JAPANESE LADY RECEIVES JESUS AS LORD

One of those people is my wifes mother, who lives in the Japanese city of Kyoto. She was with us for the month of April for the birth of our first son. More on his birth appears below.

My mother in law is recovering from cancer and the medication she takes has been giving her stomach pain. So she requested that we pray for her. We would set aside time in the evenings to pray for her. She never said "no" when we offered to pray. When we prayed we only put our hands on her and asked the Father to reveal the Son to her. We asked for His healing power to touch her body and soul. She would always calm down during that time of prayer and would report that the symptoms in her stomach were gone. But we were not so concerned about the physical pain as we were about her spriritual condition. She has suffered much throughout her life and we knew that she must know the Lord Jesus.

After three weeks of constant prayer she was beginning to understand the goodness of God and was hungry for even more of Him. One evening before she left we invited our pastor to visit our home and to pray over her. He said that, while he was driving to our home, the Lord said to him "just go there and administer the grace that I am already pouring out." So he arrived at our place and we gathered in one room and prayed a little while. He said that the Father wanted her to be "born of the Spirit" according to John chapter 3. So we discussed the meaning of that for a long time. When it was clear that she understood, we asked her if she would thank the Father for placing the punishment for her sin upon Jesus. She did so. And so we all gathered around her and prayed over her so that she might receive the Holy Spirit. God's presence became very strong in that room. She could not sit up straight in her chair. My pastor and I could not stand up. It seemed necessary to kneel on the floor because of an overwhelming sense of God's holy presence.

The significance of this story is that she is no longer a prodigal. She was drawn to the Father's house by His love. We did not have to force her. There were no arguments, no theological arm-twisting and no soulish manipulation so characteristic of what we'd known before "renewal" came. It was very simple. We just prayed over her and invited the Father to bless her. And God did the rest. He does what no man can do.