What happens when we pray
From a video by Stronger Network
Sue Sinclair has served in several leadership roles within the Church and community. She was also the Director of Liverpool Catalyst for 15 years, (a network of 170+ Christian led community projects) until she stepped down in 2021. In January 2023, she gave a video talk about the power of prayer for the Stronger Network. She brought some teaching from Joshua on prayer and then shared some testimonies about the power of prayer:
We live in Liverpool and we began to partner with Merseyside Police in 2002 and in 2003 and we were actually given an award for bringing crime down literally through prayer. We would meet with the police regularly, decide on target things that we needed to pray about and then mobilize the churches across Liverpool to pray wherever they were - in home groups, church or wherever.
God just did the most incredible things. We had some of the largest drug seizures in the whole of Europe and a lot of gang leaders arrested and imprisoned. Some of those actually got saved while they were doing Alpha courses in prison.
We've been praying from the year 2000 for the transformation of our city. People were living in the worst housing, going to the worst schools. There were no new businesses starting and the crime levels were so high. So we just began to pray about all of those things because you pray not from an earthly perspective, where everything's terrible, but from the heavenly realms - you're positioned with Christ Jesus and can see all the provision.
So we looked at Liverpool, how God had created it, its DNA. What were his plans and purposes? We recognized that God had provision for everything that he wanted to do and he wanted to bless our city. So from that heavenly position we began to release new schools, new hospitals, etc. The Prince of Wales and Katherine were just in Liverpool opening another new hospital there. That was because we've been praying.
We're just seeing transformation after transformation after transformation. There's a whole film industry now in Liverpool. It's one of the biggest ports for cruise ships now as well as being one of the biggest tourist destinations in the UK. That has all been since God showed us how to pray powerful prayers for our city. We need to care. We need to love our city and our community.
In January 2021, when our team gathered to pray via zoom twice a week, we had a real heavy burden to pray for the Women's Hospital in Liverpool. God doesn't always show you why and he just allows you to pray and you just need to be obedient. So we were praying for the staff, for the pregnant women, for every family that was visiting the hospital, for protection for everyone working and visiting there. We did that for 11 months and on the 14th of November, you will have seen all of this on the news, unexpectedly a taxi pulled up outside the Women's Hospital and a bomb went off.
The driver, David Perry, just suddenly realized something was very wrong, as the guy who was in his taxi, was about to explode a bomb, So he locked the car doors and got out of the car and was slightly injured. The guy who exploded the bomb died in the car and nobody else was injured. To my knowledge, not a window was broken at the hospital. Had that bomb gone off inside the hospital, it would have been a very different story.
I was very upset because we'd been praying for 11 months for protection and then this bomb had gone off at the hospital. Then God said that the hospital was the safest place in the whole of Liverpool for that bomb to go off because our prayers had created a safe space.
Sometimes we don't understand the things that God calls us to pray about but it saved the life of the taxi driver and, goodness knows, probably dozens and dozens of people who could have been killed or badly injured.
Don't be afraid to pray big prayers. We have a mighty, powerful God who wants do more than you can ever dream or imagine. Never underestimate or limit what God can do through you.
Watch the full 25 min video here:
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From a video by Stronger Network, 28/03/2023