Drawing Near to Godნიმუში

Day 7: Mustard Seed Praying

Jan Amos Comenius

We fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen” (2 Cor. 4:18).

Jesus said the Kingdom of God starts small but grows, quietly and mysteriously, like a tiny seed planted in the soil (Mark 4:1-20, 26-32). It should not surprise us, therefore, that God’s answers to Prayer often come in the same way. We pray and we wait and wait and wait. We wonder, did he hear, does he care, has he refused?

In the 1620s, Jan Amos Comenius and a rag-tag bunch of his church members knelt in the snow at the Polish border and prayed a wistful but bold mustard-seed prayer. In the turmoil of Catholic-Protestant rivalry in The Thirty Years War, they had been forced to leave their loved Bohemia. As they knelt shivering, they looked back longingly at their homeland, as Comenius asked God to preserve in Bohemia “a hidden seed to glorify thy name.” But Comenius never saw his prayer answered. In 1670 he died an exile, penniless and homeless. He did, however, leave the world 154 books that were seminal in the formation of modern ideas about Christian Education.

His prayer was answered 100 years later when a young Count Zinzendorf opened his family estate in Moravia as a refuge for the followers of Comenius. They called their community the Herrnhut or “Lord’s Watch” in German. Since they themselves were the fruit of mustard seed praying, they took their name from Isaiah 62:6-7, a great text on mustard seed prayer:

I have posted watchmen on your walls, O Jerusalem; they will never be silent day or night. You who call on the Lord, give yourselves no rest, and give him no rest till he establishes Jerusalem and makes her the praise of the earth.

The Moravian Brethren, as they came to be known, were the pioneers of modern missions. In the first 100 years of their existence, they maintained a continuous twenty-four-hour, seven-day-a-week prayer vigil, and sent 2000 missionaries to the ends of the Earth. It was at a Moravian prayer meeting in London that John Wesley felt his heart “strangely warmed.” From that encounter came the world-shaking Wesleyan revival, the impact of which we feel to this day.

Comenius prayed for God to preserve in Bohemia “a hidden seed to glorify thy name.” From a human perspective, it may have seemed that God did nothing for a century, but for the next two and a half centuries, he went far beyond anything that little bunch of refugees could have ever imagined—beyond Bohemia to the world!

God’s Ways are not our ways. His Timing is not our timing. Where are you in your prayers now? Kneeling with Comenius in the snow? Wondering with Comenius at the end of his life? Read and reflect on the seed parables of Mark 4. Ask the Holy Spirit to strengthen your praying with mustard-seed hope.

PRAYER: Holy Spirit of God! I pray, hoping for things I cannot now see. Strengthen my little mustard seed faith to wait for the day when faith becomes sight. Amen.