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A porter on a train out of Chicago brought a small man his toast and tea, came back down the aisle, and stopped short. The passenger was down on the floor between the seats, praying, with the train rocking underneath him. His name was A. W. Tozer.

Aiden Wilson Tozer was born on a hardscrabble Pennsylvania farm in 1897 and never finished high school. No seminary. No degree. What he had was a hunger. It started at seventeen in Akron, Ohio, when he walked home from work, passed a street preacher, climbed to the attic of his family's house, and called on God for mercy. He came back down a different young man.

He pastored forty-four years in the Christian and Missionary Alliance, thirty-one of them at Southside Alliance Church in Chicago. He never owned a car. He rode buses and trains. When book royalties came in, he signed most of them away.

Then came the night on the train. Tozer boarded in Chicago to preach a meeting in McAllen, Texas, carrying a burden he could not put down. Somewhere on the dark prairie he began to write. When he got stuck he slid onto his knees on the coach floor and prayed until it opened up again. Page after page, all night. By sunrise over Texas, the manuscript was finished.

That book came out in 1948. It is called The Pursuit of God, and it has never once gone out of print. Psalm 42:1 says, As the deer pants for the water brooks, so pants my soul for You, O God. Jeremiah 29:13 says, And you will seek Me and find Me, when you search for Me with all your heart.

Notice where God met this man. An attic in Akron. The floor of a railroad car. Neither was a holy place. They were where a hungry man stopped and reached for Him.

Read the full devotional: https://rodneycoe.com/aw-tozer-night-train-pursuit-of-god/

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R. A. Torrey stood in the doorway of his family home at fifteen and told his mother he was finished with her Bible and finished with her praying. She said one sentence to his back as he walked out, and it followed him for years.

Torrey entered Yale at fifteen, read the skeptics, and watched the faith of his childhood come apart in his hands. His mother kept praying anyway. She had told him a day would come when he reached the end of his own resources, and on that day he would call out to her God, and her God would answer him. She prayed into the silence for years.

The day came. Everything Torrey had built his life on gave way underneath him. In the middle of one long night, at the bottom of himself, his mother's sentence came back. He called out, and God answered him. Psalm 34:6 says, This poor man cried out, and the LORD heard him, and saved him out of all his troubles.

Torrey went on to lead Moody Bible Institute, pastor Moody Church, serve as dean of the Bible Institute of Los Angeles, and carry the gospel around the world with Charles Alexander from 1902 to 1906. By careful estimates, more than a hundred thousand people professed faith in Christ. Torrey said the revival was prayed down before it was ever preached. The man who told the world to pray got his start because one woman would not stop.

Somebody has told you to quit praying for them. Keep praying. A prayer does not expire when the argument ends. It waits in the dark for the night the floor gives way.

Read the full devotional: https://rodneycoe.com/ra-torrey-praying-mother/

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F. B. Meyer knelt in a quiet English house with a ring of keys in his hand. He had already given God his pulpit and his good name. One small key was still closed inside his fist, and he could feel the Lord waiting at the end of the hall.

Meyer pictured his life as a house full of rooms. He gave the Lord one key at a time. Then he reached a door he had never opened for anyone. He kept that key back, and the Lord laid the whole ring in his hand and turned to leave.

Meyer called Him back. He held that last key out on the tip of his little finger and prayed the most honest prayer of his life. Lord, I am not willing, but I am willing to be made willing.

Out of that surrender came a ministry to men leaving the county jail in Leicester. Meyer bought them handcarts and window-cleaning kits so they could eat honestly. Hundreds of them. Romans 12:1 asks us to present our bodies a living sacrifice. Present, not lend.

The room at the end of the hall is the one He is waiting beside. Open the door. He already knows what is in there, and He came anyway.

Read the full devotional: https://rodneycoe.com/fb-meyer-surrender-key/

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The true story of Hudson Taylor, the young missionary who slipped out of a packed Brighton church in June of 1865 because he could not bear the singing while a million a month died in China without Christ. On the sand of Brighton beach he opened his Bible and prayed a prayer that would open a nation. He asked God for twenty-four willing skillful workers, two for every unreached inland province. Days later he opened a bank account with ten pounds and a name, the China Inland Mission, with one rule from the start. Never ask anyone for money. Tell God, and God alone. The workers came. The funds came, often at the last possible hour. In May of 1866 Taylor and his wife Maria boarded the sailing ship Lammermuir with a band of new missionaries and their children. Two typhoons nearly killed them, yet the little company prayed through the storms and stepped ashore in Shanghai four months later. When Hudson Taylor died in China in 1905, the mission he began with ten pounds counted more than eight hundred missionaries and tens of thousands of Chinese believers. He summed up his life in a single sentence. God's work done in God's way will never lack God's supply. Philippians 4:19 says, My God shall supply all your need according to His riches in glory by Christ Jesus. A five-minute reminder that the supply follows the assignment. Take the step, tell your Father the need before anyone else, and watch how God provides.

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The true story of Phillips Brooks, the twenty-year-old teacher who failed so badly at Boston Latin School that the headmaster told him he would never succeed at anything else. God took that fall and turned it into a pulpit, a Christmas Eve ride from Jerusalem to Bethlehem, and a beloved carol still sung every December. Brooks entered Harvard at sixteen and graduated with honors, so his 1855 collapse cut deep. For months he drifted. Then a quiet pull toward ministry grew stronger, and he enrolled at Virginia Theological Seminary. There the awkward young man found his voice. By his mid-twenties he was filling a Philadelphia pulpit, preaching over two hundred words a minute to crowds who hung on every one. In April 1865, when Abraham Lincoln's body lay in state in Philadelphia, it was young Brooks who was asked to preach. That December he sailed for the Holy Land. On Christmas Eve he rode on horseback from Jerusalem to Bethlehem, paused in the shepherds' fields under the stars, and worshiped at the Church of the Nativity until nearly dawn. Three years later he needed a carol for the children of his Sunday school, so he reached back to that starlit ride and wrote O Little Town of Bethlehem. His organist Lewis Redner woke in the middle of the night with the tune and called it a gift from heaven. Brooks went on to lead Trinity Church in Boston, guided the congregation through the great fire of 1872, and was made bishop of Massachusetts late in life. When he died in 1893, the city all but shut down in grief. Psalm 37:23-24 says the steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord, and though he fall, he shall not be utterly cast down. A five-minute reminder that your worst chapter can become the turn in the road.

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The true story of Prince Kaboo, a teenage Liberian chieftain's son held captive and beaten daily until a light flashed over the jungle camp, a voice said flee, and the ropes fell from his body. He ran through the jungle for days, hiding in hollow trees and living on snails and mangoes, until he reached Monrovia. There a missionary preached on Saul of Tarsus, and Kaboo realized he had already met this God in the jungle. He was baptized as Samuel Morris. Hungry to know the Holy Spirit, he worked his passage across the Atlantic on a sailing ship and arrived in New York with empty pockets, asking for a man named Stephen Merritt. Sent to Taylor University in Indiana, when the school president asked which room he wanted, Samuel answered, if there is a room nobody wants, give that one to me. Students heard him praying through the door and he called it talking to his Father. He died in 1893 at just twenty years old, never seeing Africa again. At his funeral, students rose one after another to take his place on the mission field. God had chosen the weak things of the world to shame the mighty (1 Corinthians 1:27, NKJV). A five-minute reminder that surrender is the only size God requires.

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The true story of John Harper, the Baptist pastor from Glasgow who put his six-year-old daughter in a Titanic lifeboat, gave his own life vest to a stranger, and spent his final minutes in twenty-eight degree water asking one question of every soul he could reach. April 15, 1912. The North Atlantic. The grandest ship ever built has just gone under, and hundreds of people are freezing in the dark. Through the darkness a Scottish voice keeps calling out, are you saved? The man asking gave his life vest away an hour ago. He knows exactly what that gift will cost him. John Harper had already lost his wife. He had already preached a revival at Moody Church in Chicago. Now, in the last hour of his life, he was still fishing for souls. To a young Scotsman clinging to wreckage he called out the words of Acts 16:31, believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and you will be saved. Four years later, at a survivors meeting in Hamilton, Ontario, that young man stood up and said the words that still echo today. I am John Harper's last convert. A five-minute reminder that what we do with our final breath reveals what we loved with every breath before it, and that faithfulness rarely requires an ocean. Most days it only requires a phone call.

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The true story of Andrew Murray, the young South African pastor who tried to silence a revival in 1860, then spent the next fifty years teaching the world to abide in Christ (John 15:4). The year is 1860 in Worcester, South Africa. A Sunday evening prayer meeting has slipped past the young pastor's control. Sixty young people are crying out to God at once, and the sound is pouring through the open windows into the street. He walks in and calls for silence. No one stops. Then a visitor takes him by the arm and says, be careful what you do, for it is the Spirit of God at work here. That was the moment God got hold of Andrew Murray. He stepped back, watched the revival sweep the colony, and later called it the mightiest work of God he ever witnessed. Years later a throat illness took his voice for nearly two years, and out of that forced silence came Abide in Christ, With Christ in the School of Prayer, Humility, Absolute Surrender, and more than two hundred books that still feed the church today. A five-minute reminder that a branch cannot bear fruit by itself, and that sometimes the most spiritual thing we can do is step back and let the Spirit of God do what only He can do.

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The true story of George Liele, born a slave in Virginia, ordained in 1775, and set free to preach, who sailed to Jamaica in 1782 and became the first Baptist missionary in history, ten years before William Carey (Hebrews 6:10). July 1782. The British army is evacuating Savannah, Georgia, and in the middle of that chaos stands a freed slave named George Liele, holding his freedom papers in one hand and his children with the other. He is about to sign himself into two more years of servitude to buy his passage to Jamaica. Within a few years his Kingston congregation numbered three hundred and fifty. Every three months he waded into the river and baptized new converts by the dozens. He never took a salary. He was tried for his life and acquitted. He sat in jail more than three years over the debt on his chapel building rather than take legal relief. By 1814, Jamaica held eight thousand Baptists, and William Carey, the man textbooks call the father of modern missions, did not sail for India until 1793. A five-minute reminder that God is not unjust to forget your work and labor of love, and that quiet faithfulness is written down where the ink never fades.

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The year is 1787. A small, sickly young man stands up in the British House of Commons and proposes something that will make him one of the most hated men in England.

William Wilberforce, barely five feet tall, often too sick to stand, is going to fight the slave trade. Powerful men will threaten him. One captain will swear to throw him overboard if he ever sets foot near his ship. And Wilberforce will fight them anyway. For the next twenty years.

He brought his first bill to abolish the trade in 1791. It was crushed. So he brought it again. And again. And again. Year after year the votes went against him. His health failed so often that he should have quit a dozen times over. But every year he stood back up.

It took sixteen years. In 1807 Parliament finally voted to abolish the British slave trade, and members rose to their feet and cheered while Wilberforce sat with his head in his hands, weeping.

He was not done. In 1833, three days before he died, word reached his bedside that full emancipation had passed too. Slavery in the British Empire was over.

"Let us not grow weary while doing good, for in due season we shall reap if we do not lose heart." Galatians 6:9.

Maybe you are tired in a long fight of your own. Wilberforce would tell you to stand back up. In due season. Not on your schedule, but on God's. The fight that defines a life is rarely the quick one. It is the one you refuse to lose.

Keep looking up,
Pastor Rodney