Dear Friends,

It was just a coincidence. That’s how unbelievers try to explain away answered prayer. How do you answer them? Today’s devotional shows you how! God bless you.

Because of Calvary,

John Janney

• Jeremiah 33:3

  Jeremiah 33:3   English Standard Version (ESV)
  3 Call to me and I will answer you, and will tell you great and hidden things that you have not known.

Jeremiah 33:3

“Does God answer prayer? He who has never tried it is not able to tell; and it is most unphilosophical for any man to say that such a thing cannot be when he has never tested it himself, but they who have tried and proved it are the ones who do know…. Not long ago, a woman came to see me about joining the church. She was in great trouble, for her husband had gone away, under rather sad circumstances, to Australia, or somewhere in that part of the globe, and she could not hear any news of him. I said to her, ‘Well, let us pray for him.’ When I had prayed for his conversion, I prayed that he might come back to his wife; and I said to her, ‘Your husband will come back to you. I am persuaded that God has heard my prayer; so, when he returns, bring him to see me in this room.’ As she went out, she said to the friend who had come with her, ‘How very positively Mr. Spurgeon speaks about the Lord answering his prayer! He says that my husband will certainly come back to me.’ In a little over twelve months, that woman was in my vestry with her husband. I had forgotten the circumstances till she recalled them to me. About the time of our prayer, God had met with him on the sea, while he was reading one of my sermons; as a penitent sinner, he was brought to the feet of Jesus, and he came back, and joined this church, and he is with us at this day in answer to that prayer. ‘Oh!’ says someone, ‘that is merely a coincidence.’ Well, that woman did not think so, nor did her husband, nor did I at the time; and I do not think so now. You may call it a coincidence, if you like; but I call it an answer to prayer, and as long as I get such coincidences, I shall be perfectly satisfied to go on praying.”

[Charles Haddon Spurgeon, The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit XLIV, (London: Passmore and Alabaster, 1898), p. 293-294]