Post by Eli Brayley on Mar 13, 2010 10:32:12 GMT -7
I just received this from a dear friend in Wales.
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An Infant's Prayer of Tears
Dick Funnell
Dear Friends and Prayers:
Yesterday morning a young couple from Cardiff came to visit us with their two young children, and afterwards I took them up to the see the chapel. When we got inside, their three month old baby started crying because he was hungry. It was such a beautiful sound!
This was the first time I had never heard an infant's cry inside the chapel, and echoing in the silence it was almost like a song of prayer. I was so deeply impacted by his tender crying that I began to weep too as I realized that this is what is missing here - people need to learn to cry out to the Lord with the same simplicity and honesty as this little child cried out for his mother's milk!
It was such a clear and clarion sound, and it almost seemed that much like this would be the sound of revival breaking out, with people crying out to God because of the sudden spiritual hunger coming upon them. Truly, our condition before our Creator is no different than that of a helpless baby, yet our absolute need and total dependence on Him gets quickly covered over with life's busyness and our reliance on "our own" abilities which we have received from Him in the first place.
I spontaneously prayed out that as people come into this place they would be convicted of their desperate and continuous need for God's mercy and grace. The simple truth of Jesus' words in Luke 18:17 says it very clearly, "Assuredly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will by no means enter it."
All of us as believers need to have this child-like crying out to God working daily in our lives, because apart from Him we can do nothing. How much more so then, for those who have never known Jesus? Most people can manage to get through their lives somehow or other, although impoverished without God's love. But as their end draws near, what then?
So it is like this starkly honest crying out to God that we can be praying for revival - for ourselves, for the church at large, and for a lost and dying world "having no hope and without God in the world."
Hungering that the lost might hunger after God,
Dick & Gladys
----------------
An Infant's Prayer of Tears
Dick Funnell
Dear Friends and Prayers:
Yesterday morning a young couple from Cardiff came to visit us with their two young children, and afterwards I took them up to the see the chapel. When we got inside, their three month old baby started crying because he was hungry. It was such a beautiful sound!
This was the first time I had never heard an infant's cry inside the chapel, and echoing in the silence it was almost like a song of prayer. I was so deeply impacted by his tender crying that I began to weep too as I realized that this is what is missing here - people need to learn to cry out to the Lord with the same simplicity and honesty as this little child cried out for his mother's milk!
It was such a clear and clarion sound, and it almost seemed that much like this would be the sound of revival breaking out, with people crying out to God because of the sudden spiritual hunger coming upon them. Truly, our condition before our Creator is no different than that of a helpless baby, yet our absolute need and total dependence on Him gets quickly covered over with life's busyness and our reliance on "our own" abilities which we have received from Him in the first place.
I spontaneously prayed out that as people come into this place they would be convicted of their desperate and continuous need for God's mercy and grace. The simple truth of Jesus' words in Luke 18:17 says it very clearly, "Assuredly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will by no means enter it."
All of us as believers need to have this child-like crying out to God working daily in our lives, because apart from Him we can do nothing. How much more so then, for those who have never known Jesus? Most people can manage to get through their lives somehow or other, although impoverished without God's love. But as their end draws near, what then?
So it is like this starkly honest crying out to God that we can be praying for revival - for ourselves, for the church at large, and for a lost and dying world "having no hope and without God in the world."
Hungering that the lost might hunger after God,
Dick & Gladys