Realtime Prayer

Transcript

Alright, thank you very much. And hello again, radio friends. How in the world are you? Are you doing all right? Oh, we can’t see each other. I may have made a mistake in not going on television years ago so that we’re limited to the still modern miracle of radio. But I pray every day that God’s love and His concern and caring and compassion and God’s wisdom and power may somehow come through my voice. And if there is any shred of that in this broadcast, if somehow you feel, “Oh, hey, here’s a man that cares and here’s a voice that’s speaking to me on behalf of the Savior”, if there’s some touch like that, then my prayer will have been answered. God bless you.

I hope everything is going well with you and as I often say, if you struck a rough day, look up and say. “Lord Jesus, see me through this,” and He will. “Call unto me,” the Bible says, “Call unto me, and I will answer thee, and show thee great and mighty things, which thou knowest not.” Form the habit of praying where you are, about what bothers you when it happens – habit. That’s the best thing that you can learn. Learn to be always, immediately in touch with your Heavenly Father.

The last time we got together, you and I were looking at Romans 14:17, “The kingdom of God is not meat and drink; but righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost.” I was asking the Lord for something that might illustrate and apply these truths – righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Ghost. You and I had come to the concept of peace just when quitting time arrived the last time we got together. Since that time, I picked up a bound manuscript that has been on the shelves of my library since 1944 and ‘45. An old cousin of mine, oh, sort of a great cousin, well, he would be a cousin, wouldn’t he? He was the son of my father’s sister. So that would make him a cousin. Alright. He was always so much older than I was that he seemed like an old man.

But he was Vice Principal of a large high school in Los Angeles. And for some strange reason, he got interested in me back in the 40’s and decided to sit down and type out some of the experiences that he had had in his teaching career and administrative work in relationship that is as it might apply to my ministry in winning people for Christ and nurturing them in the Christian faith and enlisting them for Christian service, that sort of a thing. And so I have maybe 200 or 300 pages of closely typewritten copy that he pounded out on his old Underwood No. 5, an old, old clunker of an Underwood that is being the tough machine that it is, still survived.

And he pounded them out and sent them my way. And I bound them in a binder and I have them and I look at them now and again. So it was that I picked up those pages and was leafing through them and I came to a section where there was sort of a parenthesis. He got talking about my father and my mother and what he knew of them when they lived in California. And then he told about the time that my mother took ill and went to the hospital and was operated upon. And in the hours that followed that operation, she developed a good deal of internal bleeding which they were not able to stop. A second hurry-up operation then was scheduled on top of the first to try somehow to staunch the flow of her life’s blood from those places within her that were hemorrhaging.

And this, again, was unsuccessful and so she slipped away into the glory and her last words was she looked up at my father and she said, “Well, I guess I’m going to have to leave you, dear,” and closed her eyes and was with the Lord. Well those were dreadful times of agony. My father said to his sister Aida, he said, “Aida, the light of my life has gone out.” And people said that he never was quite the same in some ways after the shock of losing the queen of his heart and the center of his life. Daisy Grey, his wife, had become to him the emotional anchor that he needed after having had a traumatic and painful boyhood.

He needed somebody to hold him steady and help him grow emotionally and spiritually and Daisy had done that. Now she was gone. Now, what? Well, all if this is found in what my cousin, Irvin, wrote me. And he said, on that day when my mother’s body was going to be taken from the funeral home to the church for a brief service before she would be brought back to Ohio for the body to be interred. And the near members of the family were standing about in that numb waiting period where you know you have to do the next thing but somehow you just can’t stand to think about it.

Everyone was standing about and my father went over to the open casket, took a long look at his Daisy and then, to everyone’s amazement, he sang by himself three verses and choruses of the hymn “Sweet Peace, The Gift of God’s Love.” “There comes to my heart one sweet strain, a glad and a joyous refrain, I sing it again and again, sweet peace, the gift of God’s love. Peace, peace, God’s peace, wonderful gift from above.” And he sang those verses steadily with a clear voice the cracked once or twice but otherwise went right on through with that testimony of a brave, gentle unflinching spirit that although the world and life had fallen apart for him and he now faced the monumental task of rearing Daisy’s and his two children in a way that would honor her Lord and that she might have done and with all of the sorrow that was his in that day, my cousin Irvin said he stood there with the light of heaven on his face and sang “Sweet Peace, The Gift of God’s Love.”

Paul says, the kingdom of God is not the things you do that are officially religious meat and drink, etc, not the things you do that are officially religious but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Ghost. You see, God’s peace is something more than just being able to take it. The world says keep a stiff upper lip, don’t cave in, don’t give up, pick yourself up, dust yourself off and go on again bravery the sublime almost unbelievable bravery of human nature under pressure is something that we know about but the peace of God goes so far beyond that there’s no comparison.

Yes, be brave; yes, stick to it; yes, refuse to give up; yes, remember that Paul says you’re knocked down but never knocked out; and with it all remember He hath said “I will never leave thee nor forsake thee.” And you have the presence of the living God with you this moment. That’s why Paul says in Philippians 4, in everything “let your requests be made known unto God.  And the peace of God, that passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.”

This is the continuing miracle of being kept from worry. When you begin to focus upon difficulties, worry takes over and short circuits, so to speak. Short circuits the flow of power through your life. When I was a student, I used to go down to the south side of Chicago to some of the electrical shops that were there at the time and I would buy components for radio sets, a baseboard with its holes drilled and a front panel and some condensers and some transformers and some sockets and some vacuum tubes and so on. These were before the days of transistors you understand.

And so it’s not that I’m old; it’s that I started young, okay? Anyhow, I would bring all those components back to my dormitory room, get out the soldering iron and the pliers and the tiny little wrenches, and I would out together a radio set which I would sell to some unsuspecting student and hoped to make a profit. Well, sometimes, sometimes, the thing wouldn’t work. And then I’d have to find out what was wrong and carefully I’d have to check over the circuit. Like as not, I would find that either through carelessness on my part or whatever had happened, there was a short circuit.

There was a wire that crossing another wire and, thus, shutting off the flow of the power that would produce the radio program through the loud speaker. And so when you removed the short circuit, then, you heard the program clearly. Now, worry does the same thing. It short circuits the flow of God’s power. When you focus on the difficulties instead of looking to God, you make it impossible for His power to flow through your life. But when you trust your blessed Lord to keep you, then you experience the peace that passes understanding.

Take any given situation and turn it over to your Lord. A hundred times a day, things happen that upset you even momentarily. When that happens, just at that instant, look heavenward and commit the matter to the Lord. That keeps you from exploding or collapsing as the case may be and gives God a chance to do something wonderful in spite of the small tragedy that may have befallen at the moment. You follow me? Form the habit of prayer where you are about what’s happening that minute. Commit things to the Lord as they happen. Don’t wait until afterwards but commit things to the Lord when they’re happening and let Him give you His perfect peace, sweet peace, the gift of God’s love. Oh, yes, you can have it by simply turning the situation over to your blessed Lord.

Dear Father, today, may we know Thy wonderful peace as we go through the days, in Jesus’ name, Amen.

Till I meet you once again by way of radio, walk with the King today and be a blessing!