_The principal cause of my leanness and unfruitfulness is owing to an
unaccountable backwardness to pray. I can write or read or converse or
hear with a ready heart; but prayer is more spiritual and inward than
any of these, and the more spiritual any duty is the more my carnal
heart is apt to start from it. Prayer and patience and faith are never
disappointed. I have long since learned that if ever I was to be a
minister, faith and prayer must make me one. When I can find my heart
in frame and liberty for prayer, everything else is comparatively
easy._—RICHARD NEWTON.
It may be put down as a spiritual axiom that in every truly successful
ministry prayer is an evident and controlling force—evident and
controlling in the life of the preacher, evident and controlling in the
deep spirituality of his work. A ministry may be a very thoughtful
ministry without prayer; the preacher may secure fame and popularity
without prayer; the whole machinery of the preacher's life and work may
be run without the oil of prayer or with scarcely enough to grease one
cog; but no ministry can be a spiritual one, securing holiness in the
preacher and in his people, without prayer being made an evident and
controlling force.
The preacher that prays indeed puts God into the work. God does not come
into the preacher's work as a matter of course or on general principles,
but He comes by prayer and special urgency. That God will be found of us
in the day that we seek Him with the whole heart is as true of the
preacher as of the penitent. A prayerful ministry is the only ministry
that brings the preacher into sympathy with the people. Prayer as
essentially unites to the human as it does to the divine. A prayerful
ministry is the only ministry qualified for the high offices and
responsibilities of the preacher. Colleges, learning, books, theology,
preaching cannot make a preacher, but praying does. The apostles'
commission to preach was a blank till filled up by the Pentecost which
praying brought. A prayerful minister has passed beyond the regions of
the popular, beyond the man of mere affairs, of secularities, of pulpit
attractiveness; passed beyond the ecclesiastical organizer or general
into a sublimer and mightier region, the region of the spiritual.
Holiness is the product of his work; transfigured hearts and lives
emblazon the reality of his work, its trueness and substantial nature.
God is with him. His ministry is not projected on worldly or surface
principles. He is deeply stored with and deeply schooled in the things
of God. His long, deep communings with God about his people and the
agony of his wrestling spirit have crowned him as a prince in the things
of God. The iciness of the mere professional has long since melted under
the intensity of his praying.
The superficial results of many a ministry, the deadness of others, are
to be found in the lack of praying. No ministry can succeed without
much praying, and this praying must be fundamental, ever-abiding,
ever-increasing. The text, the sermon, should be the result of prayer.
The study should be bathed in prayer, all its duties impregnated with
prayer, its whole spirit the spirit of prayer. "I am sorry that I have
prayed so little," was the deathbed regret of one of God's chosen ones,
a sad and remorseful regret for a preacher. "I want a life of greater,
deeper, truer prayer," said the late Archbishop Tait. So may we all say,
and this may we all secure.
God's true preachers have been distinguished by one great feature: they
were men of prayer. Differing often in many things, they have always had
a common centre. They may have started from different points, and
travelled by different roads, but they converged to one point: they were
one in prayer. God to them was the centre of attraction, and prayer was
the path that led to God. These men prayed not occasionally, not a
little at regular or at odd times; but they so prayed that their prayers
entered into and shaped their characters; they so prayed as to affect
their own lives and the lives of others; they so prayed as to make the
history of the Church and influence the current of the times. They spent
much time in prayer, not because they marked the shadow on the dial or
the hands on the clock, but because it was to them so momentous and
engaging a business that they could scarcely give over.
Prayer was to them what it was to Paul, a striving with earnest effort
of soul; what it was to Jacob, a wrestling and prevailing; what it was
to Christ, "strong crying and tears." They "prayed always with all
prayer and supplication in the Spirit, and watching thereunto with all
perseverance." "The effectual, fervent prayer" has been the mightiest
weapon of God's mightiest soldiers. The statement in regard to
Elijah—that he "was a man subject to like passions as we are, and he
prayed earnestly that it might not rain: and it rained not on the earth
by the space of three years and six months. And he prayed again, and the
heaven gave rain, and the earth brought forth her fruit"—comprehends all
prophets and preachers who have moved their generation for God, and
shows the instrument by which they worked their wonders.