“Pastor, you’ll never believe who came to the meeting this evening!”
It was the opening night of an evangelistic series I was preaching at the newly opened community center in the town where I pastored. One of the members came up to me after the crowd had dispersed and began talking excitedly.
“There’s this woman who works on my team at the hospital and none of us can stand being around her. She belittles everyone and even cusses at us sometimes. She’s not a good worker. We’re all waiting for her to be fired any day now. And she came to the meeting tonight!”
“Aren’t you glad you invited her?” I replied with a smile.
The church member hung her head. “I didn’t invite her. She thinks I’m here because she invited me. She came to work on Thursday and held up the newspaper ad about the meetings and said, ‘I don’t know about the rest of you blankety-blanks, but I’m going to these meetings and I think you ought to go, too!’”
She kept coming to the meetings, five evenings a week for three weeks. She was one of the people who were baptized and joined the church family.
Some of the ladies in our church who loved her and discipled her found out her husband was an alcoholic and beat her every night when he came home drunk. That explained why she would go to work and beat up everyone with her words the next day.
They helped her find a safe place to stay until things could be resolved, and Jesus kept changing her from the inside out to become more like Him.
Who is on your prayer list? Does it include people who seem completely unlikely to ever change? Do you take their names to the throne room of heaven and ask the Jesus who died to change your heart to change their heart, too?
Why not take a few minutes right now to ask Jesus who to add to your prayer list? Why not pray that Jesus will perform a miracle in their hearts? Why not keep praying for them until the change comes? And why not thank Jesus for the change He is making in you toward them?
