Yes, prayer does work! Major Allen Lindberg of Westfield, New Jersey, is convinced of that. He was pilot of a Boeing Flying Fortress forced down at sea while on his way to Australia. He and his crew of nine were given up for lost.
“It was before dawn when we crashed,” Major Lindberg reports. “We had just time to shove off on two rubber rafts, without a crumb of food or a drop of water. The boys were pretty worried-all except Sergeant Albert Hernandez. Right away that lad from Dallas started praying, and pretty soon he startled us by announcing that he knew God had heard him and would help us out.”
Drifting beneath a broiling sun, their lips were too cracked and their tongues too swollen to join Hernandez in singing hymns, but their prayers continued just the same. On the third day just before nightfall they saw the outline of a small island. Soon after that they saw the almost unbelievable spectacle of three long canoes filled with men coming toward them.
The men proved to be aborigines from Australia. They told Lindberg and his crew that the day before they had been fishing far from home. Turning homeward with their catch, a strange urge came over them. Something impelled them to change their course and steer for this uninhabited coral atoll. And from that atoll they spied Lindberg and his companions.
What relief for the airmen! Water-and food and rescue from the lonely sea. We can believe that these men who had such an experience of the providence of God learned to know Him personally. Hopefully, they not only realized that the God who is able to save from physical death can also be trusted with the vastly more important matter of life AFTER DEATH. Physical death is a small matter compared with the eternal, everlasting loss of a soul.
Sergeant Hernandez knew the power of prayer, and the other eight men learned it in a way they could never forget. You may never be adrift on the Pacific Ocean, but unless you turn to the Lord Jesus as your Savior and guide, you are drifting dangerously in the turbulence of the world-and may be sucked under its waves at any moment. Why not turn to the Lord and prove for yourself that He hears, He cares and He saves? “Whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved” (Rom. 10:1313For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. (Romans 10:13)).