Text: Luke 22:44-46
Memory verse:
“My little children, for whom I labor in birth again until Christ is formed in you,” (Galatians 4:19).
Sometimes, I wished I had the opportunity to follow my wife to the labour room. It was not allowed at the time we were still having children as it is today. The best a husband was permitted to do then was to follow his wife to the door of the labour room and wave to her as she is wheeled in. He thereafter returns to the waiting room to wait and pray. Sometimes, the husband could hear the groaning from the labour room and could only imagine the experience but never saw it.
The labour room is a place of work. Some people don’t like calling it the labour room but the delivery room. Yes, while I understand such perspective, the great message of the labour room will be lost with such. It is labour that causes delivery and without which there can be no delivery.
“..For as soon as Zion was in labour, She gave birth to her children.”
(Isa 66:8).
The labour room is a place of agonizing pain. The screaming of the labouring women confirms this. Witnessing this experience once had made some husbands to willingly choose the caesarean delivery option rather than allowing their wives to experience such pain again. It is a place of endurance. Even with the contracting pain and groans, the woman endures it, while the midwife still tells the woman to push. The midwife appears to say, ‘The labour room is not a place to rest or relax but to labour, so, push, push, push!’ The woman must push in spite of the pain until the baby is birthed. What an endurance! The woman cannot afford to sleep at the labour room lest the life of her baby be entrapped in the birth canal and endangered.
As it is in the natural birth, so it is in the spiritual. Prayer is labour. It is work. Watchman Nee quipped, “Prayer is work. The experiences of many children of God demonstrate that it accomplishes far more than does any other form of work.”
There are groans which cannot be uttered in prayer (Rom 8:27). Energy is expended in prayer. There is perspiration in there. Any prayer that birth greatness must include labour.
“And being in agony, He prayed more earnestly. Then His sweat became like great drops of blood falling down to the ground.” (Luke 22:44).
“Epaphras, who is one of you, a bondservant of Christ, greets you, always labouring fervently for you in prayers, that you may stand perfect and complete in all the will of God.”
(Col 4:12).
Women endure such agonizing pain because of the great joy that comes after. What a motivation! So, did our Lord Jesus endure for the joy which was set before Him (Heb 12:2). The labour room is a place of the birth of a new life, a great testimony and a great dream.
The labour room produces results that are incontestable, just as a woman comes out from the labour room with her baby, visible to everyone.
As people rejoice with a woman after delivery, so do they celebrate breakthroughs that the labour room of prayer produces. Likewise, as nothing brings fulfillment to a woman after delivery than to see her baby beside her, so does the labourer in prayer derive an inexpressible inner fulfillment from the fruits of his prayer.
Friends, every great delivery takes place in the labour room and it’s preceded by agonizing, persistent and enduring prayer.
Prayer points
1. Father, please pour upon me the spirit of prayer and drive me regularly to the closet of prayer in Jesus name.
2. Father, please, help me never to sleep, relax or rest in the labour room but to push until my expectations of You are fulfilled in Jesus name.
Today’s declarations
1. It is in the labour room of prayer that the supernatural and my testimonies are born.
2. I know there can’t be delivery without labour, so I don’t rest, relax or sleep in the labour room of prayer.
Contact: pastor@thf.org.ng