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