One of the most wonderful verses in the whole of the Old Testament is Deuteronomy 4.29: ‘If from where you are you shall seek the Lord your God you shall find Him, if you seek Him with all your heart and all your soul.’ You will find God if you search for Him from just where you are! When you are in tribulation, when all the problems of life have come on you!
When everything’s going well, when you’re not sick, when you have no financial problems – you don’t call upon God as much. But when you are in difficulty, when you’re sick – that’s when you begin to call on God more intensely. I have had long years of experience with God and I know personally that I learned more about prayer when I had cancer, when I was in prison, when I had financial problems, than at any other time! Prayer becomes more urgent when there is no other way – no alternative. When I had both experiences of cancer there were two ways – an operation or a miracle! I chose to go the hard way of asking and believing for a miracle – but this meant a total commitment – not accepting ‘no’. When I was in the prison, there were two alternatives: either accept the inevitability of five-to-ten years incarceration or ‘barnstorm’ Heaven until I got out! That’s not holiness, it’s just following the prayer principles Jesus laid down for desperate widows and people like me! – Luke 18.1-8.
Things were difficult in the prison in Czechoslovakia where I was, and in the first few months it seemed as if God did not answer any of my prayers. When I prayed for food, there was none, when I prayed that my wife would come, she was not allowed a visa to visit me – it seemed that every prayer that I prayed, God said no. I began to despair. We had to get up at 6.00am every morning and sit for hours on a wooden stool embedded with nails. It was torture. In the first six months I wasn’t allowed out of my cell – my food and my toilet were in the cell. I lost so much weight. However, I would try to pray in those early hours before the guards brought the mouldy black bread and foul tasting, drug laced drink which was our only breakfast.
One morning when I had been three months in that cell, I cried out in desperation that I could not pray anymore because, I said, “O God, every time I pray, You say no! When I want the food parcels my family send, or a visit from my wife, or for me to be found not guilty in the court and be set free, always the answer is no! I don’t know how to pray anymore, everything I ask for, it’s no!” I sat there, not knowing what to do. “O God, if You don’t hear me, I’d rather die, because life has no purpose, no meaning if You don’t answer me.” While I was still saying, “O God, I cannot pray anymore”, I remembered the words in the Bible (I had no Bible in the prison – it was forbidden) when the disciples had asked Jesus how to pray, and He said, “When you pray say…” – and I began hesitantly to say those words, ‘Our Father’ – but as I did so, I began to argue, I cannot say ‘our’, that’s plural – I’m alone in here, no family, no friends, no believers, how can I speak in the plural? I have to say MY Father. Suddenly I knew the reality of those words, He is mine – He is my Father!
I was forbidden to have a Bible in the prison (it was only after nine months that I managed to smuggle one in), they gave me twelve books to read in English. This included six hundred pages of the history of the communist revolution in China. However, to my amazement, I found that one of the books was the story of Marco Polo who was born in Venice in the 13th century. Together with his father and uncle, he spent most of his life-time as a merchant adventurer in China. He became a favourite of the Emperor Kublai Khan. Travelling through China with him, they came to a village where they found a group of believers. The Emperor was going to have them put to death immediately, but then he said, ‘Your Bible says that if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can command a mountain to move – and it will move! I will prove that your God is dead and that the Bible is a lie. Outside this village is a mountain. I will come back in three days, and if it has not moved, I will put you to death.’ The first day the believers pleaded with God to move the mountain – but mountains don’t move! The second day they chose a believer more ‘holy’ than themselves to plead with God. Still nothing happened. The third day, Kublai Khan returned, ‘Before I kill you, I will give you one more chance, I want to see you pray,’ he said. This time the desperate believers COMMANDED the mountain in Jesus’ Name – AND IT MOVED!
Through that true story God began to speak to me, ‘David, your mountain is the prison. If you have the faith to believe, I will open the prison and release you, BY A MIRACLE.’ And God did release me as He promised!