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The Evangelistic Power
Kristina Cooper shares how the “results” of intercessory prayer has helped convince some teenagers she knows that God is alive and active and working in their lives.
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For over five years now I have had teenagers from the estate where I live coming round to my house for baked beans and the odd prayer. Like most teenage boys they are not that spiritual and their attention span is very short. Thus most of my efforts at sharing the gospel have been pretty lacklustre and it can seem a waste of time. But then every so often something happens which shows me that God has his own way of getting through to them. Earlier this year I was told by friends from my church, how dangerous Clapham Junction, the famous railway station in our parish was getting, particularly for school children. The son of one of them had been badly beaten up and had his mobile phone stolen. Other children were equally worried about travelling through the station because of the “crew” that hung round the precincts, like modern day highwaymen looking for pickings. I had a word with the boys I knew, and asked them about this. They confirmed that there was indeed a gang of teenagers there who would descend on the station in the afternoons when they knew the children would be on their way back from school. As they were careful to only attack other school children, their activity had slipped below the radar of police concern. What could be done, I asked, to halt these attacks? The key they told me, would be simply to have a few uniformed policemen strategically dotted round the station during the crucial change-over hours. Their mere presence would be likely to deter any planned criminality. Anxious to bring God into the situation, I suggested to the boys that we pray and ask God to protect all those that came through the station and make it a safe place for travellers. Although they didn’t join in themselves, they obligingly bowed their heads while I said a few suitable prayers. The following day I had a word with my parish priest and asked him to talk to the community police officer about the possibility of a police presence at the station between 3-5 in the afternoons. I had forgotten all about this, however, when a couple of weeks later, the two teenagers whom I had originally mentioned this problem to, visited the flat. They had come to ask me to pray for them, as they had football trials that Friday with a club they were eager to join. I was delighted to see that they should be turning to God at such a time and found out why their faith levels in the power of prayer had risen so dramatically. They explained excitedly to me how God had been working and that since our prayers on their prior visit, the police were now regularly positioned at Clapham Junction station when the school children were passing through. I smiled inwardly thinking that the power of prayer had had a little help on that one! Then one of them added that as well as this a “Crew” from another part of town had paid a “visit” to the Junction and beat up the resident gang at the station so badly, that they had been forced to abandon it and were now afraid to go back. Thus for the first time in a long while the station was free from any gang domination. The boys saw this as a result of our prayers and were very impressed. Immediately some of those bloody stories from the Old Testament came to mind, of the Israelites setting off for battle, praising the Lord and finding when they arrived at the battlefield that their enemies had all killed each other and there was no need to fight! I don’t quite understand how all this all fits in with the power of intercessory prayer, but it seems too much of a co-incidence to airbrush out God’s mysterious hand in it all. It has certainly helped at least two teenagers to believe in the power of God at work in real ways in their life… and me too!
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