for the robust health of his own spirit. Yes, but why should he pray for
the maintenance of his own spiritual health? What is the vital
relationship between the praying soul and the attainment of moral and
spiritual robustness? How is prayer related to a man's moral force? This
is the relationship. A praying warrior receives into his soul the
grace-energies of the eternal God. The power of grace is just the holy
love and strength and beauty of the holy Godhead flowing into the needs
of the soul and filling them with its own completeness. Now we do not
pray in order to make God willing to impart this grace, but in order to
fit ourselves to receive it. We do not pray to ingratiate God's
good-will, but to open our souls in hospitality. We do not pray in order
to create a friendly air, but to let it in, not to propitiate God but to
appropriate Him. We do not pray to turn a reluctant God toward
ourselves, but to turn our reluctant selves toward a ready and bountiful
God.
It is imperative that we should lay hold of this teaching very firmly.
It is of the utmost moment we should know what we are doing when we pray
for the bracing and sanctifying energies of the Holy Spirit. Prayer
then, I say, is first and chiefly the establishment of communion with
God. Prayer is the clearing of the blocked roads which are crowded with
all sorts of worldly hindrances. Prayer is the preparing of the way of
the Lord. When I turn to the Lord in prayer I open the doors and windows
of my soul toward the heavenlies, and I open them for the reception of
any gifts of grace which God's holy love may wish me to receive. My
reverent thought in prayer perfects communion between my soul and God.
Let me offer an illustration. I am told there is electricity in my
house. I am told that this mysterious, invisible, electric spirit is
waiting to be my minister and to serve me in a dozen different ways. I
go into a room where the genius is said to be waiting, and yet the room
is held in darkness. Where is this friendly spirit? Where is the light
which is one of its promised services? And then I am told that an action
of mine, quite a simple one, is required, and that when the action has
been performed the waiting spirit will reveal itself in radiant beams.
And so I bring my will into play, and I push a button, or I lift a tiny
lever, and my action completes the circuit, and the subtle energy leaps
into the carbon filament and turns my darkness into light.
That is it! My action completes the circuit! And when I turn my will to
pray, when I seek the holy, sanctifying power of God, my prayer
completes the circuit between my soul and God, and I receive whatever
the inexhaustible fountain of grace is always waiting to bestow. And so
do I say that prayer is first of all, and most of all, the establishing
of a vital _communion_ between the soul and God.
Lord Tennyson, in what must have been a wonderful conversation on the
subject of prayer with Mr. Gladstone, and Holman Hunt, and James
Addington Symonds, said that to him prayer was the opening of the
sluice-gates between his soul and the waters of eternal life. It is
worth while just to dwell upon Tennyson's figure for a moment. The
figure may have been taken from a canal. You enter a lock and you are
shut up within its prison. And then you open the sluice-gates, and the
water pours into your prison and lifts you up to the higher level, and
your boat emerges again on a loftier plane of your journey.
Or the figure may have been taken from a miller's wheel: There are the
miller and his mill. And the wheel is standing idle, or it is running
but sluggishly and wearily at its work. And then the miller opens the
sluice-gate, and the waiting water rushes along, and leaps upon the
wheel, and makes it sing in the bounding rapidity of its motion. Prayer,
says Tennyson, is the opening of the sluice-gates and the letting into
the soul of the waiting life and power of God. Prayer opens the
sluice-gates, and the water of life floods the sluggish affections, and
freshens the drowsy sympathies, and braces and speeds the will like the
glorious rush of the stream upon the miller's wheel.
That, to me, is the dominant conception of prayer. Prayer opens the
soul to God. Prayer opens the life to the workings of infinite grace.
And now I see why the Christian soldier should be so urgently counselled
to pray. Prayer keeps open his lines of communication. Prayer keeps him
in touch with his base of supplies. Without prayer he is isolated by the
flanking movements of the world, the flesh, and the devil, and he will
speedily give out in the dark and cloudy day. "Men ought always to pray
and not to faint."
If that is one reason why the Christian soldier should pray in order to
maintain the bounding health of his own spirit, we are now faced with
the second question as to when he should pray. And here is the answer of
the veteran warrior Paul: "Praying always." Not at some time, but at all
times! "Praying always." But can we do that? "Always"? But I am called
upon to earn my daily bread. I have to face a hundred different
problems. Every bit of gray matter in my brain is devoting its strength
to the immediate task. Is it possible for us to think of two things at
once? Can we be thinking out some absorbing question in business, and at
the same time be praying to God? One thing is surely perfectly clear, we
cannot always be thinking of God: It is constitutionally impossible.
But now, while we cannot always be thinking of God, and always speaking
to God, we can always be mentally disposed toward Him, so that whatever
we are doing there can be a mental leaning or bias towards His most holy
will. Let me show you what I mean. We must reverently dare to reason in
this great matter as we reason in other relationships. Turn, then, for
an illustration, to common gymnastics. In physical gymnastics there is
no need for us to be always exercising, to be at it every moment of the
waking day. The body does not need it. Indeed, it would resent it, and
rebel against it. But here is the healthy genius of gymnastic exercises.
Regular exercises give the body a certain healthy pose, a certain vigour
and excellence of carriage, which the body retains between the exercises
when we are going about our accustomed work. That is to say, conscious
exercise makes unconscious habit. Our conscious exercise forces the body
into attitudes which persist as habits when we are doing something else.
We can retain the pose of the gymnasium on the street, and we can retain
it without thinking.
And so it is with spiritual exercises when they are as real as the
exercises in the gymnasium. When a man prays, and prays as deliberately
and purposely as he practices physical exercises, when he drills his
soul as he drills his body, he gives his mind and soul a certain pose, a
certain attitude, a certain stateliness and loftiness of carriage. He
gives his soul a healthy bias towards God, and the soul retains the bias
when he is no longer upon his knees. His soul carries itself Godward
even when he is earning his daily bread. God can get at him any time and
anywhere! The way is open, the communion is unbroken!
That is the vital logic of the matter. By regular spiritual exercises
we can subdue the soul to spiritual habit. Again and again throughout
the day it is possible for us, by a conscious upward glance, to confirm
the habit; until it happens that the soul is always in the posture of
prayer,--in business, in laughter, in trade, at home, or abroad, always
in prayer,--and therefore, in every part of the wide and varied
battleground of life receiving the all-sufficient grace and love of God.
And so the Christian soldier is to be "Praying always, with all prayer
and supplication in the spirit."
But the Christian soldier is not only a suppliant for his own spiritual
health. He is much more than this. The apostle counsels him to be a
suppliant for the health of the entire Christian army. "Praying always,
with all prayer and supplication in the spirit, and watching thereunto
with all perseverance and supplication for all saints." That is to say,
the Christian soldier not only prays for the health of his own spirit,
but for a healthy "esprit de corps" throughout the whole militant Church
of Christ. It is his duty and privilege to be prayerfully jealous for
all the saints, and for the spiritual equipment of all his
fellow-soldiers on the field.
Now this is a very wonderful privilege entrusted to the disciple of
Christ. To every believer there is entrusted the marvellous ministry of
helping others to receive the energies of divine grace, and to
strengthen them in the fierce combats of their own "evil day." For the
character of our evil days is very varied. Your evil day may not be
mine, and my evil day may not be yours. What makes an evil day for you
may never trouble me, and what makes my day difficult and tempestuous
may leave you perfectly serene. It is to be accounted for in many ways.
The differences in our circumstances account, to some extent, for the
differences in our evil days. The differences in our occupations create
great differences in our daily warfare in the spirit. The differences in
our temperaments make no two persons' battles quite alike. And yet, with
all our differences, we are all called upon to stand in our own evil
day, "and having done all, to stand." Peter's evil day would be very
different from John's. Thomas' evil day would be very different from
Nathanael's. Dorcas' evil day would be quite different to the evil days
which gloomed upon Euodia and Synteche. But blessed be God, by the holy
ministry of prayer we can strengthen one another to "stand in the evil
day." We can help every soldier to keep his spiritual roads open and to
prepare the way of the Lord. We are called upon to be sentinel
suppliants on their behalf, "watching thereunto with all perseverance
and supplication for all saints." We are to be ever on the look-out,
vigilant for the entire army of the Lord, divinely jealous for its
healthy spirit, and seeking for every man in the ranks the grace and
glory which we seek for ourselves. What a magnificent man this true
soldier of the Lord must be!
And then, just to finish it all, and by one example to show us how deep
and wide is this ministry of supplication, the apostle Paul asks the
young Ephesian soldiers to pray for him. "And for me, that utterance may
be given unto me." Let us carefully note this, and let us observe its
heartening significance. These young, immature Christians in Ephesus,
trembling in their early faith, are asked to pray for the old warrior in
Rome. He is now "an ambassador in bonds," held in captivity in imperial
Rome, and the young soldiers in Ephesus are asked to be
sentinel-suppliants for the stricken soldier far away. Do you believe
this? And what does he want them to pray for? Listen to him again. "And
for me, that utterance may be given unto me." Have you got the real
inwardness of that appeal? A poor slave in Ephesus may, by his own
prayer, anoint the lips of a great apostle with grace and power. What a
vista of powerful possibility! Do all congregations realize that
privilege and service concerning their ministers? "For me, that
utterance may be given unto me." Do I realize that my prayers, obscure
and nameless though I be, can give utterance to a Paul, a Livingstone, a
Moffatt, or a Chalmers? Do I realize that I can pour grace upon their
lips? What a brave and splendid privilege! Am I using it? I cannot get
out of my mind the vision of some poor slave in Ephesus pouring grace
and truth upon the apostle's lips in Rome, and I cannot get out of my
imagination the surprise which awaited the slave in glory, when Paul
asked him, as a fellow-labourer, to share in gathering in the sheaves.
"And for me, that utterance may be given unto me, that I may open my
mouth boldly." And can we do that for a man, and do it by prayer? Can
one soldier give another soldier nerve, and can he do it by prayer? Can
he chase away his fears? Can he change timidity into pluck? Can he
transform a lamb into a lion? What a marvellous power has God given to
me and thee! The unbounded privilege of it all! Some slave in Ephesus
giving new boldness to Paul in Rome, and enabling Paul to take some new
ground and conquer it for the Lord! And once again I say, to be called
to share in the apostle's triumphs! If any one has prayed for me, your
fellow-soldier, that utterance and courage may be given unto me, and if
by my ministry some depressed and retreating soldier finds heart again,
and takes up his fallen sword, and fights anew the good fight, then that
suppliant shall share my holy conquest in the Lord, and the joy of the
Lord shall be his strength.
So once again, let us hear the apostle's counsel, and keep it in our
hearts. "Praying always with all prayer and supplication in the Spirit,
and watching thereunto with all perseverance and supplication for all
saints; and for me, that utterance may be given unto me, that I may open
my mouth boldly, to make known the mysteries of the gospel."
IX
"WATCH YE!"
_Eternal God, we bow before Thee as the children of grace and
love. Purify our souls, make our eyes keen and watchful, in
order that we may discern Thy purpose at every turning of the
way. Help us to hallow all our circumstances whether they appear
friendly or adverse, and may we subdue them all to the King's
will. We pray that we may obtain new visions of the glory of
Christ. May His gospel of grace become more exceedingly precious
as we gaze into its unsearchable wealth. Let in the light as our
eyes are able to bear it. Tell us some of the many things which
are yet withholden because we are not able to bear them. May we
exercise our senses in discernment, that so we may be led into
the deeper secrets of Thy truth. And wilt Thou graciously grant
unto us new possibilities of service. May we light lamps on many
a dark road. May we give help to many a tired pilgrim who is
burdened by the greatness of the way. May we give cups of
refreshment to those who are thirsty and faint. And may our own
faith and hope restore the flickering light where courage is
nearly spent. Amen._
IX
WATCH YE!
"Watch ye, stand fast in the faith, quit you like men, be
strong." I Corinthians 16:13.
This is the counsel of a brave warrior, experienced and weather-beaten,
writing to raw and comparatively untried recruits. One is reminded of
the veteran Lord Roberts when he lately spake to young English recruits
who had not yet been baptized in the actual flames of battle, advising
them about their own warfare of the spirit, and counselling them on no
account to forfeit their self-respect and self-control. And this tried
warrior, Paul, is addressing a little company of Christian recruits in
the city of Corinth. Corinth is now wiped out, buried in the accumulated
debris of the centuries. Here and there an excavated column bears
desolate witness to the glory of former days, but Corinth as a city is
sealed up in an unknown grave. But just behind the site of the city
there appears the Acrocorinthius, rising to the height of two thousand
feet. I climbed this famous hill in the spring because I wanted to see
the panorama on which the apostle had gazed, and also to see the setting
and relations of this once imperial city. It was a wonderful vision of
natural glory, with deep, far-stretching valleys, and distant gleams of
the sea, and range upon range of hills, many of them snow-covered and
glistening in the blazing sunshine of a splendid noon. There below was
the plain on which Corinth found her shelter, and beyond the plain the
narrow water-way, which gave her such intimate relations with the
commerce of the Mediterranean; and beyond the water-way there is a touch
of old romance, for there rise the shrines of the muses, the twin peaks
of Helicon and Parnassus.
Standing on this elevated eminence I tried to realize the conditions in
which this little company of Christian recruits had to live the
consecrated life. They had to fight the Christian warfare amid the soft
luxuriousness of Corinth, a luxuriousness which relaxed the moral fibre,
and made the Corinthians conspicuous for their depravity, "even amid all
the depraved cities of a dying heathenism." Corinth was a city of
abyssmal profligacy; "it was the Vanity Fair of the Roman Empire, at
once the London and Paris of the ancient world"! And it was in this
city, away there on the plain before me, that these untried Christian
recruits had to "fight the good fight of faith."
Then I thought of the little church in which they found their
fellowship. It was besieged by continual assaults of their Jewish foes.
It was torn with internal divisions. It was honeycombed by deadly
heresies. It was defiled by sensuality. Nearly all the members of the
church were of obscure origin and standing. Many of them were slaves. It
was in these conditions of fierce and growing difficulties that these
disciples had to be good soldiers of Jesus Christ. And it is to this
little company of Christian recruits that the apostle sends this
challenging letter in which is found the rousing bugle-peal of my text.
"Watch ye, stand fast in the faith, quit you like men, be strong."
Now I will confess to you that times and again during the last few
months this trumpet-blast has sounded in my ears, as though it were a
clarion-call to the Christians of to-day. For we too have our warfare
upon a most exacting field. We have fallen upon gravely troubled times.
We are witnessing a resurgence of devilry that is perfectly appalling.
The baser passions have become frightfully aggressive, and a crude
animalism is at large like a surging, boiling sea which has burst its
dykes. Some of us had begun to dream that the sweet angel of peace was
almost at our gates, and that nothing could happen to drive her away;
and now, when we look out of the gate, it is no fair angel-messenger
which we see, but the red fury of unprecedented strife and slaughter.
And amid all this we have to live the Christian life.
But it is not only the "fightings without" which trouble us. There are
also "the fears within." Many of our venerable assumptions are lying in
ruin. Our spiritual world has suffered an upheaval as though with the
convulsion of an earthquake, and many of us are trembling and confused.
What then shall we do in this terrible hour? What path shall we take?
Can we settle our goings upon any promising road of purpose and
endeavour? Along what lines shall we pull ourselves together? And in
answer to all these questions I bring you this well-tried counsel of the
great Christian apostle, this bugle-peal from the first century, and I
ask you to let it be to you as the inspired word of the living God.
"Watch ye, stand fast in the faith, quit you like men, be strong." Let
us examine the counsel in order that we may buckle it on to our souls.
Here then is the first note of this soldierly blast. "Watch ye!" The
phrase literally means "keep awake!" You perhaps think there is no need
of that counsel to-day. You probably think that in times like these our
difficulty is not to keep awake but to go to sleep. I am not so sure
about that. If we have loved ones at the war there will not be the
remotest peril of our going to sleep. Every post that comes to our door
will startle us like the crack of doom. Every headline in the daily
press will tighten our nerves in sleepless attention. But when we have
no flesh and blood at the front, when many miles roll between us and the
fields of war, when we are only spectators, a certain drowsiness is not
so far away as we may suppose. When we only read about things, things
become familiar, and the familiar is apt to lose its terror. Custom is a
dull narcotic, and frequent repetition dims our apprehension. When the
Titanic went down the whole city spoke in whispers, such a dread was
resting over our souls. But now a dreadnought goes down, or a half dozen
cruisers, and we scarcely catch our breath at the news. The cushion of
familiarity is thickening between us and realities, and awful facts do
not hit us on the raw. The awful becomes less awful by repetition, and
we grow less sensitive as the tragedies increase. The newspaper
statistics cease to be significant, and the descriptive adjectives
become the tamest blanks. And therefore there is need for the apostle's
trumpet blast to sound in our ears. "Keep awake!" Do not let familiarity
become an opiate, so putting the senses to sleep that the direst woes
become a painless commonplace. "Keep awake!" Make it a matter of will.
Bring the stream of vital thought to bear upon the field. Exercise the
imagination. Nourish the sympathies. We must keep awake, for our primary
hope of emancipation in this dark hour is to remain sensitive, to be
capable of being shocked and wounded with the appalling blows of every
succeeding day.
But it is not only wakefulness, but also watchfulness which the apostle
enjoins in the counsel of our text. The soldier of Jesus is to be awake
and watchful with all the keen quest of a sentinel peering about him
night and day. But our watchfulness must be intelligent and disciplined,
and we must carefully survey the entire field. We must keep awake, and
we must diligently watch for all enemies of the sanctified brotherhood
of the race, as a sentry would watch every suspicious movement in the
night. What are the real enemies behind all the appalling desolation and
sorrow of our time? Is it militarism? Then "Watch ye!" Is it something
deeper than militarism? Is it racial animosity and jealousy and
prejudice? Then "Watch ye!" Is it something even deeper than racial
antipathy? Is it a profound and deadly materialism in all the nations--a
materialism which has been tricked out in the ribbons of culture, and
disguised in the glamour of progress? Then "Keep awake, Watch ye!" Or is
it a faithless church, muttering many shibboleths, but confessing no
vital faith; a church which has been too much a pretense, offering no
strong moral and spiritual preservatives, and supplying no saving salt
to social fellowships, and, therefore, not exercising any restraint upon
moral degeneracy and corruption? "Keep awake, and Watch ye!" And amid
all the horrors and agonies of our day fasten your eyes upon the real
enemy of the Lord Jesus, the outstanding antagonist of His kingdom of
righteousness and truth.
But there is a further word to say about our vigilance. We must keep
awake and watchful, not only to detect the busy lurking, ambushed foes,
but also to see all the bright and wonderful things of the hour, all the
splendid happenings which are favourable to the holy will and Kingdom of
our Lord. What should we think of a sentinel who could not distinguish
between enemy and friend? And what shall we say of a soldier-sentinel of
Christ who has no eye for the great and friendly happenings on the
field? Watch ye, and behold the growing seriousness of the world;
frivolity has almost begun to apologize for itself, and tinselled gaiety
is ill at ease. Watch ye, and behold the unsealing of multitudinous
springs of human sympathy, and the flowing of holy currents from the
ends of the earth. Watch ye, and behold the magnificent courage which in
every land of strife is purging families from the dross of indolence and
indifference, and educing the gold of chivalry and sacrifice. Watch ye,
and behold the marvellous re-equipment of Christian motive--thousands
upon thousands of Christian disciples realizing as they have never done
before that the world needs the vital redeeming grace of the Lord Jesus,
and that without Him human brotherhood will remain a phantom and a
dream. A real wakeful watchman will see these things. He will not only
record the things of the night and the nightmares, but he will be as
"they who watch for the morning." The Moslem priest appears on the tower
of his mosque half an hour after sunset to call the people to prayer,
but he also appears on the tower half an hour before sunrise, when the
grey gleams of morning are faintly falling upon the night. And we too,
watchmen of Jesus, must watch for the sunrise as well as for the
sunsets, and we too must tell what fair jewels of hope we see shining on
the dark robe of the night. Brethren, the Lord Jesus Christ is abroad!
"Watch ye, for at such an hour as ye think not, the Son of Man will
come."