Reason #22 The Evidence for the Christian Faith from Answered Prayers
The
sheer abundance of credible reports of answers to prayer strongly discredits the
anti-supernatural worldviews of atheism.
"All I know is that when I pray,
coincidences happen.” For 2000 years now, Christians have been praying to God
for their “daily bread” and other needs, and “coincidences” keep happening as
they do. At some point, these phenomena become so numerous and striking that explanations
along the lines of randomness and coincidence are no longer intellectually
satisfying. The sheer preponderance of evidence is enough to overwhelm our
natural reluctance to believe.
Believers love to recall the day when
George Muller’s orphanage in Britain had so completely exhausted its food
supply and financial reserves that there was no food left for the orphans’ breakfast
and no funds left for buying groceries. They sat at the table anyway and were
praying for daily bread when a knock at their door brought the baker—who spent
a sleepless night worried about the orphans—carrying with him a generous supply
of bread. And a second knock on the door immediately afterwards brought the
milkman whose delivery wagon had broken down in front of the orphanage, making
it convenient for the milk to be “disposed of” by the orphans for free.
Similarly, when George and Sarah Clarke’s
Pacific Garden Mission in Chicago was in danger of being shuttered for their
inability to pay the rent, they appealed to God for help. On the day when their
rent was due, the Clarkes were astonished to wake up to a yard filled with the
kind of gourmet mushrooms coveted by Chicago restaurant owners and chefs. The
sale of the mushrooms was adequate to meet the Clarkes’ rent obligations, and
more curiously still, no similar mushroom crop had ever been seen on that
property before that day or since.
In the 1950s, Dr. Helen Roseveare’s work
took her to Nebobongo, in Congo, Africa, to establish a mission hospital. The
routine medical needs at that time were unending, but Helen also soon became distressed
over the plight of the victims of leprosy in her area. She was eager to help
these destitute people, but the financial needs of her clinic were already
taxed to the breaking point, and there seemed to be no way to fund a separate
endeavor for providing the long-term care leprosy patients would require. Finally,
when she could bear it no more, she ordered her first leprosy medical supplies,
praying that charitable donations might arrive from her supporters in time to
pay the bill at the end of the month. Sure enough, just before the bill came
due, a donation arrived from the U.S. marked as a contribution “for the leprosy
ministry.” The most uncanny detail associated with this event is that it took
five months for that mail to be delivered from the U.S. to Roseveare’s clinic
in Congo, and when that donation was first sent, there was no leprosy ministry
in Nebobongo, and no real reason to suppose there ever would be.
Henry W. Adams relays the account of a
pastor in the mountains of California, during the early 1900s, who ran
completely out of food and money one afternoon and began praying for God to
send some help for his family of seven. When it was almost time for dinner, a
Christian woman they had never seen before came to their door offering them a
large sack of flour with a most unusual explanation for her visit.
The nice woman once lived in the pastor’s
area, and she still owned a house in that area, but now lived in San Diego. She
was back in the area to visit her brother and, on an impulse, decided to look
in on her old house which had been sitting vacant for some time. There she
found the bag of flour, still perfectly good, and decided it would be a shame
to let it go to waste. Back in her buggy, she just felt inclined to give the
flour away, and she prayed for God to help her find a person in need of it.
When her horse turned off the main road without being directed to do so, and
then came to a stop in front of a particular house, she wondered if this was a
home that might need a sack of flour.
As impossible as it sounds, this is the
true account of how an ordinary horse was used to motivate a perfect stranger,
in possession of a large sack of flour, to knock on the door of a praying
pastor’s needy family.
These kinds of answers to prayer don’t
happen to believers every day, but they have been happening from time to time
in the Christian family for 2000 years. It may be convenient to regard an
isolated instance of answered prayer as a mere coincidence, but tens of
thousands of such instances? Not so.
No comments:
Post a Comment