Sowing & Reaping

Sowing & Reaping
(Part 6) by Julie Anne Hood

Many years ago I was diagnosed with five major things wrong with my liver. Two of them were very serious and three were fatal.
As with liver illnesses, I was extremely tired and slept a lot. My doctor said a liver transplant would not work for me because he did not
think I would live through the surgery.

As I was laying in bed, the Lord spoke to my heart and said, “Pray for your pastor”. I was annoyed that God would ask me to pray for
someone else when I was dying, so I responded, “Lord, I am the one that is sick and dying, I think my pastor should be praying for me!”.
The Lord said it again, “Pray for your pastor”.

       As I believed that I was in the process of dying and thought
I would be seeing the Lord very soon, I did not want God to be angry with me
       because the last thing He asked me to do I did not do.

So I thought, “Fine, I will pray for my pastor” and I did. I prayed for him to have a fresh anointing, better health, help with his personal
finances, etc.   When I was finished the Lord said, “Now pray for his wife”. So I prayed for his wife. Then the Lord had me pray for each
of his kids and then went on to the assistant pastor and his family.   While I was praying for the assistant pastor’s family, the thought
came into my head, “I am dying because of Satan and the sin he put on the earth, but when I pray I am hurting the kingdom of Satan”.

Remember, everything has to be done in the spiritual realm before we see it in the natural realm. That excited me and I started praying
for everyone I could think of. I even asked God to place people in my mind so I could pray for them!   Many times I would fall asleep
praying for someone and when I woke up I would ask the Lord who I had been praying for and He would remind me. This went on for
about six months. Towards the end of the six months, I started getting letters and phone calls from people I had not heard from in years
(some of them in over twenty years). They all were saying the same thing, “God put you on my heart and I can not stop praying for you.
What is wrong?”. That is when I remembered that the scripture in Matthew 13:38 talks about sowing and reaping. I had always heard
Matthew. 13:38 was regarding finances, and it can be.   But the Lord showed me that I had been sowing “seeds of prayer” and now I
was reaping prayer being poured out for me!

                                                                               In Matthew 13:38, it reads:
“Other seeds fell on good soil, and yielded grain-some a hundred times
as much as was sown, some sixty times as much, and some thirty times".

Wow! I believe God had people all over the world praying for me, some that I probably had never even met!
                                                            Remember that God’s Word also says:

"Again I say unto you, That if two of you shall agree on earth as touching any
thing
that they shall ask, it shall be done for them of my Father which is in heaven".

If every time someone prayed it was like a kite string going from the one praying to God’s arm and tugging on it, imagine if there were
thousands of people praying for the same thing-it would be like a huge rope pulling on the arm of God!

I believe that is what happened to me because at the end of the six months with everyone praying, I was finally able to get out of bed
and get dressed. My strength was starting to slowly return to me. That first time I went outside and walked to the end of my driveway, I
praised the Lord for every step!   About a year later I was walking 4 miles a day!

One day the Lord asked me, “How is that pain in your side?” (When I was real sick, I had a pain in my side that felt like someone kicked
me in the stomach. I lived with that pain day in and day out.) I smiled up at the Lord and said, “It is gone, Lord! Thank you, Jesus!”.   It
had been going away little by little until I did not even notice that it was completely gone!

During all this time I had not seen my doctor, I felt like he had given up on me so I had given up on him. But when I finally did go back, he
insisted on doing a liver function panel (which had been sky high when I had stopped seeing him). When I got the results, you guessed
it, every single test was in the middle of the normal range! That is when I had confirmation that God had COMPLETELY healed me!

I do not know what you are going through. It could be physical, financial, emotional, it could be anything. My recommendation is while
you are praying over your needs, try praying over the needs of other people. (Look at your church prayer requests and pray for them.)
Start sowing seeds of prayer so God can have others pray for you.

                                                                        Remember, you reap what you sow.
If you need a miracle, then pray for a miracle for someone else because

       MIRACLES STILL HAPPEN!

Prayer Ministry Praise Reports & Testimonies

Why Pray? Reasons (part 1) Persistence (part 2) B e lieving (part 3) Praise & Worship (part 4)
Praying The Word (part 5) Listening (part 7) When God Says No (part 8) Hindered P rayers (part 9)