[Written by Derek Dougherty]
Six years living overseas as a missionary kid, four short term mission trips as a young adult, ten years of pursuing a call to be a missionary, four years of actively preparing for the mission field, recruiting numerous financial and prayer supporters to join our team, leaving everything behind and moving my family to a distant land, and six months of learning the language and culture had all led to this moment. I was seated across from a young man at the park and I stumbled through my best effort to share the gospel with him in my poor Spanish with the hope that God had already begun a work in his heart to spiritually awaken him to the good news of the gospel. Would he be at all interested in what I had to say? It took me a number of years and many such encounters to fully realize how truly vital the prayers of the saints were for preparing people’s hearts to receive the gospel. The writings of missionary J. O. Fraser helped me come to this realization.
World War I was raging on during the ministry of James Fraser to the Lisu tribes when he wrote to his prayer warriors back home comparing the spiritual state of things there to the war-torn battlefield back home, “We are not dealing with an enemy that fires at the head only – i.e. keeps the mind only in ignorance – but with an enemy who uses GAS ATTACKS which wrap the people round with deadly effect, and yet are impalpable, elusive. What would you think of the folly of the soldier who fired a gun into the gas, to kill it or drive it back? Nor would it be of any more avail to teach or preach to the Lisu here, while they are held back by these invisible forces. Poisonous gas cannot be dispersed, I suppose, in any other way than by wind springing up and dispersing it.”
Fraser called his prayer warriors to action saying, “For the breath of God can blow away all those miasmic vapours from the atmosphere of a village, in answer to your prayers. We are not fighting against flesh and blood. You deal with the fundamental issues of this Lisu work when you pray against ‘the principalities, the powers, the world-rulers of this darkness, the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenlies’ (Eph. 6:12).”
At another time Fraser wrote, “The men need not be dealt with (it is a heart-breaking job, trying to deal with a Lisu possessed by a spirit of fear) but the powers of darkness need to be fought. I am now setting my face like a flint: if the work seems to fail, then pray; if services etc. fall flat, then pray still more; if months slip by with little or no result, then pray still more and get others to help you.”
Fraser and his prayer warriors at home labored in prayer for the Lisu, and eventually the “spiritual tide” shifted. Between 1916 and 1917 he baptized 60,000 new Lisu believers.
Brothers and sisters of Cross Creek Church, we have an opportunity to join in the fight and pray for God to lift the spiritual fog in Papua New Guinea, in Peru, in India, in Ukraine, on UAB’s campus and to the uttermost parts of the world.
Will you join us?
Quotes taken from “Mountain Rain – A Biography of James O. Fraser” by Eileen Fraser Crossman
