🛐🙏 Cries of Anguish Prayer – 1 🙏🛐 ✝️📖 Teaching Series – 51 📖✝️ “As soon as Zion travailed, she brought forth her children.” Isaiah 66:8 When a person experiences pain in his heart, he sighs deeply; when physical suffering comes upon his body, he cries out. In the same way, when there is anguish in his spirit, a cry of anguish arises in his prayer. When the nation of Israel was spending its days in slavery in Egypt, their spirits were afflicted by Pharaoh’s severe oppression. They knew that they were God’s chosen people. He had promised them the land of Canaan. But now they were bound in slavery. They were forced to do many things against their will, and these tasks were imposed upon them with severe beatings and harsh oppression. Then such great anguish came upon their hearts that they began to cry out to God with deep cries of anguish. Exodus 2:23–25 says: “The children of Israel sighed by reason of the bondage, and they cried, and their cry came up unto God by reason of the bondage. And God heard their groaning, and God remembered His covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob. And God looked upon the children of Israel, and God had respect unto them.” Just as a child is born when the travail of childbirth reaches its fullness, so when the cries of anguish of the nation of Israel reached their greatest intensity, God appointed Moses for their deliverance. The present world lies in the power of the evil one (1 John 5:19). In the midst of this world, so that the children of God may be revealed, the whole creation has been groaning together and suffering together in the pains of childbirth until now (Romans 8:22). “For these things I weep; mine eye, mine eye runneth down with water.” Lamentations 1:16