DWM-14 & WFF-20 & WFP-17
Short Clip
What Happens When Parents Learn to Pray?
1 Samuel 12:23
One of my great heroes of the faith is a missionary who lived from 1824-1907. His name was John Paton, and he was just like any other child on this planet except for two observable truths: he had parents who learned how to pray, and he responded to God.
As parents, we canāt make our children respond, but we can ask God to stir their hearts, draw them close, and make them into great and useful tools.
Is that what you are doing moms and dads? There is nothing you can do other than pray. It will change YOUR life and in the long run, it will transform your children. God never said He will judge us on how our children turn out, only on how we raised them!
Listen to the life of John Paton, born in a āfarm cottage not far from Dumfries, Scotland, May 24, 1824. He was the eldest of eleven children. After some snatches of elementary education, he set out to learn the trade of his father — the manufacture of stockings. For fourteen hours a day, he manipulated one of the six “stocking frames” in his father’s workshop, using for study most of the two hours allotted each day for the eating of his mealsā.
To learn the secret of his life as a pioneer missionary is to learn of the power of his parentās prayers for him. Remember that prayer catapults us to the frontiers of whatever God is doing around the earth, and that is exactly what John Paton had been taught by example.
āIt was New Year’s Day, 1861, on the island of Tanna, in the New Hebrides. The missionaries had spent the day taking medicine, food, and water to the villagers, hundreds of whom were smitten down with a virulent type of measles. In the evening, the missionaries knelt in the mission house in a fervent prayer of consecration of their all to Christ and of the petition for the salvation of the cannibals among whom they lived. They solemnly committed themselves to the protecting presence of their Lord, not knowing that even then the house was surrounded by fierce savages, armed with clubs, killing-stones and muskets, determined to slay and eat the foreigners whose God, they believed, had brought disease, hurricanes, and other troubles upon them.
After the worship, the younger missionary stepped out of the door to go to his own house close by. Instantly he was attacked and fell to the ground screaming, “Look out! They are trying to kill us!” Rushing to the door the older missionary shouted to the savages, “Yahweh God sees you and will punish you for trying to murder His servants.” Two cannibals swung their ponderous clubs and struck at him, but missed, whereupon the entire company fled into the bush.
The younger missionary was in such a state of excitement that for days he was unable to sleep. In fact, his nervous system was unhinged by the shock of the attack, his mind gave way under the apprehension of being killed and eaten by savages, and in three weeks he died. The older missionary had already survived many such attacks on his life and was destined to survive many more. John G. Paton — for such was his name — found in the presence of his Lord the antidote to fear and the assurance that his life was immortal until his work was accomplished. “During the crisis,” he says in his Autobiography, “I felt calm and firm of soul, standing unafraid and with my whole weight on the promise, ‘Lo, I am with you always..”
What prepared John G. Paton for that kind of perseverance ā another fifty years of rugged, faithful missionary labor? His parentās prayers. Paton’s father, James, was converted at seventeen and immediately convinced his mother and father that the family should have morning and evening prayer together.