Power of Prayer by Mrs. L. D. Avery-Stuttle

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Apr 29, 1913

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 40, No. 17.

Power of Prayer

By Mrs. L. D. Avery-Stuttle

WHAT has it not wrought?

It has soothed the weary spirit of man; it has brought from the heaven of heavens a balm for every ill, a medicine for every complaint. It has fed the hungry, not only with the bread of life, but with temporal bread as well.

It has cured the sick; it has healed the deadly malady of the leper; it has given sight to the blind and hearing to the deaf.

More than that: prayer has closed the mouths of lions; it has quenched the fires of the furnace heated seven times hotter than ordinarily. It has brought both fire and water from the far-off heavens. It has taken a man, unharmed and well, out of the belly of a whale, after he has been in the depths of the sea for three days and as many nights.

Prayer has opened prisons and released prisoners whose feet were securely bound in the stocks and whose chains were many and mighty; it has prevailed against all the powers of hell when everything else has failed. More than this: prayer has invaded the gloomy portals of the tomb. It has rebuked corruption and the worm—it has raised the dead!

Prayer provides for the needy, consoles the afflicted, gives strength to the famishing and power to the weak, and clothes the arm of man with such might that at his beck and call the very sun pauses in mid-heaven, and the wheels of nature turn backward.

How strange it seems, then, that we should need to be prompted as to our duty to pray! It is rarely necessary to remind a man, be he ever so careless, that it is time to go to bed, or that it is his duty to eat his dinner. O, why are we so lacking in simple, child-like confidence and love toward our best Friend?