“The effective, fervent prayer of a righteous man avails much.” James 5:16
This year, decide you are going to be a person of prayer.
A family got a new little pet kitten that all of them loved and adored. One day, they were out playing in the front yard with the kitten, and it quickly ran up a tree, got out on a limb, slipped, and was barely holding on by its front claws. The little kitten didn’t even have enough body strength to pull itself up. The father, who happened to be a pastor, came running over and said, “Oh, I can fix this.” He backed his car up to the small tree, tied a rope to the fender, and then tied the rope around the tree. He told his family, “I’m going to pull the tree back real slow. And when I do, I want you to reach up and grab that little kitten when I get it down far enough.” Slowly, he began to pull the car away, and the tree started bending. Everything was going just as planned when, all of a sudden, the rope broke. The kitten flew way into the air and disappeared. Two weeks later, the pastor and his wife went to visit a family in their church. They knocked on the door, and the mother invited them in. And right there was the beautiful little kitten! It was the same little kitten they had lost two weeks before. And so the pastor, not wanting to put the woman on the spot, said, “Well, what a beautiful kitten. How long have you had it?” And she said, “Pastor, we’ve had that cat about two weeks, but you will not believe how it came into our family. Little Annie, my daughter, had been begging me to get her a cat. Day and night, for weeks, she’s been asking. One day, I had all I could take and said, “Honey, here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to get down on our knees right here in this garden. And if the Lord Jesus wants you to have a kitty cat, He’s gonna send you a kitty cat all the way from Heaven.”
What some people would call a coincidence was really an answer to prayer. When we pray, “coincidences” happen. When we don’t, they don’t happen. That’s why you need to take on the PUSH philosophy in your prayer life. PUSH stands for “pray until something happens.” Have you ever heard someone say, “What a coincidence that I was unemployed and somebody randomly offered me a job.” It’s amazing how many so-called coincidences come into some people’s lives, and other people never have them. This year, pray until something happens. Don’t just pray a day, a week, or a month. But pray until you receive the answer. God responds to the faithful prayers of His people.
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