The Reality of Prayer
_EDITED BY HOMER W. HODGE_
The Spiritual Life Books
By EDWARD M. BOUNDS
_The Possibilities of Prayer._
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A rich, exceptionally helpful addition to Doctor Bounds’ books, which
deal with the place and significance prayer has in the life of the
believer.
_Heaven_: A Place—A City—A Home.
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Possessed of a wonderfully full knowledge of Holy Scripture, a man of
unswerving faith and mystical insight, Mr. Bounds writes with a
certitude, confidence and joyous anticipation of the eternal felicity
awaiting the faithful believer.
_Purpose in Prayer._ Cloth $1.25
“Mr. Bounds has the gift of insight, and with this a faculty for
selecting words to express precisely that which responds to the
heart-hunger of those who are seeking spiritual enlightenment.”
—_Sunday School Times._
_Satan_: His Personality, His Power, His Overthrow.
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With irrefutable logic backed by the testimony of Holy Scripture, it
shows the Arch Enemy of mankind to be a Person—actual, literal, ever
active for the destruction of human souls. Indicates whereby Christian
believers can withstand his assaults and how they may finally triumph.
The Reality of Prayer
By
EDWARD M. BOUNDS, D.D.
_Author of “Purpose in Prayer,” “The Possibilities
of Prayer,” “Heaven,” “Satan,” etc._
EDITED BY
HOMER W. HODGE
NEW YORK CHICAGO
Fleming H. Revell Company
LONDON AND EDINBURGH
Copyright, 1924, by
FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY
New York: 158 Fifth Avenue
Chicago: 17 North Wabash Ave.
London: 21 Paternoster Square
Edinburgh: 75 Princes Street
Foreword
During the last twenty-five years of the nineteenth century and a score
of years of the twentieth, there lived and died three great men of God
whom I knew—men whom God has doubtless numbered among the foremost of
His heavenly host. The first was Edward McKendree Bounds, author of this
present volume and the other “Spiritual Life” Books. The second was
Claud L. Chilton, minister for many years in the Methodist Episcopal
Church, South, and a musical composer of religious music of considerable
note. The third, Clement C. Cary, preacher and editor, lost his life in
an automobile accident in 1922. The fourth was Dr. B. F. Haynes,
minister, editor and author, who died in Nashville, in 1923.
What Dr. Thomas Goodwin, the Puritan, was to Strong, Arrowsmith and
Spurstow; what John Wesley was to Whitefield, Fletcher and Clark, Bounds
was to Chilton, Cary and Haynes. What David Brainerd’s _Journal_ did for
Cary, Martyn, McCheyne, Bounds’ books can do for thousands of God’s
children. He was a man who lived ever on prayer ground. He walked and
talked with the Lord. Prayer was the great weapon in his arsenal, his
pathway to the Throne of Grace. None who read what he has written can
fail of realising that Edward McKendree Bounds talked with God, as a man
talketh to his friend.
HOMER W. HODGE.
_Flushing, N. Y._
Contents
I. PRAYER—A PRIVILEGE, PRINCELY, SACRED . . . 9
II. PRAYER—FILLS MAN’S POVERTY WITH GOD’S RICHES . . . 18
III. PRAYER—THE ALL-IMPORTANT ESSENCE OF EARTHLY WORSHIP . . . 28
IV. GOD HAS EVERYTHING TO DO WITH PRAYER . . . 34
V. JESUS CHRIST, THE DIVINE TEACHER OF PRAYER . . . 46
VI. JESUS CHRIST, THE DIVINE TEACHER OF PRAYER (_Continued_) . . . 56
VII. JESUS CHRIST AN EXAMPLE OF PRAYER . . . 69
VIII. PRAYER INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF OUR LORD . . . 80
IX. PRAYER INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF OUR LORD (_Continued_) . . . 87
X. OUR LORD’S MODEL PRAYER . . . 97
XI. OUR LORD’S SACERDOTAL PRAYER . . . 102
XII. THE GETHSEMANE PRAYER . . . 112
XIII. THE HOLY SPIRIT AND PRAYER . . . 122
XIV. THE HOLY SPIRIT OUR HELPER IN PRAYER . . . 133
XV. THE TWO COMFORTERS AND TWO ADVOCATES . . . 143
XVI. PRAYER AND THE HOLY GHOST DISPENSATION . . . 148
I
PRAYER—A PRIVILEGE, PRINCELY, SACRED
_I am the creature of a day, passing through life as an arrow
through the air. I am a spirit come from God and returning to God;
just hovering over the great gulf; till a few moments hence I am no
more seen; I drop into an unchangeable eternity! I want to know one
thing, the way to heaven; how to land safe on that happy shore. God
Himself has condescended to teach the way; for this end He came from
heaven. He hath written it down in a book. O give me that book! At
any price give me the Book of God! Lord, is it not Thy word—“If any
man lack wisdom, let him ask of God? Thou givest liberally, and
upbraidest not. Thou hast said, if any be willing to do Thy will he
shall know. I am willing to do; let me know Thy will.”_—JOHN WESLEY.
The word “Prayer” expresses the largest and most comprehensive approach
unto God. It gives prominence to the element of devotion. It is
communion and intercourse with God. It is enjoyment of God. It is access
to God. “Supplication” is a more restricted and more intense form of
prayer, accompanied by a sense of personal need, limited to the seeking
in an urgent manner of a supply for pressing need.
“Supplication” is the very soul of prayer in the way of pleading for
some one thing, greatly needed, and the need intensely felt.
“Intercession” is an enlargement in prayer, a going out in broadness and
fullness from self to others. Primarily, it does not centre in praying
for others, but refers to the freeness, boldness and childlike
confidence of the praying. It is the fullness of confiding influence in
the soul’s approach to God, unlimited and unhesitating in its access and
its demands. This influence and confident trust is to be used for
others.
Prayer always, and everywhere is an immediate and confiding approach to,
and a request of, God the Father. In the prayer universal and perfect,
as the pattern of all praying, it is “Our Father, Who art in Heaven.” At
the grave of Lazarus, Jesus lifted up His eyes and said, “Father.” In
His sacerdotal prayer, Jesus lifted up His eyes to Heaven, and said,
“Father.” Personal, familiar and paternal was all His praying. Strong,
too, and touching and tearful, was His praying. Read these words of
Paul: “Who in the days of his flesh, when he had offered up prayers and
supplications, with strong crying and tears, unto him that was able to
save him from death, and was heard in that he feared” (Hebrews 5:7).
So elsewhere (James 1:5) we have “asking” set forth as prayer: “If any
of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, who giveth to all men liberally,
and upbraideth not, and it shall be given him.”
“Asking of God” and “receiving” from the Lord—direct application to God,
immediate connection with God—that is prayer.
In John 5:13 we have this statement about prayer:
“And this is the confidence that we have in him, that if we ask
anything according to his will, he heareth us. And if we know that
he heareth us, whatsoever we ask, we know that we have the petitions
that we desired of him.”
In Philippians 4:6 we have these words about prayer:
“Be careful for nothing, but in everything, by prayer and
supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known
unto God.”
What is God’s will about prayer? First of all, it is God’s will that we
pray. Jesus Christ “spake a parable unto them to this end, that men
ought always to pray, and not to faint.”
Paul writes to young Timothy about the first things which God’s people
are to do, and first among the first he puts prayer: “I exhort,
therefore, that first of all, supplications, prayers, intercessions, and
giving of thanks, be made for all men” (I Tim. 2:1).
In connection with these words Paul declares that the will of God and
the redemption and mediation of Jesus Christ for the salvation for all
men are all vitally concerned in this matter of prayer. In this his
apostolical authority and solicitude of soul conspire with God’s will
and Christ’s intercession to will that “the men pray everywhere.”
Note how frequently prayer is brought forward in the New Testament:
“Continuing instant in prayer”; “Pray without ceasing”; “Continue in
prayer, and watch in the same with thanksgiving”; “Be ye sober and watch
unto prayer”; Christ’s clarion call was “watch and pray.” What are all
these and others, if it is not the will of God that men should pray?
Prayer is complement, make efficient and cooperate with God’s will,
whose sovereign sway is to run parallel in extent and power with the
atonement of Jesus Christ. He, through the Eternal Spirit, by the grace
of God, “tasted death for every man.” We, through the Eternal Spirit, by
the grace of God, _pray_ for every man.
But how do I know that I am praying by the will of God? Every true
attempt to pray is in response to the will of God. Bungling it may be
and untutored by human teachers, but it is acceptable to God, because it
is in obedience to His will. If I will give myself up to the inspiration
of the Spirit of God, who commands me to pray, the details and the
petitions of that praying will all fall into harmony with the will of
Him who wills that I should pray.
Prayer is no little thing, no selfish and small matter. It does not
concern the petty interests of one person. The littlest prayer broadens
out by the will of God till it touches all words, conserves all
interests, and enhances man’s greatest wealth, and God’s greatest good.
God is so concerned that men pray that He has promised to answer prayer.
He has not promised to do something general if we pray, but He has
promised to do the very thing for which we pray.
Prayer, as taught by Jesus in its essential features, enters into all
the relations of life. It sanctifies brotherliness. To the Jew, the
altar was the symbol and place of prayer. The Jew devoted the altar to
the worship of God. Jesus Christ takes the altar of prayer and devotes
it to the worship of the brotherhood. How Christ purifies the altar and
enlarges it! How He takes it out of the sphere of a mere performance,
and makes its virtue to consist, not in the mere act of praying, but in
the spirit which actuates us toward men. Our spirit toward folks is of
the life of prayer. We must be at peace with men, and, if possible, have
them at peace with us, before we can be at peace with God.
Reconciliation with men is the forerunner of reconciliation with God.
Our spirit and words must embrace men before they can embrace God. Unity
with the brotherhood goes before unity with God. “Therefore, if thou
bring thy gift to the altar, and there rememberest that thy brother hath
aught against thee; leave there thy gift before the altar, and go thy
way. First, be reconciled to thy brother, and then come and offer thy
gift” (Matt. 5:23).
Non-praying is lawlessness, discord, anarchy. Prayer, in the moral
government of God, is as strong and far-reaching as the law of
gravitation in the material world, and it is as necessary as gravitation
to hold things in their proper sphere and in life.
The space occupied by prayer in the Sermon on the Mount bespeaks its
estimate by Christ and the importance it holds in His system. Many
important principles are discussed in a verse or two. The Sermon
consists of one hundred and eleven verses, and eighteen are about prayer
directly, and others indirectly.
Prayer was one of the cardinal principles of piety in every dispensation
and to every child of God. It did not pertain to the business of Christ
to originate duties, but to recover, to recast, to spiritualise, and to
re-enforce those duties which are cardinal and original.
With Moses the great features of prayer are prominent. He never beats
the air nor fights a sham battle. The most serious and strenuous
business of his serious and strenuous life was prayer. He is much at it
with the intensest earnestness of his soul. Intimate as he was with God,
his intimacy did not abate the necessity of prayer. This intimacy only
brought clearer insight into the nature and necessity of prayer, and led
him to see the greater obligations to pray, and to discover the larger
results of praying. In reviewing one of the crises through which Israel
passed, when the very existence of the nation was imperilled, he writes:
“I fell down before the Lord forty days and forty nights.” Wonderful
praying and wonderful results! Moses knew how to do wonderful praying,
and God knew how to give wonderful results.
The whole force of Bible statement is to increase our faith in the
doctrine that prayer affects God, secures favors from God, which can be
secured in no other way, and which will not be bestowed by God if we do
not pray. The whole canon of Bible teaching is to illustrate the great
truth that God hears and answers prayer. One of the great purposes of
God in His book is to impress upon us indelibly the great importance,
the priceless value, and the absolute necessity of asking God for the
things which we need for time and eternity. He urges us by every
consideration, and presses and warns us by every interest. He points us
to His own Son, turned over to us for our good, as His pledge that
prayer will be answered, teaching us that God is our Father, able to do
all things for us and to give all things to us, much more than earthly
parents are able or willing to do for their children.
Let us thoroughly understand ourselves and understand, also, this great
business of prayer. Our one great business is prayer, and we will never
do it well without we fasten to it by all binding force. We will never
do it well without arranging the best conditions of doing it well. Satan
has suffered so much by good praying that all his wily, shrewd and
ensnaring devices will be used to cripple its performances.
We must, by all the fastenings we can find, cable ourselves to prayer.
To be loose in time and place is to open the door to Satan. To be exact,
prompt, unswerving, and careful in even the little things, is to
buttress ourselves against the Evil One.
Prayer, by God’s very oath, is put in the very stones of God’s
foundations, as eternal as its companion, “And men shall pray for him
continually.” This is the eternal condition which advances His cause,
and makes it powerfully aggressive. Men are to always pray for it. Its
strength, beauty and aggression lie in their prayers. Its power lies
simply in its power to pray. No power is found elsewhere but in its
ability to pray. “For my house shall be called the house of prayer for
all people.” It is based on prayer, and carried on by the same means.
Prayer is a privilege, a sacred, princely privilege. Prayer is a duty,
an obligation most binding, and most imperative, which should hold us to
it. But prayer is more than a privilege, more than a duty. It is a
means, an instrument, a condition. Not to pray is to lose much more than
to fail in the exercise and enjoyment of a high, or sweet privilege. Not
to pray is to fail along lines far more important than even the
violation of an obligation.
Prayer is the appointed condition of getting God’s aid. This aid is as
manifold and illimitable as God’s ability, and as varied and exhaustless
is this aid as man’s need. Prayer is the avenue through which God
supplies man’s wants. Prayer is the channel through which all good flows
from God to man, and all good from men to men. God is the Christian’s
father. Asking and giving are in that relation.
Man is the one more immediately concerned in this great work of praying.
It ennobles man’s reason to employ it in prayer. The office and work of
prayer is the divinest engagement of man’s reason. Prayer makes man’s
reason to shine. Intelligence of the highest order approves prayer. He
is the wisest man who prays the most and the best. Prayer is the school
of wisdom as well as of piety.
Prayer is not a picture to handle, to admire, to look at. It is not
beauty, coloring, shape, attitude, imagination, or genius. These things
do not pertain to its character or conduct. It is not poetry nor music.
Its inspiration and melody come from Heaven. Prayer belongs to the
spirit, and at times it possesses the spirit and stirs the spirit with
high and holy purposes and resolves.
II
PRAYER—FILLS MAN’S POVERTY WITH GOD’S RICHES
_For two hours I struggled on, forsaken of God, and met neither God
nor man, all one chilly afternoon. When at last, standing still and
looking at Schiehallion clothed in white from top to bottom, this of
David shot up into my heart: “Wash me, and I shall be whiter than
snow!” In a moment I was with God, or rather God was with me. I
walked home with my heart in a flame of fire._
—ALEXANDER WHYTE, D.D.
We have much fine writing and learned talk about the subjective benefits
of prayer; how prayer secures its full measure of results, not by
affecting God, but by affecting us, by becoming a training school for
those who pray. We are taught by such teachers that the province of
prayer is not to get, but to train. Prayer thus becomes a mere
performance, a drill-sergeant, a school, in which patience, tranquility
and dependence are taught. In this school, denial of prayer is the most
valuable teacher. How well all this may look, and how reasonable soever
it may seem, there is nothing of it in the Bible. The clear and
oft-repeated language of the Bible is that prayer is to be answered by
God; that God occupies the relation of a father to us, and that as
Father He gives to us when we ask the things for which we ask. The best
praying, therefore, is the praying that gets an answer.
The possibilities and necessity of prayer are graven in the eternal
foundations of the Gospel. The relation that is established between the
Father and the Son and the decreed covenant between the two, has prayer
as the base of its existence, and the conditions of the advance and
success of the Gospel. Prayer is the condition by which all foes are to
be overcome and all the inheritance is to be possessed.
These are axiomatic truths, though they may be very homely ones. But
these are the times when Bible axioms need to be stressed, pressed,
iterated and reiterated. The very air is rife with influences, practices
and theories which sap foundations, and the most veritable truths and
the most self-evident axioms go down by insidious and invisible attacks.
More than this: the tendency of these times is to an ostentatious parade
of doing, which enfeebles the life and dissipates the spirit of praying.
There may be kneeling, and there may be standing in prayerful attitude.
There may be much bowing of the head, and yet there may be no serious,
real praying. Prayer is real work. Praying is vital work. Prayer has in
its keeping the very heart of worship. There may be the exhibit, the
circumstance, and the pomp of praying, and yet no real praying. There
may be much attitude, gesture, and verbiage, but no praying.
Who can approach into God’s presence in prayer? Who can come before the
great God, Maker of all worlds, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus
Christ, who holds in His hands all good, and who is all powerful and
able to do all things? Man’s approach to this great God—what lowliness,
what truth, what cleanness of hands, and purity of heart is needed and
demanded!
Definition of prayer scarcely belongs to Bible range at any point.
Everywhere we are impressed that it is more important and urgent that
men pray, than that they be skilled in the homiletic didactics of
prayer. That is a thing of the heart, not of the schools. It is more of
feeling than of words. Praying is the best school in which to learn to
pray, prayer the best dictionary to define the art and nature of
praying.
We repeat and reiterate. Prayer is not a mere habit, riveted by custom
and memory, something which must be gone through with, its value
depending upon the decency and perfection of the performance. Prayer is
not a duty which must be performed, to ease obligation and to quiet
conscience. Prayer is not mere privilege, a sacred indulgence to be
taken advantage of, at leisure, at pleasure, at will, and no serious
loss attending its omission.
Prayer is a solemn service due to God, an adoration, a worship, an
approach to God for some request, the presenting of some desire, the
expression of some need to Him, who supplies all need, and who satisfies
all desires; who, as a Father, finds His greatest pleasure in relieving
the wants and granting the desires of His children. Prayer is the
child’s request, not to the winds nor to the world, but to the Father.
Prayer is the outstretched arms of the child for the Father’s help.
Prayer is the child’s cry calling to the Father’s ear, the Father’s
heart, and to the Father’s ability, which the Father is to hear, the
Father is to feel, and which the Father is to relieve. Prayer is the
seeking of God’s great and greatest good, which will not come if we do
not pray.
Prayer is an ardent and believing cry to God for some specific thing.
God’s rule is to answer by giving the specific thing asked for. With it
may come much of other gifts and graces. Strength, serenity, sweetness,
and faith may come as the bearers of the gifts. But even they come
because God hears and answers prayer.
We do but follow the plain letter and spirit of the Bible when we affirm
that God answers prayer, and answers by giving us the very things we
desire, and that the withholding of that which we desire and the giving
of something else is not the rule, but rare and exceptional. When His
children cry for bread He gives them bread.
Revelation does not deal in philosophical subtleties, nor verbal
niceties and hair-splitting distinctions. It unfolds relationships,
declares principles, and enforces duties. The heart must define, the
experience must realise. Paul came on the stage too late to define
prayer. That which had been so well done by patriarchs and prophets
needed no return to dictionaries. Christ is Himself the illustration and
definition of prayer. He prayed as man had never prayed. He put prayer
on a higher basis, with grander results and simpler being than it had
ever known. He taught Paul how to pray by the revelation of Himself,
which is the first call to prayer, and the first lesson in praying.
Prayer, like love, is too ethereal and too heavenly to be held in the
gross arms of chilly definitions. It belongs to Heaven, and to the
heart, and not to words and ideas only.
Prayer is no petty invention of man, a fancied relief for fancied ills.
Prayer is no dreary performance, dead and death-dealing, but is God’s
enabling act for man, living and life-giving, joy and joy-giving. Prayer
is the contact of a living soul with God. In prayer, God stoops to kiss
man, to bless man, and to aid man in everything that God can devise or
man can need. Prayer fills man’s emptiness with God’s fullness. It fills
man’s poverty with God’s riches. It puts away man’s weakness with God’s
strength. It banishes man’s littleness with God’s greatness. Prayer is
God’s plan to supply man’s great and continuous need with God’s great
and continuous abundance.
What is this prayer to which men are called? It is not a mere form, a
child’s play. It is serious, difficult work, the manliest, the mightiest
work, the divinest work which man can do. Prayer lifts men out of the
earthliness and links them with the heavenly. Men are never nearer
Heaven, nearer God, never more God-like, never in deeper sympathy and
truer partnership with Jesus Christ, than when praying. Love,
philanthropy, holy affiances,—all of them helpful and tender for men—are
born and perfected by prayer.
Prayer is not merely a question of duty, but of salvation. Are men saved
who are not men of prayer? Is not the gift, the inclination, the habit
of prayer, one of the elements or characteristics of salvation? Can it
be possible to be in affinity with Jesus Christ and not be prayerful? Is
it possible to have the Holy Spirit and not have the spirit of prayer?
Can one have the new birth and not be born to prayer? Is not the life of
the Spirit and the life of prayer coördinate and consistent? Can
brotherly love be in the heart which is unschooled in prayer?
We have two kinds of prayer named in the New Testament—prayer and
supplication. Prayer denotes prayer in general. Supplication is a more
intense and more special form of prayer. These two, supplication and
prayer, ought to be combined. Then we would have devotion in its widest
and sweetest form, and supplication with its most earnest and personal
sense of need.
In Paul’s Prayer Directory, found in the sixth chapter of Ephesians, we
are taught to be always in prayer, as we are always in the battle. The
Holy Spirit is to be sought by intense supplication, and our
supplications are to be charged by His vitalising, illuminating and
ennobling energy. Watchfulness is to fit us for this intense praying and
intense fighting. Perseverance is an essential element in successful
praying, as in every other realm of conflict. The saints universal are
to be helped on to victory by the aid of our prayers. Apostolic courage,
ability and success are to be gained by the prayers of the soldier
saints everywhere.
It is only those of deep and true vision who can administer prayer.
These “Living Creatures,” in Revelation 4:6, are described as “full of
eyes before and behind,” “full of eyes within.” Eyes are for seeing.
Clearness, intensity, and perfection of sight are in it. Vigilance and
profound insight are in it, the faculty of knowing. It is by prayer that
the eyes of our hearts are opened. Clear, profound knowledge of the
mysteries of grace is secured by prayer. These “Living Creatures” had
eyes “within and without.” They were “full of eyes.” The highest form of
life is intelligent. Ignorance is degrading and low, in the spiritual
realm as it is in other realms. Prayer gives us eyes to see God. Prayer
is seeing God. The prayer life is knowledge without and within. All
vigilance without, all vigilance within. There can be no intelligent
prayer without knowledge within. Our inner condition and our inner needs
must be felt and known.
It takes prayer to minister. It takes life, the highest form of life, to
minister. Prayer is the highest intelligence, the profoundest wisdom,
the most vital, the most joyous, the most efficacious, the most powerful
of all vocations. It is life, radiant, transporting, eternal life. Away
with dry forms, with dead, cold habits of prayer! Away with sterile
routine, with senseless performances and petty playthings in prayer! Let
us get at the serious work, the chief business of men, that of prayer.
Let us work at it skillfully. Let us seek to be adepts in this great
work of praying. Let us be master-workmen, in this high art of praying.
Let us be so in the habit of prayer, so devoted to prayer, so filled
with its rich spices, so ardent by its holy flame, that all Heaven and
earth will be perfumed by its aroma, and nations yet in the womb will be
blest by our prayers. Heaven will be fuller and brighter in glorious
inhabitants, earth will be better prepared for its bridal day, and hell
robbed of many of its victims, because we have lived to pray.
There is not only a sad and ruinous neglect of any attempt to pray, but
there is an immense waste in the seeming praying which is done, as
official praying, state praying, mere habit praying. Men cleave to the
form and semblance of a thing after the heart and reality have gone out
of it. This finds illustrations in many who seem to pray. Formal praying
has a strong hold and a strong following.
Hannah’s statement to Eli and her defense against his charge of
hypocrisy was: “I have poured out my soul before the Lord.” God’s
serious promise to the Jews was, “Then shall ye call upon me, and ye
shall go and pray unto me, and I will hearken unto you. And ye shall
seek me and find me when ye shall search for me with all your heart.”
Let all the present day praying be measured by these standards, “Pouring
out the soul before God,” and “Seeking with all the heart,” and how much
of it will be found to be mere form, waste, worthless. James says of
Elijah that he “prayed with prayer.”
In Paul’s directions to Timothy about prayer, (I Tim. 1:8) we have a
comprehensive verbal description of prayer in its different departments,
or varied manifestations. They are all in the plural form,
supplications, prayers and intercessions. They declare the
many-sidedness, the endless diversity, and the necessity of going beyond
the formal simplicity of a single prayer, and press and add prayer upon
prayer, supplication to supplication, intercession over and over again,
until the combined force of prayers in their most superlative modes,
unite their aggregation and pressure with cumulative power to our
praying. The unlimited superlative and the unlimited plural are the only
measures of prayer. The one term of “prayer” is the common and
comprehensive one for the act, the duty, the spirit, and the service we
call prayer. It is the condensed statement of worship. The heavenly
worship does not have the element of prayer so conspicuous. Prayer is
the conspicuous, all-important essence and the all-colouring ingredient
of earthly worship, while praise is the pre-eminent, comprehensive,
all-colouring, all-inspiring element of the heavenly worship.
III
PRAYER—THE ALL-IMPORTANT ESSENCE OF EARTHLY WORSHIP
_Where the spiritual consciousness is concerned—the department which
asks the question and demands the evidence—no evidence is competent
or relevant except such as is spiritual. Only that which is above
matter and above logic can be heard, because the very question at
issue is the existence and personality of a spiritual and
supernatural God. Only the Spirit himself beareth witness with our
spirit. This must be done in a spiritual or supernatural way, or it
cannot be done at all._—C. L. CHILTON.
The Jewish law and the prophets know something of God as a Father.
Occasional and imperfect, yet comforting glimpses they had of the great
truth of God’s Fatherhood, and of our sonship. Christ lays the
foundation of prayer deep and strong with this basic principle. The law
of prayer, the right to pray, rests on sonship. “Our Father” brings us
into the closest relationship to God. Prayer is the child’s approach,
the child’s plea, the child’s right. It is the law of prayer that looks
up, that lifts up the eye to “Our Father, Who art in Heaven.” Our
Father’s house is our home in Heaven. Heavenly citizenship and heavenly
homesickness are in prayer. Prayer is an appeal from the lowness, from
the emptiness, from the need of earth, to the highness, the fullness and
to the all-sufficiency of Heaven. Prayer turns the eye and the heart
heavenward with a child’s longings, a child’s trust and a child’s
expectancy. To hallow God’s Name, to speak it with bated breath, to hold
it sacredly, this also belongs to prayer.
In this connection it might be said that it is requisite to dictate to
children the necessity of prayer in order to their salvation. But alas!
Unhappily it is thought sufficient to tell them there is a Heaven and a
hell; that they must avoid the latter place and seek to reach the
former. Yet they are not taught the easiest way to arrive at salvation.
The only way to Heaven is by the route of prayer, such prayer of the
heart which every one is capable of. It is prayer, not of reasonings
which are the fruits of study, or of the exercise of the imagination,
which fills the mind with wondering objects, but which fails to settle
salvation, but the simple, confidential prayer of the child to his
Father in Heaven.
Poverty of spirit enters into true praying. “Blessed are the poor in
spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven.” “The poor” means paupers,
beggars, those who live on the bounties of others, who live by begging.
Christ’s people live by asking. “Prayer is the Christian’s vital
breath.” It is his affluent inheritance, his daily annuity.
In His own example, Christ illustrates the nature and necessity of
prayer. Everywhere He declares that he who is on God’s mission in this
world will pray. He is an illustrious example of the principle that the
more devoted the man is to God, the more prayerful will he be. The
diviner the man, the more of the Spirit of the Father and of the Son he
has, the more prayerful will he be. And, conversely, it is true that the
more prayerful he is, the more of the Spirit of the Father and of the
Son will he receive.
The great events and crowning periods of the life of Jesus we find Him
in prayer—at the beginning of His ministry, at the fords of the Jordan,
when the Holy Spirit descended upon Him; just prior to the
transfiguration, and in the garden of Gethsemane. Well do the words of
Peter come in here: “Leaving us an example that ye should follow His
steps.”
There is an important principle of prayer found in some of the miracles
of Christ. It is the progressive nature of the answer to prayer. Not at
once does God always give the full answer to prayer, but rather
progressively, step by step. Mark (8:22) describes a case which
illustrates this important truth, too often overlooked:
“And he cometh to Bethsaida; and they bring a blind man unto him,
and besought him to touch him.
“And he took the blind man by the hand, and led him out of the town;
and when he had spit on his eyes, and put His hands upon him, he
asked him if he saw aught.
“And he looked up, and said, ‘I see men as trees, walking.’
“After that he put his hands again upon his eyes, and made him look
up; and he was restored, and saw every man clearly.”
Alone He has to take us at times, aside from the world, where He can
have us all to Himself, and there speak to and deal with us.
We have three cures in blindness in the life of our Lord, which
illustrate the nature of God’s working in answering prayer, and show the
exhaustless variety and the omnipotence of His working.
In the first case Christ came incidentally on a blind man at Jerusalem,
made clay, softened it by spittle, and smeared it on the eyes and then
commanded the man to go and wash in the pool of Siloam. The gracious
results lay at the end of his action—washing. The failure to go and wash
would have been fatal to the cure. No one, not even the blind man, in
this instance, requested the cure.
In the second case the parties who bring the blind man, back their
bringing with earnest prayer for cure; they beseech Christ to simply
touch him, as though their faith would relieve the burden of a heavy
operation. But He took the man by the hand and led him out of the town
and apart from the people. Alone, and in secret, this work was to be
done. He spat on his eyes and put his hands on them. The response was
not complete, a dawning of light, a partial recovery; the first gracious
communication but gave him a disordered vision, the second stroke
perfected the cure. The man’s submissive faith in giving himself up to
Christ to be led away into privacy and alone, were prominent features of
the cure, as also the gradual reception of sight, and the necessity of a
second stroke to finish the perfect work.
The third was the case of blind Bartimæus. It was the urgency of faith
declaring itself in clamourous utterances, rebuked by those who were
following Christ, but intensified and emboldened by opposition.
The first case comes on Christ unawares; the second was brought with
specific intent to Him; the last goes after Christ with irresistible
urgency, met by the resistance of the multitude and the seeming
indifference of Christ. The cure, though, was without the interposition
of any agent, no taking by the hand, no gentle or severe touch, no
spittle, nor clay, nor washing—a word only and his sight, full-orbed,
came instantly. Each one had experienced the same divine power, the same
blessed results, but with marked diversity in the expression of their
faith and the mode of their cure. Suppose, at their meeting, the first
had set up the particulars and process of his cure, the spittle, the
clay, the washing in Siloam as the only Divine process, as the only
genuine credentials of a Divine work, how far from the truth, how narrow
and misleading such a standard of decision! Not methods, but results,
are the tests of the Divine work.
Each one could say: “This one thing I know, whereas I was blind I now
see.” The results were conscious results; that Christ did the work they
knew; faith was the instrument, but its exercise different; the method
of Christ’s working different; the various steps that brought them to
the gracious end on their part and on His part at many points strikingly
dissimilar.
What are the limitations of prayer? How far do its benefits and
possibilities reach? What part of God’s dealing with man, and with man’s
world, is unaffected by prayer? Do the possibilities of prayer cover all
temporal and spiritual good? The answers to these questions are of
transcendental importance. The answer will gauge the effort and results
of our praying. The answer will greatly enhance the value of prayer, or
will greatly depress prayer. The answer to these important questions are
fully covered by Paul’s words on prayer: “Be careful for nothing, but in
everything, by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your
requests be made known unto God” (Phil. 4:6).
IV
GOD HAS EVERYTHING TO DO WITH PRAYER
_Christ is all. We are complete in Him. He is the answer to every
need, the perfect Savior. He needs no decoration to heighten His
beauty, no prop to increase His stability, no girding to perfect His
strength. Who can gild refined gold, whiten the snow, perfume the
rose or heighten the colors of the summer sunset? Who will prop the
mountains or help the great deep? It is not Christ and philosophy,
nor Christ and money, nor civilization, nor diplomacy, nor science,
nor organization. It is Christ alone. He trod the winepress alone.
His own arm brought salvation. He is enough. He is the comfort, the
strength, the wisdom, the righteousness, the sanctification of all
men._—C. L. CHILTON.
Prayer is God’s business to which men can attend. Prayer is God’s
necessary business, which men only can do, and that men must do. Men who
belong to God are obliged to pray. They are not obliged to grow rich,
nor to make money. They are not obliged to have large success in
business. These are incidental, occasional, merely nominal, as far as
integrity to Heaven and loyalty to God are concerned. Material successes
are immaterial to God. Men are neither better nor worse with those
things or without them. They are not sources of reputation nor elements
of character in the heavenly estimates. But to pray, to really pray, is
the source of revenue, the basis of reputation, and the element of
character in the estimation of God. Men are obliged to pray as they are
obliged to be religious. Prayer is loyalty to God. Non-praying is to
reject Christ and to abandon Heaven. A life of prayer is the only life
which Heaven counts.
God is vitally concerned that men should pray. Men are bettered by
prayer, and the world is bettered by praying. God does His best work for
the world through prayer. God’s greatest glory and man’s highest good
are secured by prayer. Prayer forms the godliest men and makes the
godliest world.
God’s promises lie like giant corpses without life, only for decay and
dust unless men appropriate and vivify these promises by earnest and
prevailing prayer.
Promise is like the unsown seed, the germ of life in it, but the soil
and culture of prayer are necessary to germinate and culture the seed.
Prayer is God’s life-giving breath. God’s purposes move along the
pathway made by prayer to their glorious designs. God’s purposes are
always moving to their high and benignant ends, but the movement is
along the way marked by unceasing prayer. The breath of prayer in man is
from God.
God has everything to do with prayer, as well as everything to do with
the one who prays. To him who prays, and as he prays, the hour is sacred
because it is God’s hour. The occasion is sacred because it is the
occasion of the soul’s approach to God, and of dealing with God. No hour
is more hallowed because it is the occasion of the soul’s mightiest
approach to God, and of the fullest revelation from God. Men are Godlike
and men are blessed, just as the hour of prayer has the most of God in
it. Prayer makes and measures the approach of God. He knows not God who
knows not how to pray. He has never seen God whose eye has not been
couched for God in the closet. God’s vision place is the closet. His
dwelling place is in secret. “He that dwelleth in the secret place of
the most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty.”
He has never studied God who has not had his intellect broadened,
strengthened, clarified and uplifted by prayer. Almighty God commands
prayer, God waits on prayer to order His ways, and God delights in
prayer. To God, prayer is what the incense was to the Jewish Temple. It
impregnates everything, perfumes everything and sweetens everything.
The possibilities of prayer cover the whole purposes of God through
Christ. God conditions all gifts in all dispensations to His Son on
prayer: “Ask of me,” saith God the Father to the Son, as that Son was
moving earthward on the stupendous enterprise for a world’s salvation,
“and I will give thee the heathen for thy inheritance, and the uttermost
parts of the earth for thy possession.” Hinging on prayer were all the
means and results and successes of that wonderful and Divine movement
for man’s salvation. Broad and profound, mysterious and wonderful was
the scheme.
The answer to prayer is assured not only by the promises of God, but by
God’s relation to us as a Father.
“But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou has
shut thy door, pray to thy Father, which is in secret; and thy Father,
which seeth in secret, shall reward thee openly.”
Again, we have these words: “If ye, being evil, know how to give good
gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father, which is in
heaven, give good things to them that ask him?”
God encourages us to pray, not only by the certainty of the answer, but
by the munificence of the promise, and the bounty of the Giver. How
princely the promise! “All things whatsoever.” And when we superadd to
that “whatsoever” the promise which covers all things and everything,
without qualification, exception or limitation, “anything,” this is to
expand and make minute and specific the promise. The challenge of God to
us is “Call unto me, and I will answer thee, and show thee great and
mighty things which thou knowest not.” This includes, like the answer to
Solomon’s prayer, that which was specifically prayed for, but embraces
vastly more of great value and of great necessity.
Almighty God seems to fear we will hesitate to ask largely, apprehensive
that we will strain His ability. He declares that He is “able to do
exceeding abundantly above all that we can ask or think.” He almost
paralyses us by giving us a _carte blanche_, “Ask of me things to come
concerning my sons, and concerning the work of my hands, command ye me.”
How He charges, commands and urges us to pray! He goes beyond promise
and says: “Behold my Son! I have given Him to you.” “He that spared not
his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not with him
freely give us all things?”
God gave us all things in prayer by promise because He had given us all
things in His Son. Amazing gift—His Son! Prayer is as illimitable as His
own Blessed Son. There is nothing on earth nor in Heaven, for time or
eternity, that God’s Son did not secure for us. By prayer God gives us
the vast and matchless inheritance which is ours by virtue of His Son.
God charges us to “come boldly to the throne of grace.” God is glorified
and Christ is honoured by large asking.
That which is true of the promises of God is equally true of the
purposes of God. We might say that God does nothing without prayer. His
most gracious purposes are conditioned on prayer. His marvelous promises
in the thirty-sixth chapter of Ezekiel are subject to this qualification
and condition: “Thus saith the Lord God: I will yet for this be inquired
of by the house of Israel to do it for them.”
In the second Psalm the purposes of God to His enthroned Christ are
decreed on prayer, as has been previously quoted. That decree which
promises to Him the heathen for His inheritance relies on prayer for its
fulfillment: “Ask of me.” We see how sadly the decree has failed in its
operation, not because of the weakness of God’s purpose, but by the
weakness of man’s praying. It takes God’s mighty decree and man’s mighty
praying to bring to pass these glorious results.
In the seventy-second Psalm, we have an insight into the mighty
potencies of prayer as the force which God moves on the conquest of
Christ: “Prayer shall be made for him continually.” In this statement
Christ’s movements are put into the hands of prayer.
When Christ, with a sad and sympathising heart, looked upon the ripened
fields of humanity, and saw the great need of labourers, His purposes
were for more labourers, and so He charged them, “Pray ye therefore the
Lord of the harvest that he will send forth labourers into his harvest.”
In Ephesians, chapter three, Paul reminds those believers of the eternal
purposes of God, and how he was bowing his knees to God in order that
that eternal purpose might be accomplished, and also that they “might be
filled with all the fullness of God.”
We see in Job how God conditioned His purposes for Job’s three friends
on Job’s praying, and God’s purposes in regard to Job were brought about
by the same means.
In the first part of Revelation, (chapter eight) the relation and
necessity of saintly prayers to God’s plans and operations in executing
the salvation of men is set forth in rich, expressive symbol, wherein
the angels have to do with the prayers of the saints.
Prayer gives efficiency and utility to the promises. The mighty ongoing
of God’s purposes rests on prayer. The representatives of the Church in
Heaven and of all creation before the throne of God “have every one of
them golden vials of odours which are the prayers of the saints.”
We have said before, and repeat it, that prayer is based not simply upon
a promise, but on a relationship. The returning penitent sinner prays on
a promise. The child of God prays on the relation of a child. What the
father has belongs to the child for present and prospective uses. The
child asks, the father gives. The relationship is one of asking and
answering, of giving and receiving. The child is dependent upon the
father, must look to the father, must ask of the father, and must
receive of the father.
We know how with earthly parents asking and giving belong to this
relation, and how in the very act of asking and giving, the relationship
of parent and child is cemented, sweetened and enriched. The parent
finds his wealth of pleasure and satisfaction in giving to an obedient
child, and the child finds his wealth in the father’s loving and
continuous giving.
Prayer affects God more powerfully than His own purposes. God’s will,
words and purposes are all subject to review when the mighty potencies
of prayer come in. How mighty prayer is with God may be seen as he
readily sets aside His own fixed and declared purposes in answer to
prayer. The whole plan of salvation had been blocked had Jesus Christ
prayed for the twelve legions of angels to carry dismay and ruin to His
enemies.
The fasting and prayers of the Ninevites changed God’s purposes to
destroy that wicked city, after Jonah had gone there and cried unto the
people, “Yet forty days and Nineveh shall be destroyed.”
Almighty God is concerned in our praying. He wills it, He commands it,
He inspires it. Jesus Christ in Heaven is ever praying. Prayer is His
law and His life. The Holy Spirit teaches us how to pray. He prays for
us “with groanings which cannot be uttered.” All these show the deep
concern of God in prayer. It discloses very clearly how vital it is to
His work in this world, and how far-reaching are its possibilities.
Prayer forms the very center of the heart and will of God concerning
men. “Rejoice evermore, pray without ceasing, and in everything give
thanks. For this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you.”
Prayer is the pole star around which rejoicing and thanksgiving revolve.
Prayer is the heart sending its full and happy pulsations up to God
through the glad currents of joy and thanksgiving.
By prayer God’s Name is hallowed. By prayer God’s kingdom comes. By
prayer is His kingdom established in power and made to move with
conquering force swifter than the light. By prayer God’s will is done
till earth rivals Heaven in harmony and beauty. By prayer daily toil is
sanctified and enriched, and pardon is secured, and Satan is defeated.
Prayer concerns God, and concerns man in every way.