Pray for Missionaries and Believe

SEVEN MISSIONARIES AND THEIR FAMILIES
HOUSED, FED, AND CLOTHED THROUGH PRAYER

This is one of the leading camps of the great Southwest. The tabernacle has a seating capacity of thirty-seven hundred; the choir loft five hundred. Here we hear the best singers of the world. We have seen the thousands moved not only to tears by the great singers, but to holy enthusiasm and to much rejoicing. We have seen 25,000 people in front of and around the preacher; they come from all parts. Several hundred camp in shacks and tents and at all hours one hears the voice of prayer, praise, and rejoicing. The people are of the common classes, but honest and full of industry; they believe in God, in Jesus Christ and the operations of the Holy Ghost. They teach that Jesus Christ is stronger than the devil, in that He can undo anything old Splitfoot has ever done, that is, save His people from all sin.

They not only preach this, but in their humble homes, they honor Christ by a devout, commendable life -- commendable, may be, not in the eyes of man, but in the eyes of God. Man sees in us that for which he is looking; God looks at the motives. One may be full of mistakes and blunders, but have a good heart.

In a certain year the author was the leading preacher at this camp; he had a good opportunity to see these good people at close range, to study their methods and work, and all proved conclusively that they had been with Jesus. One Sunday morning, in the presence of twenty to thirty thousand people, the author had preached about ten minutes when that mighty preacher, Dr. A. A. Niles, went down into the aisle and picked up a rubber-tired invalid chair, with what, to us, looked like an invalid in it. He carried chair and invalid on to the platform, saying, "Mr. Harney, listen." We turned and looked into a very bright-faced woman. Her face was lit up with Heaven's light. She had an angelic expression. We felt that we were right in the presence of one of those quiet, unassuming holy women who had constant connection with the skies, who was always hitched up to the powerhouse, who could get through to God any minute. As we turned toward her, she threw up her hand shouting, "I have the Blessing." It was wonderful, it was melting. Stout men and women wept all over that great audience. She simply was living in the center of His will. It was not so much what she said as how she said it. She was simply swallowed up in the will of God. She had but one job and that was to please her Heavenly Father.

After preaching and exhorting, several scores rushed to the altar. She said to her chair woman, "Wheel me to the seekers," then she reached over and took one man by the shoulder, telling him to turn to her mourner's bench (the wheel of her chair), and soon he was shouting. She went to seven and all of them got through brightly.

After the service, I asked her for the privilege of going with her to dinner. I asked. "Are you never discouraged? Don't you look at other women with good limbs, a strong body, and wonder why you were so badly deformed? Do you ever bring any accusations against Him?"

She said, "Brother Harney, never, not once. I am rejoicing that I am just as I am. Had I been otherwise, I might have been like thousands of other women -- in sin, but praise the Lord! as it is, I am full of faith, hope, and salvation. I am doing a great work for God and lost humanity. I spend from two to three hours almost every day reading my Bible and in prayer. I am having the time of my life in serving the Lord, He is so good, so patient, so forbearing, so long-suffering with me. I am so unworthy of His great love and mercy. He simply fills my heart continuously with His perfect love, Had I been a strong woman, I could have been useless and fruitless. Have you ever thought how many able-bodied, bright-minded people are on the broad road to destruction? So I am praising God today, yes, I am really delighted, that I am just as I am, for my life is like a Florida flower garden, like a California orange grove. I am just as happy, just as contented as it is possible for mortal to be. I am perfectly satisfied, because I know that I am as God wanted me to be, and I am fulfilling His purpose relative to my life's work much better as I am than I could have done had I been a strong, able-bodied woman. I am living on the sunny side of the street.

"The Bible is the most interesting book I can study. Its pages loom up with beautiful promises before me as I read, until my soul is immersed and swallowed up in the warm gulf stream of His fullness. It becomes more precious day by day. I get so hungry to get alone before Him with the open Bible. How it feeds, how it strengthens, how it comforts. When the devil whispers, "Defeat awaits you," I just open the Bible and read how God conquered through Daniel, how God defeated the enemy through Gideon's three hundred, how God tore down the towering walls of Jericho by the blast of the rams' horns, then I feel like I could leap through a troop and with the jawbone of an ass slay a thousand. You know it isn't always with the strong that He conquers. Look at His disciples; they were unlettered men. Again, through the crowing of one rooster, God brought back into the fold the spokesman of the apostolic college of bishops. God takes the weak things to confound the mighty.

"You see in working through these simple channels, He gets all the glory, and He is jealous of having the glory and will use all who will give Him the glory. How could I be discouraged when my Lord is using me to do such a tremendous work? Today I have in foreign lands, working among the heathen, bringing hundreds of them to Christ, seven missionaries, and we are seeing annually hundreds of these poor, sin-cursed, devil-driven heathen lifted into the beautiful light of forgiveness, Oh, it is wonderful just to read my mail! How these missionaries thrill my very soul by telling me what great things our Christ is doing. Just a few weeks ago one of my men closed a month's campaign in which five or six thousand knelt for prayer and professed faith in God. Remember, it isn't hard to get a thousand people out at a six o'clock morning service.

We broke in by asking if her parents were millionaires; we wanted to know how she could carry on this great missionary work unless her parents were wealthy; how she could do so much and be thus deformed? She said, "My parents are dead and I have no wealthy kinsman who helps me, but I take my Bible and go before Him telling Him just how much money my men need. not how much they want, not how much they are urging me to send them, but, how much does He see they need to carry on His work. He has never failed to answer. When we pray we must get His mind and pray for the thing that will glorify Him most and bring the most fruits for His glory. Too many times we go to prayer without any forethought, without any burden, without any definite leading, hence, we get befogged, befuddled, and then it is that we are so easily misguided and misled and not a few times bring disrepute to His cause.

"I never pray until I first get quiet before Him and wait for His Holy Spirit to burden or to lead me out along the line He wants me to go, and then I hold on, wait, patiently wait, not getting in a hurry, wrestle, Jacob-like, until the break of day, fast and pray three days and nights, Esther-like, until I hear from God. When He sees in us no selfishness, no selfish purpose, that all that we plan to do is done wholly for His glory, then it is He will answer. And we must not make too much noise and give too much publicity, because it might bring inflation. We must be guarded and very cautious that our praying, preaching, testifying, singing and devotion to Him and His work are all done with an eye single to His glory, and never lift up before the people any talent that we may possess. Humility and meekness are rich graces, graces that will flood one's soul with Heaven's golden sunlight, causing one to ride the waves of perfect love continuously.

"My work is done through much prayer. He has always kept enough money in the treasury just to keep us going, and sometimes we have to wrestle a week before the clouds rift, but oh, what blessed victory comes into one's life with such waiting! what strength! how stalwart the faith! how towering the hope! how rich the experience that floods one's soul and carries him out into mid ocean, into the bottomless experience of a full salvation! It would never be for our good for God to answer us at all times quickly. We would grow lazy, become idle and lose out in the prayer life. God knows, for our good and His glory, that He must at times withhold the answer for a while. We never grow as much in grace as in one of these prayer battles. It is here that we make religious muscles, it is here we toughen fiber, it is here we become strong, stalwart warriors.

"Show me men of much prayer and we will always see men who move things for God and lost humanity. Look at A. B. Simpson, who prayed all night at Old Orchard, Me., and took a collection of over $100,000 next morning as a missionary offering. He got that by wrestling all night in heart agony. A few years ago this man of God had more missionaries in the field than all the rest of Christendom. God honors, blesses, and uses men who live on their faces."

That Sunday afternoon, as that blessed man of God, Ed Fergerson, was reading his text, this little woman threw up her hands and raised a shout, the dark clouds had rifted, she had prayed through and victory like a Niagara was sweeping her soul. One man jumped out of the choir, ran down the aisle and threw a twenty-dollar bill in her lap. Here came five others down one aisle, here came six sisters, and then a commotion, the power swept the audience, two to three hundred stood waving their handkerchiefs and rejoicing for the ten or fifteen minutes during which this hallelujah storm lasted.

This little woman kept looking up into His face saying, "Much obliged, Lord." Some two to three hundred dollars were pitched into her lap. She had been with Jesus, He knew her needs, we did not, and He answered in a most remarkable manner. The Lord knew that a little church was needed and that one of her men could do ten times the good if he had a church home, so here came this shower of money, but not until this saint had wrestled and cried -- prayed clear through.