THE preceding chapter closed with the statement that prayer can do
anything that God can do. It is a tremendous statement to make, but it
is a statement borne out by history and experience. If we are abiding in
Christ—and if we abide in Him we are living in obedience to His holy
will—and approach God in His name, then there lie open before us the
infinite resources of the Divine treasure-house.
The man who truly prays gets from God many things denied to the
prayerless man. The aim of all real praying is to get the thing prayed
for, as the child’s cry for bread has for its end the getting of bread.
This view removes prayer clean out of the sphere of religious
performances. Prayer is not acting a part or going through religious
motions. Prayer is neither official nor formal nor ceremonial, but
direct, hearty, intense. Prayer is not religious work which must be gone
through, and avails because well done. Prayer is the helpless and needy
child crying to the compassion of the Father’s heart and the bounty and
power of a Father’s hand. The answer is as sure to come as the Father’s
heart can be touched and the Father’s hand moved.
The object of asking is to receive. The aim of seeking is to find. The
purpose of knocking is to arouse attention and get in, and this is
Christ’s iterated and re-iterated asseveration that the prayer without
doubt will be answered, its end without doubt secured. Not by some
round-about way, but by getting the very thing asked for.
The value of prayer does not lie in the number of prayers, or the length
of prayers, but its value is found in the great truth that we are
privileged by our relations to God to unburden our desires and make our
requests known to God, and He will relieve by granting our petitions.
The child asks because the parent is in the habit of granting the
child’s requests. As the children of God we need something and we need
it badly, and we go to God for it. Neither the Bible nor the child of
God knows anything of that half-infidel declaration, that we are to
answer our own prayers. God answers prayer. The true Christian does not
pray to stir himself up, but his prayer is the stirring up of himself to
take hold of God. The heart of faith knows nothing of that specious
scepticism which stays the steps of prayer and chills its ardour by
whispering that prayer does not affect God.
D. L. Moody used to tell a story of a little child whose father and
mother had died, and who was taken into another family. The first night
she asked whether she could pray as she used to do. They said: “Oh,
yes!” So she knelt down and prayed as her mother had taught her; and
when that was ended, she added a little prayer of her own: “O God, make
these people as kind to me as father and mother were.” Then she paused
and looked up, as if expecting the answer, and then added: “Of course
you will.” How sweetly simple was that little one’s faith! She expected
God to answer and “do,” and “of course” she got her request, and that is
the spirit in which God invites us to approach Him.
In contrast to that incident is the story told of the quaint Yorkshire
class leader, Daniel Quorm, who was visiting a friend. One forenoon he
came to the friend and said, “I am sorry you have met with such a great
disappointment.”
“Why, no,” said the man, “I have not met with any disappointment.”
“Yes,” said Daniel, “you were expecting something remarkable to-day.”
“What do you mean?” said the friend.
“Why you prayed that you might be kept sweet and gentle all day long.
And, by the way things have been going, I see you have been greatly
disappointed.”
“Oh,” said the man, “I thought you meant something particular.”
Prayer is mighty in its operations, and God never disappoints those who
put their trust and confidence in Him. They may have to wait long for
the answer, and they may not live to see it, but the prayer of faith
never misses its object.
“A friend of mine in Cincinnati had preached his sermon and sank back in
his chair, when he felt impelled to make another appeal,” says Dr. J.
Wilbur Chapman. “A boy at the back of the church lifted his hand. My
friend left the pulpit and went down to him, and said, ‘Tell me about
yourself.’ The boy said, ‘I live in New York. I am a prodigal. I have
disgraced my father’s name and broken my mother’s heart. I ran away and
told them I would never come back until I became a Christian or they
brought me home dead.’ That night there went from Cincinnati a letter
telling his father and mother that their boy had turned to God.
“Seven days later, in a black-bordered envelope, a reply came which
read: ‘My dear boy, when I got the news that you had received Jesus
Christ the sky was overcast; your father was dead.’ Then the letter went
on to tell how the father had prayed for his prodigal boy with his last
breath, and concluded, ‘You are a Christian to-night because your old
father would not let you go.’”
A fourteen-year-old boy was given a task by his father. It so happened
that a group of boys came along just then and wiled the boy away with
them, and so the work went undone. But the father came home that evening
and said, “Frank, did you do the work that I gave you?” “Yes, sir,” said
Frank. He told an untruth, and his father knew it, but said nothing. It
troubled the boy, but he went to bed as usual. Next morning his mother
said to him, “Your father did not sleep all last night.”
“Why didn’t he sleep?” asked Frank.
His mother said, “He spent the whole night praying for you.”
This sent the arrow into his heart. He was deeply convicted of his sin,
and knew no rest until he had got right with God. Long afterward, when
the boy became Bishop Warne, he said that his decision for Christ came
from his father’s prayer that night. He saw his father keeping his
lonely and sorrowful vigil praying for his boy, and it broke his heart.
Said he, “I can never be sufficiently grateful to him for that prayer.”
An evangelist, much used of God, has put on record that he commenced a
series of meetings in a little church of about twenty members who were
very cold and dead, and much divided. A little prayer-meeting was kept
up by two or three women. “I preached, and closed at eight o’clock,” he
says. “There was no one to speak or pray. The next evening one man
spoke.
“The next morning I rode six miles to a minister’s study, and kneeled in
prayer. I went back, and said to the little church:
“‘If you can make out enough to board me, I will stay until God opens
the windows of heaven. God has promised to bless these means, and I
believe He will.’
“Within ten days there were so many anxious souls that I met one hundred
and fifty of them at a time in an inquiry meeting, while Christians were
praying in another house of worship. Several hundred, I think, were
converted. It is safe to believe God.”
A mother asked the late John B. Gough to visit her son to win him to
Christ. Gough found the young man’s mind full of sceptical notions, and
impervious to argument. Finally, the young man was asked to pray, just
once, for light. He replied: “I do not know anything perfect to whom or
to which I could pray.” “How about your mother’s love?” said the orator.
“Isn’t that perfect? Hasn’t she always stood by you, and been ready to
take you in, and care for you, when even your father had really kicked
you out?” The young man chocked with emotion, and said, “Y-e-s, sir;
that is so.” “Then pray to Love—it will help you. Will you promise?” He
promised. That night the young man prayed in the privacy of his room. He
kneeled down, closed his eyes, and struggling a moment uttered the
words: “O Love.” Instantly as by a flash of lightning, the old Bible
text came to him: “God is love,” and he said, brokenly, “O God!” Then
another flash of Divine truth, and a voice said, “God so loved the
world, that He gave His only begotten Son,”—and there, instantly, he
exclaimed, “O Christ, Thou incarnation of Divinest love, show me light
and truth.” It was all over. He was in the light of the most perfect
peace. He ran downstairs, adds the narrator of this incident, and told
his mother that he was saved. That young man is to-day an eloquent
minister of Jesus Christ.
A water famine was threatened in Hakodate, Japan. Miss Dickerson, of the
Methodist Episcopal Girls’ School, saw the water supply growing less
daily, and in one of the fall months appealed to the Board in New York
for help. There was no money on hand, and nothing was done. Miss
Dickerson inquired the cost of putting down an artesian well, but found
the expense too great to be undertaken. On the evening of December 31st,
when the water was almost exhausted, the teachers and the older pupils
met to pray for water, though they had no idea how their prayer was to
be answered. A couple of days later a letter was received in the New
York office which ran something like this: “Philadelphia, January 1st.
It is six o’clock in the morning of New Year’s Day. All the other
members of the family are asleep, but I was awakened with a strange
impression that some one, somewhere, is in need of money which the Lord
wants me to supply.” Enclosed was a cheque for an amount which just
covered the cost of the artesian well and the piping of the water into
the school buildings.
“I have seen God’s hand stretched out to heal among the heathen in as
mighty wonder-working power as in apostolic times,” once said a
well-known minister to the writer. “I was preaching to two thousand
famine orphan girls, at Kedgaum, India, at Ramabai’s Mukti (salvation)
Mission. A swarm of serpents as venomous and deadly as the reptile that
smote Paul, suddenly raided the walled grounds, ‘sent of Satan,’ Ramabai
said, and several of her most beautiful and faithful Christian girls
were smitten by them, two of them bitten twice. I saw four of the very
flower of her flock in convulsions at once, unconscious and apparently
in the agonies of death.
“Ramabai believes the Bible with an implicit and obedient faith. There
were three of us missionaries there. She said: ‘We will do just what the
Bible says, I want you to minister for their healing according to James
v. 14-18.’ She led the way into the dormitory where her girls were lying
in spasms, and we laid our hands upon their heads and prayed, and
anointed them with oil in the name of the Lord. Each of them was healed
as soon as anointed and sat up and sang with faces shining. That miracle
and marvel among the heathen mightily confirmed the word of the Lord,
and was a profound and overpowering proclamation of God.”
Some years ago, the record of a wonderful work of grace in connection
with one of the stations of the China Inland Mission attracted a good
deal of attention. Both the number and spiritual character of the
converts had been far greater than at other stations where the
consecration of the missionaries had been just as great as at the more
fruitful place.
This rich harvest of souls remained a mystery until Hudson Taylor on a
visit to England discovered the secret. At the close of one of his
addresses a gentleman came forward to make his acquaintance. In the
conversation which followed, Mr. Taylor was surprised at the accurate
knowledge the man possessed concerning this inland China station. “But
how is it,” Mr. Taylor asked, “that you are so conversant with the
conditions of that work?” “Oh!” he replied, “the missionary there and I
are old college-mates; for years we have regularly corresponded; he has
sent me names of enquirers and converts, and these I have daily taken to
God in prayer.”
At last the secret was found! A praying man at home, praying definitely,
praying daily, for specific cases among the heathen. That is the real
intercessory missionary.
Hudson Taylor himself, as all the world knows, was a man who knew how to
pray and whose praying was blessed with fruitful answers. In the story
of his life, told by Dr. and Mrs. Howard Taylor, we find page after page
aglow with answered prayer. On his way out to China for the first time,
in 1853, when he was only twenty-one years of age, he had a definite
answer to prayer that was a great encouragement to his faith. “They had
just come through the Dampier Strait, but were not yet out of sight of
the islands. Usually a breeze would spring up after sunset and last
until about dawn. The utmost use was made of it, but during the day they
lay still with flapping sails, often drifting back and losing a good
deal of the advantage gained at night.” The story continues in Hudson
Taylor’s own words:
“This happened notably on one occasion when we were in dangerous
proximity to the north of New Guinea. Saturday night had brought us to a
point some thirty miles off the land, and during the Sunday morning
service, which was held on deck, I could not fail to see that the
Captain looked troubled and frequently went over to the side of the
ship. When the service was ended I learnt from him the cause. A
four-knot current was carrying us toward some sunken reefs, and we were
already so near that it seemed improbable that we should get through the
afternoon in safety. After dinner, the long boat was put out and all
hands endeavoured, without success, to turn the ship’s head from the
shore.
“After standing together on the deck for some time in silence, the
Captain said to me:
“‘Well, we have done everything that can be done. We can only await the
result.’
“A thought occurred to me, and I replied: ‘No, there is one thing we
have not done yet.’
“‘What is that?’ he queried.
“‘Four of us on board are Christians. Let us each retire to his own
cabin, and in agreed prayer ask the Lord to give us immediately a
breeze. He can as easily send it now as at sunset.’
“The Captain complied with this proposal. I went and spoke to the other
two men, and after prayer with the carpenter, we all four retired to
wait upon God. I had a good but very brief season in prayer, and then
felt so satisfied that our request was granted that I could not continue
asking, and very soon went up again on deck. The first officer, a
godless man, was in charge. I went over and asked him to let down the
clews or corners of the mainsail, which had been drawn up in order to
lessen the useless flapping of the sail against the rigging.
“‘What would be the good of that?’ he answered roughly.
“I told him we had been asking a wind from God; that it was coming
immediately; and we were so near the reef by this time that there was
not a minute to lose.
“With an oath and a look of contempt, he said he would rather see a wind
than hear of it.
“But while he was speaking I watched his eye, following it up to the
royal, and there, sure enough, the corner of the topmost sail was
beginning to tremble in the breeze.
“‘Don’t you see the wind is coming? Look at the royal!’ I exclaimed.
“‘No, it is only a cat’s paw,’ he rejoined (a mere puff of wind).
“‘Cat’s paw or not,’ I cried, ‘pray let down the mainsail and give us
the benefit.’
“This he was not slow to do. In another minute the heavy tread of the
men on deck brought up the Captain from his cabin to see what was the
matter. The breeze had indeed come! In a few minutes we were ploughing
our way at six or seven knots an hour through the water ... and though
the wind was sometimes unsteady, we did not altogether lose it until
after passing the Pelew Islands.
“Thus God encouraged me,” adds this praying saint, “ere landing on
China’s shores to bring every variety of need to Him in prayer, and to
expect that He would honour the name of the Lord Jesus and give the help
each emergency required.”
In an address at Cambridge some time ago (reported in “The Life of
Faith,” April 3rd, 1912), Mr. S. D. Gordon told in his own inimitable
way the story of a man in his own country, to illustrate from real life
the fact of the reality of prayer, and that it is not mere talking.
“This man,” said Mr. Gordon, “came of an old New England family, a bit
farther back an English family. He was a giant in size, and a keen man
mentally, and a university-trained man. He had gone out West to live,
and represented a prominent district in our House of Congress, answering
to your House of Commons. He was a prominent leader there. He was reared
in a Christian family, but he was a sceptic, and used to lecture against
Christianity. He told me he was fond, in his lectures, of proving, as he
thought, conclusively, that there was no God. That was the type of his
infidelity.
“One day he told me he was sitting in the Lower House of Congress. It
was at the time of a Presidential Election, and when party feeling ran
high. One would have thought that was the last place where a man would
be likely to think about spiritual things. He said: ‘I was sitting in my
seat in that crowded House and that heated atmosphere, when a feeling
came to me that the God, whose existence I thought I could successfully
disprove, was just there above me, looking down on me, and that He was
displeased with me, and with the way I was doing. I said to myself,
‘This is ridiculous, I guess I’ve been working too hard. I’ll go and get
a good meal and take a long walk and shake myself, and see if that will
take this feeling away.’ He got his extra meal, took a walk, and came
back to his seat, but the impression would not be shaken off that God
was there and was displeased with him. He went for a walk, day after
day, but could never shake the feeling off. Then he went back to his
constituency in his State, he said, to arrange matters there. He had the
ambition to be the Governor of his State, and his party was the dominant
party in the State, and, as far as such things could be judged, he was
in the line to become Governor there, in one of the most dominant States
of our Central West. He said: ‘I went home to fix that thing up as far
as I could, and to get ready for it. But I had hardly reached home and
exchanged greetings, when my wife, who was an earnest Christian woman,
said to me that a few of them had made a little covenant of prayer that
I might become a Christian.’ He did not want her to know the experience
that he had just been going through, and so he said as carelessly as he
could, ‘When did this thing begin, this praying of yours?’ She named the
date. Then he did some very quick thinking, and he knew, as he thought
back, that it was the day on the calendar when that strange impression
came to him for the first time.
“He said to me: ‘I was tremendously shaken. I wanted to be honest. I was
perfectly honest in not believing in God, and I thought I was right. But
if what she said was true, then merely as a lawyer sifting his evidence
in a case, it would be good evidence that there was really something in
their prayer. I was terrifically shaken, and wanted to be honest, and
did not know what to do. That same night I went to a little Methodist
chapel, and if somebody had known how to talk with me, I think I should
have accepted Christ that night.’ Then he said that the next night he
went back again to that chapel, where meetings were being held each
night, and there he kneeled at the altar, and yielded his great strong
will to the will of God. Then he said, ‘I knew I was to preach,’ and he
is preaching still in a Western State. That is half of the story. I also
talked with his wife—I wanted to put the two halves together, so as to
get the bit of teaching in it all—and she told me this. She had been a
Christian—what you call a nominal Christian—a strange confusion of
terms. Then there came a time when she was led into a full surrender of
her life to the Lord Jesus Christ. Then she said, ‘At once there came a
great intensifying of desire that my husband might be a Christian, and
we made that little compact to pray for him each day until he became a
Christian. That night I was kneeling at my bedside before going to rest,
praying for my husband, praying very earnestly and then a voice said to
me, ‘Are you willing for the results that will come if your husband is
converted?’ The little message was so very distinct that she said she
was frightened; she had never had such an experience. But she went on
praying still more earnestly, and again there came the quiet voice, ‘Are
you willing for the consequences?’ And again there was a sense of being
startled, frightened. But she still went on praying, and wondering what
this meant, and a third time the quiet voice came more quietly than ever
as she described it, ‘Are you willing for the consequences?’
“Then she told me she said with great earnestness, ‘O God, I am willing
for anything Thou dost think good, if only my husband may know Thee, and
become a true Christian man.’ She said that instantly, when that prayer
came from her lips, there came into her heart a wonderful sense of
peace, a great peace that she could not explain, a ‘peace that passeth
understanding,’ and from that moment—it was the very night of the
covenant, the night when her husband had that first strange
experience—the assurance never left her that he would accept Christ.
But all those weeks she prayed with the firm assurance that the result
was coming. What were the consequences? They were of a kind that I think
no one would think small. She was the wife of a man in a very prominent
political position; she was the wife of a man who was in the line of
becoming the first official of his State, and she officially the first
lady socially of that State, with all the honour that that social
standing would imply. Now she is the wife of a Methodist preacher, with
her home changed every two or three years, she going from this place to
that, a very different social position, and having a very different
income than she would otherwise have had. Yet I never met a woman who
had more of the wonderful peace of God in her heart, and of the light of
God in her face, than that woman.”
And Mr. Gordon’s comment on that incident is this: “Now, you can see at
once that there was no change in the purpose of God through that prayer.
The prayer worked out His purpose; it did not change it. But the woman’s
surrender gave the opportunity of working out the will that God wanted
to work out. If we might give ourselves to Him and learn His will, and
use all our strength in learning His will and bending to His will, then
we would begin to pray, and there is simply nothing that could resist
the tremendous power of the prayer. Oh for more men who will be simple
enough to get in touch with God, and give Him the mastery of the whole
life, and learn His will, and then give themselves, as Jesus gave
Himself, to the sacred service of intercession!”
To the man or woman who is acquainted with God and who knows how to
pray, there is nothing remarkable in the answers that come. They are
sure of being heard, since they ask in accordance with what they know to
be the mind and the will of God. Dr. William Burt, Bishop of Europe in
the Methodist Episcopal Church, tells that a few years ago, when he
visited their Boys’ School in Vienna, he found that although the year
was not up, all available funds had been spent. He hesitated to make a
special appeal to his friends in America. He counselled with the
teachers. They took the matter to God in earnest and continued prayer,
believing that He would grant their request. Ten days later Bishop Burt
was in Rome, and there came to him a letter from a friend in New York,
which read substantially thus: “As I went to my office on Broadway one
morning [and the date was the very one on which the teachers were
praying], a voice seemed to tell me that you were in need of funds for
the Boys’ School in Vienna. I very gladly enclose a cheque for the
work.” The cheque was for the amount needed. There had been no human
communication between Vienna and New York. But while they were yet
speaking God answered them.
Some time ago there appeared in an English religious weekly the report
of an incident narrated by a well-known preacher in the course of an
address to children. For the truth of the story he was able to vouch. A
child lay sick in a country cottage, and her younger sister heard the
doctor say, as he left the house, “Nothing but a miracle can save her.”
The little girl went to her money-box, took out the few coins it
contained, and in perfect simplicity of heart went to shop after shop in
the village street, asking, “Please, I want to buy a miracle.” From each
she came away disappointed. Even the local chemist had to say, “My dear,
we don’t sell miracles here.” But outside his door two men were talking,
and had overheard the child’s request. One was a great doctor from a
London hospital, and he asked her to explain what she wanted. When he
understood the need, he hurried with her to the cottage, examined the
sick girl, and said to the mother: “It is true—only a miracle can save
her, and it must be performed at once.” He got his instruments,
performed the operation, and the patient’s life was saved.
D. L. Moody gives this illustration of the power of prayer: “While in
Edinburgh, a man was pointed out to me by a friend, who said: ‘That man
is chairman of the Edinburgh Infidel Club.’ I went and sat beside him
and said, ‘My friend, I am glad to see you in our meeting. Are you
concerned about your welfare?’
“‘I do not believe in any hereafter.’
“‘Well, just get down on your knees and let me pray for you.’
“‘No, I do not believe in prayer.’
“I knelt beside him as he sat, and prayed. He made a great deal of sport
of it. A year after I met him again. I took him by the hand and said:
‘Hasn’t God answered my prayer yet?’
“‘There is no God. If you believe in one who answers prayer, try your
hand on me.’
“‘Well, a great many are now praying for you, and God’s time will come,
and I believe you will be saved yet.’
“Some time afterwards I got a letter from a leading barrister in
Edinburgh telling me that my infidel friend had come to Christ, and that
seventeen of his club men had followed his example.
“I did not know _how_ God would answer prayer, but I knew He would
answer. Let us come boldly to God.”
Robert Louis Stevenson tells a vivid story of a storm at sea. The
passengers below were greatly alarmed, as the waves dashed over the
vessel. At last one of them, against orders, crept to the deck, and came
to the pilot, who was lashed to the wheel which he was turning without
flinching. The pilot caught sight of the terror-stricken man, and gave
him a reassuring smile. Below went the passenger, and comforted the
others by saying, “I have seen the face of the pilot, and he smiled. All
is well.”
That is how we feel when through the gateway of prayer we find our way
into the Father’s presence. We see His face, and we know that all is
well, since His hand is on the helm of events, and “even the winds and
the waves obey Him.” When we live in fellowship with Him, we come with
confidence into His presence, asking in the full confidence of receiving
and meeting with the justification of our faith.
————————————————————————————————
_Let your hearts be much set on revivals of religion. Never forget
that the churches have hitherto existed and prospered by revivals;
and that if they are to exist and prosper in time to come, it must
be by the same cause which has from the first been their glory and
defence._
—JOEL HAWES.
_If any minister can be satisfied without conversions, he shall
have no conversions._
—C. H. SPURGEON.
_I do not believe that my desires for a revival were ever half so
strong as they ought to be; nor do I see how a minister can help
being in a “constant fever” when his Master is dishonoured and
souls are destroyed in so many ways._
—EDWARD PAYSON.
_An aged saint once came to the pastor at night and said: “We are
about to have a revival.” He was asked why he knew so. His answer
was, “I went into the stable to take care of my cattle two hours
ago, and there the Lord has kept me in prayer until just now. And I
feel that we are going to be revived.” It was the commencement of a
revival._
—H. C. FISH.