A Father’s Prayer

A Father’s Prayer

A father’s fervent prayer was answered after his death.

WILLIAM GRIMSHAW was a well-known pastor and evangelist in Haworth, England, during the mid-eighteenth century. He and his first wife, Sarah, had two children, John and Jane, before Sarah died at the age of twenty-nine.

In 1748, when John was twelve and Jane was eleven, William sent them to be educated at the Kingswood School in Bristol, a boarding school started by George Whitefield for the children of miners. In 1740 John Wesley had turned it into a school for the children of itinerant preachers. Jane became very sick and died there at the age of twelve. William Grimshaw was devastated not to have been with his daughter at her death but was comforted by the story of the last words she uttered before dying:

He hath loved me, I cried,

He hath suffered and died

To redeem such a rebel as me.

John showed no interest in studying or in spiritual matters, and William thought he should at least learn a trade. After Jane’s death he brought John home from school to become a weaver’s apprentice. He also wanted the boy nearer to himself so that he could encourage him in spiritual matters.

After losing his mother when he was three, his stepmother when he was ten, and his sister when he was thirteen, John was a troubled teenager with no personal faith of his own. He had spent many of his years at his grandparents’ home or at boarding school because of his father’s travels. He and Jane had inherited all of his maternal grandparents’ substantial estate. Knowing that he would be getting a substantial legacy when he turned twenty-one added to his difficulties. He had no motivation to master his trade or to study and became a heavy drinker, fathering a child out of wedlock.

William Grimshaw hoped and prayed fervently that his son might find Christ. In a spirit of hopefulness for his son’s salvation he wrote: “What inconceivable, incomprehensible, eternally durable pleasure it will afford us to meet and dwell for ever with those in heaven (whether they have gone thither before us or shall follow after us). . . . O what exquisite pleasure to see their faces. . . . Parents departed hence in the Lord rejoice over the conversion of their children, whom they left behind in their sins.”

In March 1763 William contracted a fatal infection after visiting a sick parishioner. As he lay on his deathbed, many people came to visit him, risking their own health in order to pay their last respects to their beloved pastor and friend. One of the people who came to visit at his bedside was John, now twenty-seven years old and still a drunkard. We do not know what was said between them; we do know that John went away burdened by the realization of his sinfulness for the first time. William died shortly thereafter and was buried near the pulpit in his church as he had requested.

Memories of his father plagued John with guilt. He regretted his prodigal ways and the torment he had caused his father while he was alive. John inherited the horse that his father rode on his evangelistic travels, and when he rode the horse, he would often say, “Once you carried a saint, but now you carry a devil.”

Over the next years the burden of his sinfulness became intolerable, and he began to search for the God his father knew and loved. When he was only thirty-one, he fell ill and soon was near death. Before he died, John finally found his Savior. His father’s prayers had been answered.

Remembering his father’s great burden and hope for his salvation, John exclaimed with joy just before he died on May 17, 1766, “What will my father say when he sees me in heaven?”

Reflection

William Grimshaw loved and prayed for his son for many years without seeing any visible results. Yet even after he died, William bore witness to his son. His faithfulness was finally rewarded, although not in his lifetime. We must be faithful in our prayers and our witness to our loved ones who are without Christ, for God brings people to himself in his own time.

I appointed you to go and produce fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask for, using my name.

John 15:16