A Secret Foundation

Metropolitan

January 20, 2023

A few years ago, I heard the story of an extremely influential and effective priest of our church. Curious of how this young priest became so influential, I called one of our senior bishops and asked him if he could tell me more about this young priest’s life.

All that I knew was that he was an ordinary simple man and yet, people from far and wide come to this priest for prayer and seeking counsel. Our senior bishop said he would check into it and let me know what he found out. When he called to tell me, he said, “There is nothing unusual about him. I found nothing special except for one thing—he gets up very early each morning and spends two or three hours in prayer and then an hour or two meditating on the Holy Scriptures. This habit began while he was studying in one of our Church Seminaries.”

Let me give another example. One morning I was talking to a senior priest of our church. He was traveling through different regions to meet with and appoint new workers to projects that had recently been started. In our conversation we were discussing who might be able to take a certain new position. I asked him, “What do you think about this particular young priest? He seems to be a really godly man. Why don’t we think about putting him in that position?”

We talked back and forth about this priest’s abilities, his lack of experience and the seriousness of the challenge in this new area of work. But finally we both agreed to trust him with the particular job. There was something about him that caused us to make that decision: He spends nearly four hours in prayer each day.

You see, prayer is God’s method of carrying out His purposes upon this earth. There is a mystery to the truth that God waits to hear and answer the prayers of His people. Remember what Jesus said in St Matthew 9:37–38? “The harvest is great, but the workers are few. So pray to the Lord who is in charge of the harvest; ask him to send more workers into his fields” (NLT).

There are many people all throughout Christian history who knew the power of prayer. John Hyde was one of them. In the late 1800s, he left his home in the West and set sail for a land far away. There he laboured, not just physically but, more importantly, in prayer. He was known to stay up late into the night praying, as well as rising very early each morning, crying out to God, “Give me souls, O God, or I die!” He knew that the strongholds the enemy had upon the people could only be broken through prayer. So, pray he did and because of his prayers, thousands of lives were touched and transformed!

Just like ‘Praying’ Hyde, we too can learn to pray and see God accomplish great things through our prayers. But we must learn. We could read every book ever written on prayer, but that won’t make us people of prayer. We learn to pray by doing it. In other words, we can all learn to pray effectively!

My brothers and sisters, we must grow into the life of prayer. As St. John Chrysostom, an early church father, said, “There is nothing more worthwhile than to pray to God and to converse with him, for prayer unites us with God as His companions”. Let us begin today, taking the first steps toward becoming people great in prayer. As we do, we will see incredible things happen in our lifetime. “The earnest prayer of a righteous person has great power and wonderful results” (St James 5:16, NLT).

I know firsthand just how effective the prayers of those who trust the Lord and continue in prayer are. For three and one-half years my mother fasted and prayed for the Lord to call one of her six sons to serve Him. One after the other, each of my brothers started their careers, with only me, the youngest and shyest, left as my mother’s last hope.

But when I was 16, the Lord answered my mother’s prayers and called me to serve Him. The call on my life is a direct result of her prayers.

As Blessed Augustine of Hippo once said, “Prayer is the key that opens heaven; the favors we ask descend upon us the very instant our prayers ascend to God.”

I believe Blessed Augustine, who once lived a life of sin far away from the Lord, first learned the importance of prayer and how to pray through the example he saw in his mother, Saint Monica. She was a beautiful woman of faith who poured herself into prayer. She prayed daily and intensely for her wayward son, Augustine for 17 years, and for her husband even longer. Her continual and persistent prayer ultimately paid off, as both of them turned totally from a life of sin and her son, Augustine, even became a great Christian theologian, philosopher and one of the Fathers of the Church. Blessed Augustine later declared that his mother’s resilience and dedication to prayer is what led him to become the man of God he was meant to be.

“Call to Me, and I will answer you, and show you great and mighty things, which you do not know” (Jeremiah 33:3). Let us receive His invitation and begin to walk this road of learning to pray.