The Force Of Faith.
Part Two.  The Operation Of Faith.
Installment Nine.
By Phil Scovell

Comments.

     We are still on the topic of how faith works.  In the last
installment, I focused on SAY IT from Mark 11:22-24.  Now I will
begin to focus on how prayer and faith work together.

B.  Pray It.

Introduction.

What Prayer Is Not.

     Prayer is not a physical act.  It is not always
instantaneous.  It is not easy.  It is not a method of arm
twisting to try and get God to do something He was not planning on
doing in the first place.  Prayer is not spatial, that is, prayer
is not time relative.  Finally, prayer is not magic.

Illustration.

     Several years ago, I was preaching in the state of Illinois.
As I traveled in the area, Sandy and I stayed with a friend we had
known for several years.  One night, our friend said that some of
his friends from church asked if we would all come over and spend
the evening visiting with them.

     As we talked, I listened to the children of the families as
they played around us in the living room of the home.  Some were
small but the oldest, I found out later, was 13 years old.

     as others talked, I found myself listening to the children as
they played.  Hearing their happy little voices, I thought about
the coin I was playing with in one hand.  It was a quarter; a 25
cent piece.

     Months earlier, I had begun carrying long skinny balloons
which I used to blow up in order to tie into animal shapes.  After
church services, as children would play around the adults as they
stood and visited, I would often pull out the brightly colored
balloons and suddenly, children came from everywhere to see me
blow up the balloons.  I would tie different animal shapes and
then hand them out to the children one by one who were standing
around watching.

     As time passed, I began considering learning some magical
tricks which might help me when speaking to children.  I even
added a ventriloquist dummy who helped me tell Bible stories when
I was asked to talk to children.  I later used him in nursing
homes and church services because I discovered that adults
enjoyed hearing and watching the dummy as much as the children and
nobody really cared how much you moved your lips in the first
place.

     Since I had been considering the idea of the magical tricks
to emphasize certain Biblical truth, I decided to try it out on
the children in our friend's living room whom we were visiting.  I
had never done any magical tricks in front of anyone before so I
was very concerned I might not do it well enough and would be
easily detected but it was now or never.

     Hearing a small boy playing on the floor next to my chair, I
held up the quarter and said, "Would you like to see me make this
coin vanish?"  In five seconds, every child in and outside the
house came running and crowded around in front of me to watch.
This made me even more nervous.  To my concern, every adult
talking in the room suddenly stopped and I knew everyone was
watching.

     I held the coin up for everyone to see that it was real and
then announced I would make it disappear.  I closed my fingers
around the coin and pressed it against the elbow of my other arm
and pretended to force the quarter into my elbow; grunting a
little to make it appear I was really working at shoving the coin
into my elbow.  Then I stopped and held out both hands to my
little audience.  My hands were empty.  Everyone was amazed and
little whispers went around the room.  "How did he do it?"

     "Now," I said, "I am going to make the coin return for you."
Pulling at my elbow, and pretending to be trying to extract the
coin from my elbow, I tried to make it appear difficult.  After
some display of effort, I held out my hands and slowly opened
them.  There was the coin but this time, it appeared in the
opposite hand from where it had started.  Everybody began talking
at once.  I asked the oldest girl standing near me if she could
tell how I had done the trick.  She said that she had no idea.
Then every adult said that they didn't know how it had been done
either.  I was a brilliant success.  No, of course I did not tell
anyone there how I had done the magic trick with the coin.  A
Magician never tells how his tricks are done unless someone offers
to pay him for the information.  This is the magician's code
passed down through the generations.

     A couple of years later, I became the assistant pastor of a
small church in western Colorado.  I checked a book out of the
library which explained how to do 100 magical tricks with coins,
rope, scarf's, cups, balls, and many easily available items.  I
began to practice.

     The book opened with a chapter or two on the history of magic
as far as it was used for entertainment.  Then each of the 100
tricks were described and I began to teach myself how to allow
someone to tie my wrists together behind my back and then I would
free myself without any assistance.  I used cups upside down
under which I would place a ball in order to mysteriously cause
the ball to move from one upside down cup to another.  I found
myself fascinated with the many coin tricks the book described and
found most of them easy to accomplish.  Knots tied in rope that
mysteriously vanished and reappeared were taught in the book and
many other such magic tricks.

     One day, I realized something was somehow disappointing about
the magic tricks.  I was puzzled.  As I thought about it, I
couldn't put my finger on what it was that bothered me.  As I
continued thinking about it, I had to laugh to myself when I
discovered what was wrong.  I learned, as I read the book and
practiced the tricks, that everything was performed by slight of
hand, misleading the audience to believe something different than
what they saw, and how the magician presented the trick from the
very beginning.  The key, I learned, was showmanship.  My
disappointment was simple.  There was no magic in magic and
somehow, I secretly believed there would be.

     If, you believe as I once did, that maybe there was some sort
of magic to getting our prayers answered, you, too, will be
disappointed Because there is no magic in prayer.  There are
principles, on the other hand, and that's where we will begin our
study in the next installment.

End Of Installment Nine