Another illustration of the power of prayer happened some years ago. In our Indian headquarters, the leadership felt the need to really seek the Lord for His guidance. As the Lord burdened our hearts, we called for four days of fasting and prayer. During that time of ministry to the Lord, the Lord spoke to us through one of our brothers. Because of this man’s godliness and intimate walk with the Lord, we took the words very seriously. The instruction was that there would be a major investigation from the government with the intention to hinder the ministry. The admonition from the Lord was, “Seek My face. They will come as lions and leave as lambs.”
We were all doing well. We had never had any major problems with government authorities before. If it were not for this particular brother’s groundedness in the Lord, I would have thought that his imagination was running wild. But we took it seriously and began to pray and ask the Lord to go before us.
As we took the time to seek Him in this, He began to burden our hearts with specific things to pray. We knew the Lord was calling us to stand in the gap with prayer for the ministry more than ever before. Ezekiel 22:30 became a key verse for us: “So I sought for a man among them who would make a wall, and stand in the gap before Me on behalf of the land, that I should not destroy it; but I found no one.”