Lake’s Cry For Deliverance

I lived in a family which for 32 years was never without an invalid in the home. Before I was 24 years of age, we had buried four brothers and four sisters, and four other members of the family were dying—hopeless, helpless invalids. I set up my own home, married a beautiful woman, and our first son was born. In only a short time I saw the same devilish train of sickness that had followed father’s family had come into mine. My wife became an invalid; my son was a sickly child. Out of it all one thing developed in my nature: a cry for deliverance. My soul cried to God for deliverance. I knew nothing about the subject of healing; notwithstanding, I was a Methodist evangelist.

But my heart was crying for deliverance; my soul had come to the place where I had given up depending on man. My father had spent a fortune on the family to no avail, as if there were no stoppage to the train of hell. And let me tell you, there is no human stoppage, because the thing is settled deep in the nature of man—too deep for any material remedy to get at it. It takes the Almighty God and the Holy Spirit and the Lord Jesus Christ to get into the depth of man’s nature and find the real difficulty that is there and destroy it.

If you are away from God and your heart is longing, your soul is crying for God’s deliverance, He will be on hand to deliver. You will not have to cry very long until you see that the mountains are being moved, and the angel of deliverance will be there.

I finally got to that place where my supreme heart-cry was for deliverance. Tears were shed for deliverance for three years before the healing of God came to us. I could hear the groans and cries, the wretchedness and sobs, and feel my family’s desperation. My heart cried, my soul sobbed, my spirit wept tears. I wanted help. I did not know enough to call directly on God for it. Isn’t it a strange thing that men do not have sense enough to call on God for physical difficulties, as well as for spiritual ones? But I did not.

But one thing matured in my heart—a real hunger. And the hunger of a man’s soul must be satisfied. It is a law of God which is in the depths of the Spirit. God will answer the heart that cries; God will answer the soul that asks. Christ Jesus comes to us with divine assurance and invites us when we are hungry to pray, to believe, to take from the Lord that which our soul covets and our heart yearns for.

One day the Lord of heaven came our way, and in a little while the cloud of darkness, that midnight of hell, that curse of death, was lifted. The light of God shone into our life and into our home, just the same as it existed in other men’s lives and other men’s homes. We learned the truth of Jesus and were able to apply the divine power of God. We were healed of the Lord.

“Blessed are they which do hunger.”