The General on His Knees #RTTBROS #Nightlight #USA250 #Nation250 #America250

The General on His Knees 

#RTTBROS #Nightlight #USA250 #Nation250 #America250

The General on His Knees

And it came to pass, when Solomon had made an end of praying all this prayer and supplication unto the LORD, he arose from before the altar of the LORD, from kneeling on his knees.

— 1 Kings 8:54

THE STORY

Isaac Potts did not mean to see it.

The Quaker farmer was riding through the woods near Valley Forge in the bitter winter of 1777 to 1778 when he heard a voice. He followed the sound through the trees until he came to a clearing. There, alone in the snow, was General George Washington on his knees, his voice lifted in earnest prayer.

Potts watched for a moment, then quietly withdrew. He went home and told his wife what he had seen and said: "If George Washington be not a man of God, I am greatly deceived, and still more shall I be deceived if God does not, through him, work out a great salvation for America."

Valley Forge was the lowest moment of the Revolution. The army was starving. Two thousand men were without shoes in the snow. Washington wrote that the situation was desperate beyond what most Americans knew. He did not just write about trusting God. He knelt in the snow and asked for it.

THE REFLECTION

There is a kind of faith that is easy to have when things are going well. Valley Forge is the test of another kind, the faith that kneels in the cold when comfort is gone and the cause looks lost.

Washington could have given up at Valley Forge. By every human calculation, the war was not winnable. His army was dissolving. The British were comfortable in Philadelphia, twenty miles away. But he prayed. And he stayed.

The spring of 1778 brought Friedrich von Steuben, who transformed a ragged militia into a genuine army. It brought news of the French alliance. None of it was inevitable. All of it, Washington believed, was providential.

We serve the same God who met Washington in those cold Pennsylvania woods. The question is whether we are willing to kneel in our own Valley Forge moments, when nothing is working and the sensible thing would be to go home. The General stayed on his knees. It changed everything.

THE PATRIOT’S PRAYER

Pray It Forward: Where is your Valley Forge right now, the situation where you are most tempted to give up? Bring it specifically to God today, and ask Him to show you the spring that is coming.