Sep 9, 2023

Christmas Evans

I long for God to answer my prayers. I ask, I seek, and sometimes I even resort to begging God for divine intervention. I’m not alone in this wrestling. Jacob wrestled with God all night long and lived to talk about it.
We can add one more person to the wrestling-with-God list: Christmas Evans (1766-1838). He was named Christmas because, you guessed it, he was born on Christmas day. His dad died when he was nine, so he went to live with a mean, alcoholic uncle. Christmas was still illiterate at age seventeen, the same year he opened his life to Christ. He longed to read the Bible, so he taught himself to read and write. He kept right on going and became proficient in Greek and Hebrew also. He became a Baptist minister and was called to serve a cluster of churches on an island off the coast of Wales. The parsonage was a cabin so small that he couldn’t stand up in it. The churches he served were mired in controversy. Members fussed and feuded with each other. He eventually wore down and lost his zeal for preaching. He climbed a mountain on April 19, 1802 “to wrestle with God in prayer.” He stayed on the mountain for three hours, pouring his heart out to God in prayer. He descended from the summit, renewed to continue the mission. He wrote, “In the first service after the event, I felt as if I had been revived from the cold and sterile region of spiritual ice, into the pleasant lands of the promises of God.”

He wrote a covenant to God to solidify his resolve. The first three sections of this thirteen-paragraph covenant follow here, accompanied by his final prayer resolve. What a great way to offer ourselves to God:

1. I give my soul and body unto Thee, Jesus, the true God, and everlasting life; deliver me from sin, and from eternal death, and bring me into life everlasting. Amen.

2. I call the day, the sun, the earth, the trees, the stones, the bed, the table and the books, to witness that I come unto Thee, Redeemer of sinners, that I may obtain rest for my soul from the thunders of guilt and the dread of eternity. Amen.

3. I do, through confidence in Thy power, earnestly entreat Thee to take the work into Thine own hand, and give me a circumcised heart, that I may love Thee; and create in me a right spirit that I may seek Thy glory. Grant me that principle which Thou wilt own in the day of judgment, that I may not then assume pale facedness, and find myself a hypocrite. Grant me this, for the sake of Thy most precious blood. Amen.

13. I beseech Thee, my Redeemer, to present these supplications of mine before the Father; and oh, inscribe them in Thy book with Thine own immortal pen, while I am writing them with my mortal hand in my book on earth. According to the depths of Thy merit, and Thy infinite grace, and Thy compassion, and Thy tenderness toward Thy people, O attach Thy name in Thine Upper Court to these humble supplications of mine, and set Thine amen to them, even as I set mine on my side of the covenant. Amen.

Rev. Dr. Peter James served 42 years as the senior of Vienna Presbyterian Church in Vienna, VA — 21 years in the 20th century and 21 years in the 21st century. He retired in 2021 and now serves as Pastor-in-Residence at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary.

Even as a pastor, prayer came slowly to Pete. Read Pete’s story.