For two years we lived in O’Fallon, Missouri, while my husband Daniel served with the Public Health Service in St. Louis. On Sundays we drove the 30 miles to Troy, Missouri, to attend church with my mother and then go to her home for dinner. She always had a delicious meal prepared.

Wesley Duewel said that from his earliest memories, he knew a Spirit-filled, praying mother. He relayed the following about her experience of becoming Spirit-filled.

One Sunday we attended church with my in-laws and a speaker from the Gideons spoke using the familiar Scripture “God’s word would not return void.” That night after everyone else went to bed, I went to my study planning to read and meditate on that verse. The verse before that, though, caught my attention and drew me into it and changed my thinking forever.

One day Patty called saying, “I think the Holy Spirit wants me to visit Larry. Please pray. I’m afraid to go.”

“His love endures forever” appears to be a victory mantra of the Old Testament. The Israelites entered their battle against the men of Ammon, Moab, and Mount Seir singing:

“We’re a nation of quickaholics,” says Sue Monk Kidd in her book When the Heart Waits. We have fast-food restaurants, jiffy markets, instant coffee, express lanes, and express mail. We can get our glasses in an hour and our oil changed in ten minutes. Fast-food restaurants were timed in Pittsburgh and the winner took forty-six seconds to serve a hamburger, fries, and a soft drink. The loser, a slow three minutes.

One of the great tragedies of the 1980’s in Kansas City was the collapse of an overhead walkway in the fashionable Hyatt Regency hotel. Over a hundred people were killed when the unsupported walkway crashed under the weight of people swaying to music and fell on those dancing beneath it.

Satan has two lies he tells us to damage our confidence that God hears our prayer. First, he tells us that our prayers do such little good that it really doesn’t matter if we skip prayer.