Workers Together

“Mom, you should hear what Anne-Marie’s Sunday School teacher told me this morning,” my son was saying over the phone about our four-year-old granddaughter. “She said she had never heard a child pray like Anne-Marie!”

“Really?” I chuckled, though not surprised. I had heard of her elaborate prayers since she was a three-year-old. The little blonde angel takes praying seriously, even if she does have surprising requests sometimes, such as asking God to send Easter candy raining down from heaven. “Does the teacher ask her to pray?” I wondered.

“No, she volunteers! She leads the class in prayer!” he said in a bemused, if daddy-proud, voice.

Well, I thought, she’s like her mommy. Our daughter-in-law is an intercessor at their church and is a fervent, effective prayer warrior. As it says in James 5:16, “The effectual, fervent prayer of a righteous man avails much,” and I’m sure that applies to women, too. I have no doubt our granddaughter will be one of the new generation of young people God is using and will use to bring people to Christ in these last days.

More and more I hear of children with remarkable gifts and testimonies in their young lives that awe us and even put adults to shame. Some are precocious and talented artists, painting pictures of Christ with breathtaking reality, having amazing effects on people. Others are singers, their pure, sweet voices seemingly sent from heaven above. The book, Heaven is for Real, by a young boy who experienced heaven in a near-death episode in surgery, is touching people across the world.

Psalms 8:2 tells us, “Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength because of thine enemies, that thou mightest still the enemy and the avenger.” In Matthew 21:16, Jesus responded to those who criticized the children’s praise, saying, “ Yea; have ye never read, Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings thou has perfected praise?”

We can either stand and watch in amazement as the younger generation outstrips us in our efforts of evangelism, or we can join them in their zeal for the harvest, adding the strength, support and wisdom of their elders as we all work together to “still the enemy and the avenger”. This is a victory in which we can all share.