great things happen.”
(James 5:16, NCV)
IMITATE THOSE FRIENDS, WON’T YOU?
Turn your heart to God in prayer. Carry your friends and family into the presence of God.
Lay our great nation at His feet. And take God at His word.
IF GOD’S PEOPLE DELIBERATELY, STRATEGICALLY, CEASELESSLY LIFTED THIS COUNTRY TO GOD IN PRAYER, WHAT WOULD HAPPEN?
We needn’t guess at the answer. “If my people…will humble themselves and pray…then will I hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and will heal their land” (2 Chronicles 7:14).
Scripture insists that God has hardwired the universe in such a way that He works primarily through prayer. God has set up creation so that the way He does His work is through the prayers of His children. At the moment we pray, we become subject to the most powerful force in the universe.
—David Jeremiah, The Prayer Matrix, p. 4
“If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and will heal their land.”
(2 Chronicles 7:14)
TURN # 3
The crew of the HMS Bounty had taken all they could take. Goaded by the cruelty of Captain Bligh, they seized control of the ship. They gave the captain and his faithfuls a boat, a push, and watched them float out to sea.
In the spring of 1789, the mutinous sailors settled on Pitcairn Island, a tiny dot in the South Pacific. The mutineers burned the ship, took Tahitian wives, and recruited Tahitian workers. It had the makings of a tropical paradise.
But they turned it into a living hell.
The sailors elevated no standard, no morals, no laws. They stirred a cesspool of adultery, violence, and drunkenness. Within a decade, the inevitable occurred. The natives attacked the settlers. Only one mutineer survived: Alexander Smith.
Left on a two-square-mile island, surrounded by natives and half-breed children, he did something remarkable. He began to read a Bible crew members had salvaged from the Bounty. (Today that Bible can be seen in the New York City Museum.) “When I came to the life of Jesus,” Smith later explained to his superiors, “my heart began to open like doors swingin’ apart. Once I was sure that God was a loving and merciful Father to them that repent, it seemed to me I could feel His very presence, sir, and I grew more sure every day of His guiding hand”3
Scripture transformed not just Smith, but the entire island. When the British navy discovered Pitcairn Island in 1808, its order and decency astonished them. Smith was spared, and the name Pitcairn became a byword for piety in the nineteenth century.
From immorality to piety. What made the difference? The Bible.
History offers a concordant chorus. Psychologist William James affirmed, “The Bible contains more true sublimity, more exquisite beauty, more morality, more important history, and finer stains of poetry and eloquence than can be collected from all other books, in whatever age or language they have been written.”
Sir William Gladstone, prime minister of England, stated. “I have known ninety-five great men of the world in my time. And of these, eighty-seven were followers of the Bible.”
President John Quincy Adams declared, “The Bible is the book of all others to read at all ages and in all conditions of human life.”
No one remembers philosopher Immanuel Kant for orthodox religion, yet he confessed, “The existence of the Bible as a book