Land; as Paul did about the thorn in the flesh; as David did for his
doomed child; as Hezekiah did to live. We must pray against God’s will
three times when the stroke is the heaviest, the sorrow is the keenest,
and the grief is the deepest. We may lie prostrate all night, as David
did, through the hours of darkness. We may pray for hours, as Jesus did,
and in the darkness of many nights, not measuring the hours by the
clock, nor the nights by the calendar. It must all be, however, the
prayer of submission.
When sorrow and the night and desolation of Gethsemane fall in heaviest
gloom on us, we ought to submit patiently and tearfully, if need be, but
sweetly and resignedly, without tremour, or doubt, to the cup pressed by
a Father’s hand to our lips. “Not my will, but thine, be done,” our
broken hearts shall say. In God’s own way, mysterious to us, that cup
has in its bitterest dregs, as it had for the Son of God, the gem and
gold of perfection. We are to be put into the crucible to be refined.
Christ was made perfect in Gethsemane, not by the prayer, but by the
suffering. “For it became him to make the captain of their salvation
perfect through suffering.” The cup could not pass because the suffering
must go on and yield its fruit of perfection. Through many an hour of
darkness and of hell’s power, through many a sore conflict with the
prince of this world, by drinking many a bitter cup, we are to be made
perfect. To cry out against the terrific and searching flame of the
crucible of a Father’s painful processes is natural and is no sin, if
there be perfect acquiescence in the answer to our prayer, perfect
submission to God’s will, and perfect devotion to His glory.
If our hearts are true to God, we may plead with Him about His way, and
seek relief from His painful processes. But the fierce fire of the
crucible and the agonising victim with His agonising and submissive
prayer, is not the normal and highest form of majestic and
all-commanding prayer. We can cry out in the crucible, and can cry out
against the flame which purifies and perfects us. God allows this, hears
this, and answers this, not by taking us out of the crucible, nor by
mitigating the fierceness of the flame, but by sending more than an
angel to strengthen us. And yet crying out thus, with full submission,
does not answer the real high, world-wide, royal and eternity-reaching
behests of prayer.
The prayer of submission must not be so used as to vitiate or substitute
the higher and mightier prayer of faith. Nor must it be so stressed as
to break down importunate and prevailing prayer, which would be to
disarm prayer of its efficiency and discrown its glorious results and
would be to encourage listless, sentimental and feeble praying.
We are ever ready to excuse our lack of earnest and toilsome praying, by
a fancied and delusive view of submission. We often end praying just
where we ought to begin. We quit praying when God waits and is waiting
for us to really pray. We are deterred by obstacles from praying, or we
succumb to difficulties, and call it submission to God’s will. A world
of beggarly faith, of spiritual laziness, and of half-heartedness in
prayer, are covered under the high and pious name of submission. To have
no plan but to seek God’s plan and carry it out, is of the essence and
inspiration of Christly praying. This is far more than putting in a
clause of submission. Jesus did this once in seeking to change the
purpose of God, but all His other praying was the output of being
perfectly at one with the plans and purposes of God. It is after this
order we pray when we abide in Him and when His word abides in us. Then
we ask what we will and it is done. It is then our prayers fashion and
create things. Our wills then become God’s will and His will becomes
ours. The two become one, and there is not a note of discord.
“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
hear us, whatsoever we ask, we know that we have the petitions that we
desired of Him. And then it proves true: “And whatsoever we ask, we
receive of him, because we keep his commandments, and do those things
that are pleasing in his sight.”
What restraint, forbearance, self-denial, and loyalty to duty to God,
and what deference to the Old Testament Scriptures are in that statement
of our Lord: “Thinkest thou that I cannot now pray to my Father, and he
shall presently give me more than twelve legions of angels? But how then
shall the scriptures be fulfilled, that thus it must be?”
XIII
THE HOLY SPIRIT AND PRAYER
_During the great Welsh Revival a minister was said to be very
successful in winning souls by one sermon that he preached—hundreds
were converted. Far away in a valley news reached a brother minister
of the marvelous success of this sermon. He desired to find out the
secret of the man’s great success.—He walked the long way, and came
to the minister’s poor cottage, and the first thing he said was:
“Brother, where did you get that sermon?” He was taken into a poorly
furnished room and pointed to a spot where the carpet was worn
threadbare, near a window that looked out upon the everlasting hills
and solemn mountains and said, “Brother, there is where I got that
sermon. My heart was heavy for men. One night I knelt there—and
cried for power as I never preached before. The hours passed until
midnight struck, and the stars looked down on a sleeping world, but
the answer came not. I prayed on until I saw a faint streak of grey
shoot up, then it was silver—silver became purple and gold. Then the
sermon came and the power came and men fell under the influence of
the Holy Spirit.”_—G. H. MORGAN.
The Gospel without the Holy Spirit would be vain and nugatory. The gift
of the Holy Spirit was vital to the work of Jesus Christ in the
atonement. As Jesus did not begin His work on earth till He was anointed
by the Holy Spirit, so the same Holy Spirit is necessary to carry
forward and make effective the atoning work of the Son of God. As His
anointing by the Holy Ghost at His baptism was an era in His life, so
also is the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost a great era in the
work of redemption in making effective the work of Christ’s Church.
The Holy Spirit is not only the bright lamp of the Christian
Dispensation, its Teacher and Guide, but is the Divine Helper.
He is the enabling agent in God’s new dispensation of doing. As the
pilot takes his stand at the wheel to guide the vessel, so the Holy
Ghost takes up His abode in the heart to guide and empower all its
efforts. The Holy Ghost executes the whole gospel through the man by His
presence and control of the spirit of the man.
In the execution of the atoning work of Jesus Christ, in its general and
more comprehensive operation, or in its minute and personal application,
the Holy Spirit is the one efficient Agent, absolute and indispensable.
The gospel cannot be executed but by the Holy Ghost. He only has the
regal authority to do this royal work. Intellect cannot execute it,
neither can learning, nor eloquence, nor truth, not even the revealed
truth can execute the gospel. The marvelous facts of Christ’s life told
by hearts unanointed by the Holy Spirit will be dry and sterile, or
“like a story told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying
nothing.” Not even the precious blood can execute the gospel. Not any,
nor all of these, though spoken with angelic wisdom, angelic eloquence,
can execute the gospel with saving power. Only tongues set on fire by
the Holy Spirit can witness the saving power of Christ with power to
save others.
No one dared move from Jerusalem to proclaim or utter the message along
its streets to the dying multitudes till the Holy Spirit came in
baptismal power. John could not utter a word, though he had pillowed his
head on Christ’s bosom and caught the pulsations of Christ’s heart, and
though his brain was full of the wondrous facts of that life and of the
wondrous words which fell from His lips. John must wait till a fuller
and richer endowment than all of these came on him. Mary could not live
over that Christ-life in the home of John, though she had nurtured the
Christ and stored heart and mind full of holy and motherly memories,
till she was empowered by the Holy Spirit.
The coming of the Holy Spirit is dependent upon prayer, for prayer only
can compass with its authority and demands, the realm where this Person
of the Godhead has His abode. Even Christ was subject to this law of
prayer. With Him, it is, it ever has been, and ever will be, “Ask, and
it shall be given you; seek and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be
opened unto you.” To His disconsolate disciples, He said, “I will pray
the Father, and He will give you another Comforter.” This law of prayer
for the Holy Spirit presses on the Master and on the disciples as well.
Of so many of God’s children it may truly be said, “Ye have Him not
because ye ask not.” And of many others it might be said, “Ye have Him
in faint measure because ye pray for Him in faint measure.”
The Holy Spirit is the spirit of all grace and of each grace as well.
Purity, power, holiness, faith, love, joy and all grace are brought into
being and perfected by Him. Would we grow in grace in particular? Would
we be perfect in all graces? We must seek the Holy Spirit by prayer.
We urge the seeking of the Holy Spirit. We need Him, and we need to stir
ourselves up to seek Him. The measure we receive of Him will be gauged
by the fervour of faith and prayer with which we seek Him. Our ability
to work for God, and to pray to God, and live for God, and affect others
for God, will be dependent on the measure of the Holy Spirit received by
us, dwelling in us, and working through us.
Christ lays down the clear and explicit law of prayer in this regard for
all of God’s children. The world needs the Holy Spirit to convict it of
sin and of righteousness and judgment to come and to make it feel its
guiltiness in God’s sight. And this spirit of conviction on sinners
comes in answer to the prayers of God’s people. God’s children need Him
more and more, need His life, His more abundant life, His super-abundant
life. But that life begins and ever increases as the child of God prays
for the Holy Spirit. “If ye, then, being evil, know how to give good
gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Heavenly Father give
the Holy Spirit to them that ask him?” This is the law, a condition
brightened by a promise and sweetened by a relationship.
The gift of the Holy Spirit is one of the benefits flowing to us from
the glorious presence of Christ at the right hand of God, and this gift
of the Holy Spirit, together with all the other gifts of the enthroned
Christ, are secured to us by prayer as the condition. The Bible by
express statement, as well as by its general principles and clear and
constant intimations, teaches us that the gift of the Holy Spirit is
connected with and conditioned in prayer. That the Holy Spirit is in the
world as God is in the world, is true. That the Holy Spirit is in the
world as Christ is in the world is also true. And it is also true that
there is nothing predicated of Him being in us and in the world that is
not predicated of God and Christ being in us, and in the world. The Holy
Spirit was in the world in measure before Pentecost, and in the measure
of His operation then He was prayed for and sought for, and the
principles are unchanged. The truth is, if we cannot pray for the Holy
Spirit we cannot pray for any good thing from God, for He is the sum of
all good to us. The truth is we seek after the Holy Spirit just as we
seek after God, just as we seek after Christ, with strong cryings and
tears, and we are to seek always for more and more of His gifts, and
power, and grace. The truth is, that the presence and power of the Holy
Spirit at any given meeting is conditioned on praying faith.
Christ lays down the doctrine that the reception of the Holy Spirit is
conditioned on prayer, and He Himself illustrated this universal law,
for when the Holy Spirit came upon Him at His baptism, He was praying.
The Apostolic Church in action illustrates the same great truth.
A few days after Pentecost the disciples were in an agony of prayer,
“and when they had prayed, the place was shaken where they were
assembled together; and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit.” This
incident destroys every theory which denies prayer as the condition of
the coming and re-coming of the Holy Spirit after Pentecost, and
confirms the view that Pentecost as the result of a long struggle of
prayer is illustrative and confirmatory that God’s great and most
precious gifts and conditioned on asking, seeking, knocking, prayer,
ardent, importunate prayer.
The same truth comes to the front very prominently in Philip’s revival
at Samaria. Though filled with joy by believing in Christ, and though
received into the Church by water baptism, they did not receive the Holy
Spirit till Peter and John went down there and prayed with and for them.
Paul’s praying was God’s proof to Ananias that Paul was in a state which
conditioned him to receive the Holy Spirit.
The Holy Spirit is not only our Teacher, our Inspirer and our Revealer,
in prayer, but the power of our praying in measure and force is measured
by the Spirit’s power working in us, as the will and work of God,
according to God’s good pleasure. In the third chapter of Ephesians,
after the marvelous prayer of Paul for the Church, he seemed to be
apprehensive that they would think he had gone beyond the ability of God
in his large asking. And so he closes his appeal for them with the
words, that God was able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we
ask or think. The power of God to do for us was measured by the power of
God in us. “According to,” says the Apostle, that is, after the measure
of, “the power that worketh in us.” The projecting power of praying
outwardly was the projecting power of God in us. The feeble operation of
God in us brings feeble praying. The mightiest operation of God in us
brings the mightiest praying. The secret of prayerlessness is the
absence of the work of the Holy Spirit in us. The secret of feeble
praying everywhere is the lack of God’s Spirit in His mightiness.
The ability of God to answer and work through our prayers is measured by
the Divine energy that God has been enabled to put in us by the Holy
Spirit. The projecting power of praying is the measure of the Holy
Spirit in us. So the statement of James in the fifth chapter of his
Epistle is to this effect:
“The fervent effectual prayer of a righteous man availeth much.” The
prayer inwrought in the heart by the almighty energy of the Holy Spirit
works mightily in its results just as Elijah’s prayer did.
Would we pray efficiently and mightily? Then the Holy Spirit must work
in us efficiently and mightily. Paul makes the principle of universal
application. “Whereunto I also labour, striving according to his
working, which worketh in me mightily.” All labour for Christ which does
not spring from the Holy Spirit working in us, is nugatory and vain. Our
prayers and activities are so feeble and resultless, because He has not
worked in us and cannot work in us His glorious work. Would you pray
with mighty results? Seek the mighty workings of the Holy Spirit in your
own spirit.
Here we have the initial lesson in prayer for the Holy Spirit which was
to enlarge to its full fruitage in Pentecost. It is to be noted that in
John 14:16, where Jesus engages to pray the Father to send another
Comforter, who would dwell with His disciples and be in them, that this
is not a prayer that the Holy Spirit might do His work in making us
children of God by regeneration, but it was for that fuller grace and
power and Person of the Holy Spirit which we can claim by virtue of our
relation as children of God. His work in us to make us the children of
God and His Person abiding with us and in us, as children of God, are
entirely different stages of the same Spirit in His relation to us. In
this latter work, His gifts and works are greater, and His presence,
even Himself, is greater than His works or gifts. His work in us
prepares us for Himself. His gifts are the dispensations of His
presence. He puts and makes us members of the body of Christ by His
work. He keeps us in that body by His Presence and Person. He enables us
to discharge the functions as members of that body by His gifts.
The whole lesson culminates in asking for the Holy Spirit as the great
objective point of all praying. In the direction in the Sermon on the
Mount, we have the very plain and definite promise, “If ye, being evil,
know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your
Father in Heaven give good things to them that ask him?” In Luke we have
“good things” substituted by “the Holy Spirit.” All good is comprehended
in the Holy Spirit and He is the sum and climax of all good things.
How complex, confusing and involved is many a human direction about
obtaining the gift of the Holy Spirit as the abiding Comforter, our
Sanctifier and the one who empowers us! How simple and direct is our
Lord’s direction—ASK! This is plain and direct. Ask with urgency, ask
without fainting. Ask, seek, knock, till He comes. Your Heavenly Father
will surely send Him if you ask for Him. Wait in the Lord for the Holy
Spirit. It is the child waiting, asking, urging and praying
perseveringly for the Father’s greatest gift and for the child’s
greatest need, the Holy Spirit.
How are we to obtain the Holy Spirit so freely promised to those who
seek Him believingly? Wait, press, and persevere with all the calmness
and with all the ardour of a faith which knows no fear, which allows no
doubt, a faith which staggers not at the promise through unbelief, a
faith which in its darkest and most depressed hours against hope
believes in hope, which is brightened by hope and strengthened by hope,
and which is saved by hope.
Wait and pray—here is the key which unlocks every castle of despair, and
which opens every treasure-store of God. It is the simplicity of the
child’s asking of the Father, who gives with a largeness, liberality,
and cheerfulness, infinitely above everything ever known to earthly
parents. Ask for the Holy Spirit—seek for the Holy Spirit—knock for the
Holy Spirit. He is the Father’s greatest gift for the child’s greatest
need.
In these three words, “ask,” “seek” and “knock,” given us by Christ, we
have the repetition of the advancing steps of insistency and effort. He
is laying Himself out in command and promise in the strongest way,
showing us that if we will lay ourselves out in prayer and will
persevere, rising to higher and stronger attitudes and sinking to deeper
depths of intensity and effort, that the answer must inevitably come. So
that it is true the stars would fail to shine before the asking, the
seeking and the knocking would fail to obtain what is needed and
desired.
There is no elect company here, only the election of undismayed,
importunate, never-fainting effort in prayer: “For to him that knocketh,
it shall be opened.” Nothing can be stronger than this declaration
assuring us of the answer unless it be the promise upon which it is
based, “And I say unto you, ask and it shall be given you.”
XIV
THE HOLY SPIRIT OUR HELPER IN PRAYER
_We must pray in the Spirit, in the Holy Ghost, if we would pray at
all. Lay this, I beseech you, to heart. Do not address yourselves to
prayer as to a work to be accomplished in your own natural strength.
It is a work of God, of God the Holy Ghost, a work of His in you and
by you, and in which you must be fellow-workers with Him—but His
work notwithstanding._—ARCHBISHOP TRENCH.
One of the revelations of the New Testament concerning the Holy Spirit
is that He is our helper in prayer. So we have in the following incident
in our Lord’s life the close connection between the Holy Spirit’s work
and prayer:
“At that time Jesus rejoiced in spirit and said, I thank thee, O
Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that thou hast hid these things
from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes; even
so, Father, for it seemed good in thy sight.”—Luke 10:21.
Here we have revelations of what God is to us. Only the child’s heart
can know the Father, and only the child’s heart can reveal the Father.
It is by prayer only that all things are delivered to us by the Father
through the Son. It is only by prayer that all things are revealed to us
by the Father and by the Son. It is only in prayer that the Father gives
Himself to us, which is much more every way than all other things
whatsoever.
The Revised Version reads: “At that same hour Jesus rejoiced in the Holy
Spirit.” This sets forth that great truth not generally known, or if
known, ignored, that Jesus Christ was generally led by the Holy Spirit,
and that His joy and His praying, as well as His working, and His life,
were under the inspiration, law and guidance of the Holy Spirit.
Turn to and read this passage:
Romans 8:26—“Likewise the spirit also helpeth our infirmities; for
we know not what we should pray for as we ought.”
This text is most pregnant and vital, and needs to be quoted. Patience,
hope and waiting help us in prayer. But the greatest and the divinest of
all helpers is the Holy Spirit. He takes hold of things for us. We are
dark and confused, ignorant and weak in many things, in fact in
everything pertaining to the Heavenly life, especially in the simple
service of prayer. There is an “ought” on us, an obligation, a necessity
to pray, a spiritual necessity upon us of the most absolute and
imperative kind. But we do not feel the obligation and have no ability
to meet it. The Holy Spirit helps us in our weaknesses, gives wisdom to
our ignorance, turns ignorance into wisdom, and changes our weakness
into strength. The Spirit Himself does this. He helps and takes hold
with us as we tug and toil. He adds His wisdom to our ignorance, gives
His strength to our weakness. He pleads for us and in us. He quickens,
illumines and inspires our prayers. He indites and elevates the matter
of our prayers, and inspires the words and feelings of our prayers. He
works mightily in us so that we can pray mightily. He enables us to pray
always and ever according to the will of God.
In I John 5:14 we have these words:
“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 hear us, whatsoever we ask, we know that we
have the petitions that we desired of him.”
That which gives us boldness and so much freedom and fullness of
approach toward God, the fact and basis of that boldness and liberty of
approach, is that we are asking “according to the will of God.” This
does not mean submission, but conformity. “According to” means after the
standard, conformity, agreement. We have boldness and all freedom of
access to God because we are praying in conformity to His will. God
records His general will in His Word, but He has this special work in
praying for us to do. His “things are prepared for us,” as the prophet
says, who “wait upon him.” How can we know the will of God in our
praying? What are the things which God designs specially for us to do
and pray? The Holy Spirit reveals them to us perpetually.
“The Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which
cannot be uttered.
“And he that searcheth the hearts knoweth what is the mind of the spirit
because he maketh intercession for the saints according to the will of
God.” Combine this text with those words of Paul in First Corinthians,
second chapter, eighth verse and what follows:
“But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither
have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath
prepared for them that love him.
“But God hath revealed them unto us by his spirit; for the spirit
searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God.
“For what man knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of man
which is in him? Even so the things of God knoweth no man, but the
spirit of God.
“Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the spirit
which is of God; that we might know the things that are freely given
to us of God.
“Which things also we speak, not in the words which man’s wisdom
teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth, comparing spiritual
things with spiritual.
“But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God;
for they are foolishness unto him; neither can he know them, because
they are spiritually discerned.
“But he that is spiritual judgeth all things, yet he himself is
judged of no man.
“For who hath known the mind of the Lord, that he may instruct him?
But we have the mind of Christ.”