Predictably, those from history that have shown the supernatural intervention of God time and time again—predictably those people are men and women of prayer. And that's really what I wanted to do. I tried to test these things against reality as I went back and tried to find those people who seemed to have altered the course of history to some extent, and to find out what impact they played; why they played that impact. It’s very interesting that this thing keeps coming back up and up again and that is their fervency and perseverance in prayer.
What I want to show you as we talk about some actual people that you could actually reach out and touch is that they are people of like passions as we are. They are people as James would say, they are just men like us that God used those people to accomplish a lot of tremendous things. That it is possible in a human being’s life to do the things that Jesus did. And that’s why I want to share these things because they really motivated me.
A man named Charles Simeon used to pray every morning from 4am to 8am. It’s possible to do that. It was said that one could always point out George Washington in Congress because he was the one that dropped to his knees in fervent prayer during a session of Congress—interesting kind of thing. John Wesley prayed from 4am to 6am every morning and still had time to preach 40,000 sermons, to write 231 books, and travel 250,000 miles on horseback. Prayed two hours every morning and, of course, his name actually kept England out of revolution it seems.
John Fletcher was said to have stained the walls with the breath of his all-night prayers. He frequently stayed up all night praying, and it literally stained the walls in the room where he was in. This is a quote from John Fletcher, “I would not rise from my seat without lifting my heart to God." Now, I ask if that’s your position in prayer—that you won't even stand up as we are about to leave this building without lifting your heart in prayer? Something he did pretty frequently that was kind of interesting—maybe we should start that? Whenever he met a fellow disciple on the road the question that he would always ask them when he got close enough to them ask them. "Did I meet you in prayer? Were you praying when I bumped into you?" That was a common greeting that he always offered those people that he knew that were disciples of Christ. “Are you praying? Where's your life at?”
Martin Luther said, “If I fail to spend two hours in prayer each morning, the devil gets the victory.” Now that’s true of a man of the word as he was. If you read anything that he has written you'll know that that man was ready to lay down his life for the cause of Christ no matter what else you may think of him. Certainly we may not agree with anybody on every point, but that man had courage and was willing to sacrifice his life for his conviction of what Christianity is about. That man said, “If I fail to spend two hours in prayer each morning the devil gets the victory.”
Francis Asbury was born in England and pretty quickly moved to the United States and spent a lot of years here. He use to pray two hours every morning. A man named Joseph Elaine prayed from 4am to 8am every morning. He got up late one morning and sort of overslept. One of his famous quotes is, "How the noise of the blacksmiths shames me. Does not my master deserve better than their master?" He got up and heard the blacksmiths banging away on their anvils and he said, "How embarrassing this is! Does not my master deserve more than their earthly masters? Why should they get up before I do? How embarrassing to my Lord.”
The Queen of England named “Bloody Mary” back in the 1500’s said, “I fear no man; I only fear the prayers of John Knox.” Now John Knox was the same person, by the way, that said, "I don't know how anybody could lay in bed all night and not rise to pray even once.” How can a person go to bed at midnight and get up at 6AM and sleep all that time without at least getting up a couple of times to pray? And now the Queen of England who has the world in the palm of her hands said, “I fear NOTHING except one thing—the prayers of John Knox.”
John Welsh prayed eight to ten hours every day, and his wife was not a big fan of that. She used to rebuke him when she found him lying on the floor weeping in prayer—but eight to ten hours every day. Rees Howells, according to his wife, was one time faced with a massive problem in his life and in the church. He prayed twelve hours a day for eleven months until there was an answer to that prayer, and things came into being in a way that was harmonizing with God.
A guy named Edward Payson was from Portland, Oregon. It is said that when they were preparing his body for burial they found the same thing they did with the Lord’s brother, James—that he had these massive calluses on his knees, and it was almost sagging from the weight of the calluses on his knees. This was in Portland, Oregon, not some medieval time and place, but in Portland, Oregon. When they went into his bedroom, they found grooves cut into the floor 6 or 7 inches long where his knees—in his fervency in prayer he would rock back and forth on the floor. It actually carved grooves in the floor where he prayed at night. Maybe you can understand now why he had those calluses on his knees. He was a man of God, and a man devoted to prayer.
A woman named Susanna Wesley—who was the mother of John Wesley and also mother of Charles Wesley, who was the author of a massive percentage of the songs in that song book you've got in front of you there. She had twelve children, as I remember. She use to pray for over an hour a day. The way she did that was that she took a veil, and she put it over her head and would lay her head down on the table. Whenever the children in the family saw that she had this veil over her head they knew that, “We do not disturb mother now,” and the children just backed away from her. They knew that prayer was very, very important to their mother. They grew up with that same intention, with that same motivation. If your children don't see you in prayer, don't expect for them to ever be that way either.
James Dunkin preached a sermon that just totally destroyed all the people in the room. Someone came up after him and said, “Where did you get the supernatural power for this sermon? We have never heard anything like this in our lives.” He said it came from thirteen hours of consecutive prayer. There was the answer—not in Kittles and Vines and all those things, but in his relationship with the Father.
An old-timer, Livingston of Shots, twice preached with such power that 500 people were brought to Christ in that one sitting. And just by pure coincidence I'm sure, both times were the only two times he ever spent all night in prayer preceding delivering a sermon. Charles Finney spent a full day in the woods fasting and praying before he went to preach at a congregation that was known to be as dead as nails. He went into that sermon prepared after a full day of fasting and praying in the woods. Every single person history records—every person except for one fell on their face in the aisles. They were crying and weeping and asking for God’s mercy with such a loud moan that he finally had to stop the sermon because no one could hear him. Now that happened after a full day of praying to God and fasting in prayer.
David Brainerd was a man whose heart was for the American Indians. He was back in the times of the Revolution. He saw these American Indians and their life styles of heathenism. He devoted his life to converting the Indians to Christ. Here is a quote from his diary: “I got up in the morning, and the Indians were still committing adultery and drinking and beating their tom-toms and shouting. I prayed from half an hour before sunrise until half an hour before sunset. There was nowhere to pray in the Indian camp. I went into the woods and knelt in the snow; it was up to my chin.” Bear in mind he's gone out into the woods. There's no heater there. All he's got on and all he owned was a rawhide robe with a leather rope around him. That's all he owned. He went out into the woods with snow up to his chin. He said, “I wrestled in prayer until half an hour before sunset. I could only touch the snow with the tips of my fingers. The heat of my body had melted the snow.” He finished that time of wrestling in prayer and all around him no longer was the snow up to his chin. He could just barely touch the snow from the fervency of his prayer and his body heat from being out in that snow. Now I also ought to add this, the man weighed 95 pounds and had tuberculosis when he was doing that. That was the price he was willing to pay for those Indians. Actually when he left that Indian community those people had God-honoring marriages. They were people of prayer. They were people who knew the word of God. And these so-called “savages” were converted wholly to Christ, and their lives reflected that. He didn't pray in vain.
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