Prayer
It is easy to see where the action is in the church today. First of all is a call to Intercessory prayer in the body. We are certainly called to pray. Jesus asked us to pray to the Lord of the Harvest to send out laborers, let it happen now, Lord. If we are called to pray for them then the Lord of the harvest has to be
sending out those willing to labor in the fields. Praying and laboring are both in action.
It would be easy to recognize that with the capabilities of the Internet that one prayer request could possibly, with the touch of a button, be sent to thousands of Intercessors in moments. That is exactly what is
happening in several places around the globe. I want to know about them, we need to connect. That is exciting. We are now being called to pray for revival. So pray, pray, pray. Pray for the leaders in the church that they will be able to lay down their crowns so that Jesus can have full control. Pray for each other that the Lord will give us what do do. Pray for the latter rain to fall and His spirit is poured out without measure. Pray for yourselves that you are filled with faith and holiness and boldness. I am called to labor in the harvest and ask for you to pray for me and the other laborers, and pray that more are sent. Pray like Jesus did that we may all be One. Pray that Jesus will come quickly and that we are ready to meet Him. Pray that we all will be illuminated and filled with His spirit. The shortest distance between a problem and a solution is the distance between your knees and the floor. The one who kneels to the Lord can stand up to anything.
Praise God when you pray. Praise is our best weapon against the enemy of God. Satan cannot come against you in your time of praise.
We are warned of the spirit of delusion which is always lying in wait for one who
prays. The sense of God's presence is right only when it arises within one's sense of
unworthiness and sinfulness, from a heart softened by tears of repentance. Prayer is to
be made less with the head than with the heart. The head is not a very good place for
prayer. It is not a bad place for starting your prayer, but if your prayer stays there too
long and doesn't move into the heart it will gradually dry up and prove tiresome and
frustrating. You need to move into the area of feeling sensing, loving, intuiting. That is the area where contemplation is born and prayer becomes a transforming power and a source of
never-ending delight and peace. Emerson: "Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view. It is the soliloquy of a beholding and jubilant soul. It is the spirit of God pronouncing his works good."
We are, all of us, endowed with a mystical mind and a mystical heart, a faculty which
makes it possible for us to know God directly. There are two types of prayer: the devotional and
the intuitional. Both forms of prayer lead to union with God. You may be one of those
persons whom the Lord calls, in a very special way, to exercise the ministry of
intercession and to transform the world and the hearts of men by the power of their
prayers. Feel the power of Jesus pass through your hands to their hearts. Imagine the Lord
giving this gift to you and imagine yourself joyfully praising him for this. The loving
recitation of the name of Jesus makes Jesus present to us. Now "anoint" each of your
senses and faculties with the name of Jesus. Thus, as we gradually grow into the habit of
finding this inspiring Presence within ourselves, and of realizing its forward movement as
the ultimate determining factor in all true healthful mental action, it will become second
nature to us.
The Lord is about to bring judgment upon the false authority that has reigned in the churches and many of His people will be debased. This is not something new, we have known about it for some time but now it is close at hand and we should be very concerned because these are the people of God that we should be reaching out to in love. The complacent attitude of many is to do things as we have been doing things and allow others to pave the way. Our attitude should be one of sorrow but also of reverant fearfulness that we may not be caught up in part of that delusion and judgment. For many of us that takes repentance but for all of us, it takes prayer. It is in this fervent prayer, travail and tearful remorse for the whole world that will bring down the outpouring of God's spirit upon all flesh.
We are about to embark upon a sacred journey. I have already asked for confirmation with my concern about this solemn assembly and received all I need to know that it is time. I have mentioned that it is past time. This includes a fast also but it would do little good for me to start fasting and travailing on my own, we need the support of many in a unity that has never been witnessed before. It is not up to me to go out with a campaign in the flesh and start attracting attention either. Although I know that I could do it, it has to be a united effort according to the spirit and it must be in God's timing. So what I will be doing is praying that the Lord would send the desire in many around the world to bear witness of this solemn assembly and the knowledge that the time is coming for judgment and we should be concerned. You are all invited to pray with me toward that end. The result is getting as many as we can through the refiner's fire and into the beauty of holiness and the river of life without a scent of smoke.
Certainly, we should have the faith to pray for ourselves but we would think nothing of asking others in the body of Christ to also pray for us, especially those that we know are close to Jesus. How much more so those that have been glorified in heaven. Those that have gone on are with the Lord now and are of the same body of Christ that we are. Either we believe that they are in heaven now and in a glorified state or we do not. I believe in the resurrection of believers and I believe that time is different than eternity and I believe that if the saints are to be coming with Jesus that they are there now. I believe then, this is a valid argument to have saints that are alive now in communion with those that have departed. There is but One Body. Putting these things into proper perspective is to hold these truths that we already believe as obvious conclusions to the issue of the communion of saints.
Those who call themselves Christians have been praying for our nation but they have chosen
to do nothing to take dominion. Prayer is a cop-out unless it causes action. Prayer as a means to effect a private end is meaningless and robbery. It supposes dualism and not unity in nature and consciousness. As soon as a man is at one with God, he will not beg. He will then see prayer in all his action. To Jesus, the dearest and best repose was solitude and silence, where He might be alone and undisturbed with His heavenly Father. Jesus refreshed His spirit with prayer, engaged in solitary prayer, probably at early dawn. They saw Him standing there with His eyes uplifted
to heaven, for standing, not kneeling, was and is the common attitude in prayer. We may come boldly to the throne of grace.
God's first way is in the sanctuary, in the holiest of all, into His presence. In His light we see light. The devout Jews had three hours of prayer, morning, noon, night. So do not wait to be prayerful before you begin to pray; pray from a sense of duty, and prayerfulness will presently come.
Many of us have experienced a spiritual "rape" It hits the hardest when it is from people you trust. Betrayal is another word for it, if it is the hurtfulness arising from that trust, it is the trust that had been betrayed. All in all, we are to love each other and have patience and bear one another's burdens. Sometimes that betrayal is a sign that you should
trust no one but Jesus, but then, He is the only One that could never betray our trust, He is faithful regardless. I will continue to put my trust in others, simply because we are a social animal and there is no mutual love without a sense of trusting each other.
Basically, these things are signs that something somewhere is wrong and we need to pray for them. Perhaps we should not trust in certain people but how can we know? Jesus will one day wipe our tears so instead of a pity party or feeling sorry for myself or use it as a sign of weakness to others or a desperate cry for help and compassion and love from other quarters, we must be strong in the Lord and in the power of His might. Easier said than done but His burden is light and He calls us to trust Him completely.
Travail is something that must come. We must have that solemn assembly with prayer and fasting or it would not be prophesied. It cannot be faked, it is not something that is worked up, it does not belong to anyone except whom God has called it to. So when these betrayals happen, it may just be God preparing our hearts and there is a purpose for it. How long Lord, how long? Saint John wept because no one was worthy to open the seals and then the Lamb stood up. He had seven eyes and seven horns and represent us. Hear that? We may not be Jesus as the Head but we are His body and if we are reviled and looked down on, it only gives us an occasion to glorify God the more because we are worthy to endure these things. We are the golden vials and the odors are our prayers, especially when they are in travail for His Church.
No one is perfect so we should not expect them to be. I get that attitude that I cannot sleep, it becomes traumatic, we want to be loved. Once betrayal is come to the fore, it is hard to trust where it came from. That is where healing comes in. Jesus is not finished with us yet. I need to wait, even in my travail and sorrow for the church. I am only just learning.
WE are constantly on a stretch, if not on a strain, to devise new methods, new
plans, new organizations to advance the Church and secure enlargement and
efficiency for the gospel. This trend of the day has a tendency to lose sight
of the man or sink the man in the plan or organization. God's plan is to make
much of the man, far more of him than of anything else. Men are God's method.
The Church is looking for better methods; God is looking for better men. "There
was a man sent from God whose name was John." The dispensation that heralded
and prepared the way for Christ was bound up in that man John. "Unto us a child
is born, unto us a son is given." The world's salvation comes out of that
cradled Son. When Paul appeals to the personal character of the men who rooted
the gospel in the world, he solves the mystery of their success. The glory and
efficiency of the gospel is staked on the men who proclaim it. When God
declares that "the eyes of the Lord run to and fro throughout the whole earth,
to show himself strong in the behalf of them whose heart is perfect toward
him," he declares the necessity of men and his dependence on them as a channel
through which to exert his power upon the world. This vital, urgent truth is
one that this age of machinery is apt to forget. The forgetting of it is as
baneful on the work of God as would be the striking of the sun from his sphere.
Darkness, confusion, and death would ensue.
What the Church needs to-day is not more machinery or better, not new
organizations or more and novel methods, but men whom the Holy Ghost can use --
men of prayer, men mighty in prayer. The Holy Ghost does not flow through
methods, but through men. He does not come on machinery, but on men. He does
not anoint plans, but men -- men of prayer.
An eminent historian has said that the accidents of personal character have
more to do with the revolutions of nations than either philosophic historians
or democratic politicians will allow. This truth has its application in full to
the gospel of Christ, the character and conduct of the followers of Christ --
Christianize the world, transfigure nations and individuals. Of the preachers
of the gospel it is eminently true.
The character as well as the fortunes of the gospel is committed to the
preacher. He makes or mars the message from God to man. The preacher is the
golden pipe through which the divine oil flows. The pipe must not only be
golden, but open and flawless, that the oil may have a full, unhindered,
unwasted flow.
The man makes the preacher. God must make the man. The messenger is, if
possible, more than the message. The preacher is more than the sermon. The
preacher makes the sermon. As the life-giving milk from the mother's bosom is
but the mother's life, so all the preacher says is tinctured, impregnated by
what the preacher is. The treasure is in earthen vessels, and the taste of the
vessel impregnates and may discolor. The man, the whole man, lies behind the
sermon. Preaching is not the performance of an hour. It is the outflow of a
life. It takes twenty years to make a sermon, because it takes twenty years to
make the man. The true sermon is a thing of life. The sermon grows because the
man grows. The sermon is forceful because the man is forceful. The sermon is
holy because the man is holy. The sermon is full of the divine unction because
the man is full of the divine unction.
Paul termed it "My gospel;" not that he had degraded it by his personal
eccentricities or diverted it by selfish appropriation, but the gospel was put
into the heart and lifeblood of the man Paul, as a personal trust to be
executed by his Pauline traits, to be set aflame and empowered by the fiery
energy of his fiery soul. Paul's sermons -- what were they? Where are they?
Skeletons, scattered fragments, afloat on the sea of inspiration! But the man
Paul, greater than his sermons, lives forever, in full form, feature and
stature, with his molding hand on the Church. The preaching is but a voice. The
voice in silence dies, the text is forgotten, the sermon fades from memory; the
preacher lives.
The sermon cannot rise in its life-giving forces above the man. Dead men give
out dead sermons, and dead sermons kill. Everything depends on the spiritual
character of the preacher. Under the Jewish dispensation the high priest had
inscribed in jeweled letters on a golden frontlet: "Holiness to the Lord." So
every preacher in Christ's ministry must be molded into and mastered by this
same holy motto. It is a crying shame for the Christian ministry to fall lower
in holiness of character and holiness of aim than the Jewish priesthood.
Jonathan Edwards said: "I went on with my eager pursuit after more holiness and
conformity to Christ. The heaven I desired was a heaven of holiness." The
gospel of Christ does not move by popular waves. It has no self-propagating
power. It moves as the men who have charge of it move. The preacher must
impersonate the gospel. Its divine, most distinctive features must be embodied
in him. The constraining power of love must be in the preacher as a projecting,
eccentric, an all-commanding, self-oblivious force. The energy of self-denial
must be his being, his heart and blood and bones. He must go forth as a man
among men, clothed with humility, abiding in meekness, wise as a serpent,
harmless as a dove; the bonds of a servant with the spirit of a king, a king in
high, royal, in dependent bearing, with the simplicity and sweetness of a
child. The preacher must throw himself, with all the abandon of a perfect,
self-emptying faith and a self-consuming zeal, into his work for the salvation
of men. Hearty, heroic, compassionate, fearless martyrs must the men be who
take hold of and shape a generation for God. If they be timid time servers,
place seekers, if they be men pleasers or men fearers, if their faith has a
weak hold on God or his Word, if their denial be broken by any phase of self or
the world, they cannot take hold of the Church nor the world for God.
The preacher's sharpest and strongest preaching should be to himself. His most
difficult, delicate, laborious, and thorough work must be with himself. The
training of the twelve was the great, difficult, and enduring work of Christ.
Preachers are not sermon makers, but men makers and saint makers, and he only
is well-trained for this business who has made himself a man and a saint. It is
not great talents nor great learning nor great preachers that God needs, but
men great in holiness, great in faith, great in love, great in fidelity, great
for God -- men always preaching by holy sermons in the pulpit, by holy lives
out of it. These can mold a generation for God.
After this order, the early Christians were formed. Men they were of solid
mold, preachers after the heavenly type -- heroic, stalwart, soldierly,
saintly. Preaching with them meant self-denying, self-crucifying, serious,
toilsome, martyr business. They applied themselves to it in a way that told on
their generation, and formed in its womb a generation yet unborn for God. The
preaching man is to be the praying man. Prayer is the preacher's mightiest
weapon. An almighty force in itself, it gives life and force to all.
The real sermon is made in the closet. The man -- God's man -- is made in the
closet. His life and his profoundest convictions were born in his secret
communion with God. The burdened and tearful agony of his spirit, his
weightiest and sweetest messages were got when alone with God. Prayer makes the
man; prayer makes the preacher; prayer makes the pastor.
The pulpit of this day is weak in praying. The pride of learning is against the
dependent humility of prayer. Prayer is with the pulpit too often only official
-- a performance for the routine of service. Prayer is not to the modern pulpit
the mighty force it was in Paul's life or Paul's ministry. Every preacher who
does not make prayer a mighty factor in his own life and ministry is weak as a
factor in God's work and is powerless to project God's cause in this world.
THE sweetest graces by a slight perversion may bear the bitterest fruit. The
sun gives life, but sunstrokes are death. Preaching is to give life; it may
kill. The preacher holds the keys; he may lock as well as unlock. Preaching is
God's great institution for the planting and maturing of spiritual life. When
properly executed, its benefits are untold; when wrongly executed, no evil can
exceed its damaging results. It is an easy matter to destroy the flock if the
shepherd be unwary or the pasture be destroyed, easy to capture the citadel if
the watchmen be asleep or the food and water be poisoned. Invested with such
gracious prerogatives, exposed to so great evils, involving so many grave
responsibilities, it would be a parody on the shrewdness of the devil and a
libel on his character and reputation if he did not bring his master influences
to adulterate the preacher and the preaching. In face of all this, the
exclamatory interrogatory of Paul, "Who is sufficient for these things?" is
never out of order.
Paul says: "Our sufficiency is of God, who also hath made us able ministers of
the new testament; not of the letter, but of the spirit: for the letter
killeth, but the spirit giveth life." The true ministry is God-touched,
God-enabled, and God-made. The Spirit of God is on the preacher in anointing
power, the fruit of the Spirit is in his heart, the Spirit of God has vitalized
the man and the word; his preaching gives life, gives life as the spring gives
life; gives life as the resurrection gives life; gives ardent life as the
summer gives ardent life; gives fruitful life as the autumn gives fruitful
life. The life-giving preacher is a man of God, whose heart is ever athirst for
God, whose soul is ever following hard after God, whose eye is single to God,
and in whom by the power of God's Spirit the flesh and the world have been
crucified and his ministry is like the generous flood of a life-giving river.
The preaching that kills is non-spiritual preaching. The ability of the
preaching is not from God. Lower sources than God have given to it energy and
stimulant. The Spirit is not evident in the preacher nor his preaching. Many
kinds of forces may be projected and stimulated by preaching that kills, but
they are not spiritual forces. They may resemble spiritual forces, but are only
the shadow, the counterfeit; life they may seem to have, but the life is
magnetized. The preaching that kills is the letter; shapely and orderly it may
be, but it is the letter still, the dry, husky letter, the empty, bald shell.
The letter may have the germ of life in it, but it has no breath of spring to
evoke it; winter seeds they are, as hard as the winter's soil, as icy as the
winter's air, no thawing nor germinating by them. This letter-preaching has the
truth. But even divine truth has no life-giving energy alone; it must be
energized by the Spirit, with all God's forces at its back. Truth unquickened
by God's Spirit deadens as much as, or more than, error. It may be the truth
without admixture; but without the Spirit its shade and touch are deadly, its
truth error, its light darkness. The letter-preaching is unctionless, neither
mellowed nor oiled by the Spirit. There may be tears, but tears cannot run
God's machinery; tears may be but summer's breath on a snow-covered iceberg,
nothing but surface slush. Feelings and earnestness there may be, but it is the
emotion of the actor and the earnestness of the attorney. The preacher may feel
from the kindling of his own sparks, be eloquent over his own exegesis, earnest
in delivering the product of his own brain; the professor may usurp the place
and imitate the fire of the apostle; brains and nerves may serve the place and
feign the work of God's Spirit, and by these forces the letter may glow and
sparkle like an illumined text, but the glow and sparkle will be as barren of
life as the field sown with pearls. The death-dealing element lies back of the
words, back of the sermon, back of the occasion, back of the manner, back of
the action. The great hindrance is in the preacher himself. He has not in
himself the mighty life-creating forces. There may be no discount on his
orthodoxy, honesty, cleanness, or earnestness; but somehow the man, the inner
man, in its secret places has never broken down and surrendered to God, his
inner life is not a great highway for the transmission of God's message, God's
power. Somehow self and not God rules in the holy of holiest. Somewhere, all
unconscious to himself, some spiritual nonconductor has touched his inner
being, and the divine current has been arrested. His inner being has never felt
its thorough spiritual bankruptcy, its utter powerlessness; he has never
learned to cry out with an ineffable cry of self-despair and self-helplessness
till God's power and God's fire comes in and fills, purifies, empowers.
Self-esteem, self-ability in some pernicious shape has defamed and violated the
temple which should be held sacred for God. Life-giving preaching costs the
preacher much -- death to self, crucifixion to the world, the travail of his
own soul. Crucified preaching only can give life. Crucified preaching can come
only from a crucified man.
THE preaching that kills may be, and often is, orthodox -- dogmatically,
inviolably orthodox. We love orthodoxy. It is good. It is the best. It is the
clean, clear-cut teaching of God's Word, the trophies won by truth in its
conflict with error, the levees which faith has raised against the desolating
floods of honest or reckless misbelief or unbelief; but orthodoxy, clear and
hard as crystal, suspicious and militant, may be but the letter well-shaped,
well-named, and well-learned, the letter which kills. Nothing is so dead as a
dead orthodoxy, too dead to speculate, too dead to think, to study, or to
pray.
The preaching that kills may have insight and grasp of principles, may be
scholarly and critical in taste, may have every minutia of the derivation and
grammar of the letter, may be able to trim the letter into its perfect pattern,
and illume it as Plato and Cicero may be illumined, may study it as a lawyer
studies his text-books to form his brief or to defend his case, and yet be like
a frost, a killing frost. Letter-preaching may be eloquent, enameled with
poetry and rhetoric, sprinkled with prayer spiced with sensation, illumined by
genius and yet these be but the massive or chaste, costly mountings, the rare
and beautiful flowers which coffin the corpse. The preaching which kills may be
without scholarship, unmarked by any freshness of thought or feeling, clothed
in tasteless generalities or vapid specialties, with style irregular, slovenly,
savoring neither of closet nor of study, graced neither by thought, expression,
or prayer. Under such preaching how wide and utter the desolation! how profound
the spiritual death!
This letter-preaching deals with the surface and shadow of things, and not the
things themselves. It does not penetrate the inner part. It has no deep insight
into, no strong grasp of, the hidden life of God's Word. It is true to the
outside, but the outside is the hull which must be broken and penetrated for
the kernel. The letter may be dressed so as to attract and be fashionable, but
the attraction is not toward God nor is the fashion for heaven. The failure is
in the preacher. God has not made him. He has never been in the hands of God
like clay in the hands of the potter. He has been busy about the sermon, its
thought and finish, its drawing and impressive forces; but the deep things of
God have never been sought, studied, fathomed, experienced by him. He has never
stood before "the throne high and lifted up," never heard the seraphim song,
never seen the vision nor felt the rush of that awful holiness, and cried out
in utter abandon and despair under the sense of weakness and guilt, and had his
life renewed, his heart touched, purged, inflamed by the live coal from God's
altar. His ministry may draw people to him, to the Church, to the form and
ceremony; but no true drawings to God, no sweet, holy, divine communion
induced. The Church has been frescoed but not edified, pleased but not
sanctified. Life is suppressed; a chill is on the summer air; the soil is
baked. The city of our God becomes the city of the dead; the Church a
graveyard, not an embattled army. Praise and prayer are stifled; worship is
dead. The preacher and the preaching have helped sin, not holiness; peopled
hell, not heaven.
Preaching which kills is prayerless preaching. Without prayer the preacher
creates death, and not life. The preacher who is feeble in prayer is feeble in
life-giving forces. The preacher who has retired prayer as a conspicuous and
largely prevailing element in his own character has shorn his preaching of its
distinctive life-giving power. Professional praying there is and will be, but
professional praying helps the preaching to its deadly work. Professional
praying chills and kills both preaching and praying. Much of the lax devotion
and lazy, irreverent attitudes in congregational praying are attributable to
professional praying in the pulpit. Long, discursive, dry, and inane are the
prayers in many pulpits. Without unction or heart, they fall like a killing
frost on all the graces of worship. Death-dealing prayers they are. Every
vestige of devotion has perished under their breath. The deader they are the
longer they grow. A plea for short praying, live praying, real heart praying,
praying by the Holy Spirit -- direct, specific, ardent, simple, unctuous in the
pulpit -- is in order. A school to teach preachers how to pray, as God counts
praying, would be more beneficial to true piety, true worship, and true
preaching than all theological schools.
Stop! Pause! Consider! Where are we? What are we doing? Preaching to kill?
Praying to kill? Praying to God! the great God, the Maker of all worlds, the
Judge of all men! What reverence! what simplicity! what sincerity! what truth
in the inward parts is demanded! How real we must be! How hearty! Prayer to God
the noblest exercise, the loftiest effort of man, the most real thing! Shall we
not discard forever accursed preaching that kills and prayer that kills, and do
the real thing, the mightiest thing -- prayerful praying, life-creating
preaching, bring the mightiest force to bear on heaven and earth and draw on
God's exhaustless and open treasure for the need and beggary of man?
THERE are two extreme tendencies in the ministry. The one is to shut itself out
from intercourse with the people. The monk, the hermit were illustrations of
this; they shut themselves out from men to be more with God. They failed, of
course. Our being with God is of use only as we expend its priceless benefits
on men. This age, neither with preacher nor with people, is much intent on God.
Our hankering is not that way. We shut ourselves to our study, we become
students, bookworms, Bible worms, sermon makers, noted for literature, thought,
and sermons; but the people and God, where are they? Out of heart, out of mind.
Preachers who are great thinkers, great students must be the greatest of
prayers, or else they will be the greatest of backsliders, heartless
professionals, rationalistic, less than the least of preachers in God's
estimate.
The other tendency is to thoroughly popularize the ministry. He is no longer
God's man, but a man of affairs, of the people. He prays not, because his
mission is to the people. If he can move the people, create an interest, a
sensation in favor of religion, an interest in Church work -- he is satisfied.
His personal relation to God is no factor in his work. Prayer has little or no
place in his plans. The disaster and ruin of such a ministry cannot be computed
by earthly arithmetic. What the preacher is in prayer to God, for himself, for
his people, so is his power for real good to men, so is his true fruitfulness,
his true fidelity to God, to man, for time, for eternity.
It is impossible for the preacher to keep his spirit in harmony with the divine
nature of his high calling without much prayer. That the preacher by dint of
duty and laborious fidelity to the work and routine of the ministry can keep
himself in trim and fitness is a serious mistake. Even sermon-making, incessant
and taxing as an art, as a duty, as a work, or as a pleasure, will engross and
harden, will estrange the heart, by neglect of prayer, from God. The scientist
loses God in nature. The preacher may lose God in his sermon.
Prayer freshens the heart of the preacher, keeps it in tune with God and in
sympathy with the people, lifts his ministry out of the chilly air of a
profession, fructifies routine and moves every wheel with the facility and
power of a divine unction.
Mr. Spurgeon says: "Of course the preacher is above all others distinguished as
a man of prayer. He prays as an ordinary Christian, else he were a hypocrite.
He prays more than ordinary Christians, else he were disqualified for the
office he has undertaken. If you as ministers are not very prayerful, you are
to be pitied. If you become lax in sacred devotion, not only will you need to
be pitied but your people also, and the day cometh in which you shall be
ashamed and confounded. All our libraries and studies are mere emptiness
compared with our closets. Our seasons of fasting and prayer at the Tabernacle
have been high days indeed; never has heaven's gate stood wider; never have our
hearts been nearer the central Glory."
The praying which makes a prayerful ministry is not a little praying put in as
we put flavor to give it a pleasant smack, but the praying must be in the body,
and form the blood and bones. Prayer is no petty duty, put into a corner; no
piecemeal performance made out of the fragments of time which have been
snatched from business and other engagements of life; but it means that the
best of our time, the heart of our time and strength must be given. It does not
mean the closet absorbed in the study or swallowed up in the activities of
ministerial duties; but it means the closet first, the study and activities
second, both study and activities freshened and made efficient by the closet.
Prayer that affects one's ministry must give tone to one's life. The praying
which gives color and bent to character is no pleasant, hurried pastime. It
must enter as strongly into the heart and life as Christ's "strong crying and
tears" did; must draw out the soul into an agony of desire as Paul's did; must
be an inwrought fire and force like the "effectual, fervent prayer" of James;
must be of that quality which, when put into the golden censer and incensed
before God, works mighty spiritual throes and revolutions.
Prayer is not a little habit pinned on to us while we were tied to our mother's
apron strings; neither is it a little decent quarter of a minute's grace said
over an hour's dinner, but it is a most serious work of our most serious years.
It engages more of time and appetite than our longest dinings or richest
feasts. The prayer that makes much of our preaching must be made much of. The
character of our praying will determine the character of our preaching. Light
praying will make light preaching. Prayer makes preaching strong, gives it
unction, and makes it stick. In every ministry weighty for good, prayer has
always been a serious business.
The preacher must be preeminently a man of prayer. His heart must graduate in
the school of prayer. In the school of prayer only can the heart learn to
preach. No learning can make up for the failure to pray. No earnestness, no
diligence, no study, no gifts will supply its lack.
Talking to men for God is a great thing, but talking to God for men is greater
still. He will never talk well and with real success to men for God who has not
learned well how to talk to God for men. More than this, prayerless words in
the pulpit and out of it are deadening words.
As the engine never moves until the fire is kindled, so preaching, with all its
machinery, perfection, and polish, is at a dead standstill, as far as spiritual
results are concerned, till prayer has kindled and created the steam. The
texture, fineness, and strength of the sermon is as so much rubbish unless the
mighty impulse of prayer is in it, through it, and behind it. The preacher
must, by prayer, put God in the sermon. The preacher must, by prayer, move God
toward the people before he can move the people to God by his words. The
preacher must have had audience and ready access to God before he can have
access to the people. An open way to God for the preacher is the surest pledge
of an open way to the people.
It is necessary to iterate and reiterate that prayer, as a mere habit, as a
performance gone through by routine or in a professional way, is a dead and
rotten thing. Such praying has no connection with the praying for which we
plead. We are stressing true praying, which engages and sets on fire every high
element of the preacher's being -- prayer which is born of vital oneness with
Christ and the fullness of the Holy Ghost, which springs from the deep,
overflowing fountains of tender compassion, deathless solicitude for man's
eternal good; a consuming zeal for the glory of God; a thorough conviction of
the preacher's difficult and delicate work and of the imperative need of God's
mightiest help. Praying grounded on these solemn and profound convictions is
the only true praying. Preaching backed by such praying is the only preaching
which sows the seeds of eternal life in human hearts and builds men up for
heaven.
It is true that there may be popular preaching, pleasant preaching, taking
preaching, preaching of much intellectual, literary, and brainy force, with its
measure and form of good, with little or no praying; but the preaching which
secures God's end in preaching must be born of prayer from text to exordium,
delivered with the energy and spirit of prayer, followed and made to germinate,
and kept in vital force in the hearts of the hearers by the preacher's prayers,
long after the occasion has past.
We may excuse the spiritual poverty of our preaching in many ways, but the true
secret will be found in the lack of urgent prayer for God's presence in the
power of the Holy Spirit. There are preachers innumerable who can deliver
masterful sermons after their order; but the effects are short-lived and do not
enter as a factor at all into the regions of the spirit where the fearful war
between God and Satan, heaven and hell, is being waged because they are not
made powerfully militant and spiritually victorious by prayer.
The preachers who gain mighty results for God are the men who have prevailed in
their pleadings with God ere venturing to plead with men. The preachers who are
the mightiest in their closets with God are the mightiest in their pulpits with
men.
Preachers are human folks, and are exposed to and often caught by the strong
driftings of human currents. Praying is spiritual work; and human nature does
not like taxing, spiritual work. Human nature wants to sail to heaven under a
favoring breeze, a full, smooth sea. Prayer is humbling work. It abases
intellect and pride, crucifies vainglory, and signs our spiritual bankruptcy,
and all these are hard for flesh and blood to bear. It is easier not to pray
than to bear them. So we come to one of the crying evils of these times, maybe
of all times -- little or no praying. Of these two evils, perhaps little
praying is worse than no praying. Little praying is a kind of make-believe, a
salvo for the conscience, a farce and a delusion.
The little estimate we put on prayer is evident from the little time we give to
it. The time given to prayer by the average preacher scarcely counts in the sum
of the daily aggregate. Not infrequently the preacher's only praying is by his
bedside in his nightdress, ready for bed and soon in it, with, perchance the
addition of a few hasty snatches of prayer ere he is dressed in the morning.
How feeble, vain, and little is such praying compared with the time and energy
devoted to praying by holy men in and out of the Bible! How poor and mean our
petty, childish praying is beside the habits of the true men of God in all
ages! To men who think praying their main business and devote time to it
according to this high estimate of its importance does God commit the keys of
his kingdom, and by them does he work his spiritual wonders in this world.
Great praying is the sign and seal of God's great leaders and the earnest of
the conquering forces with which God will crown their labors.
The preacher is commissioned to pray as well as to preach. His mission is
incomplete if he does not do both well. The preacher may speak with all the
eloquence of men and of angels; but unless he can pray with a faith which draws
all heaven to his aid, his preaching will be "as sounding brass or a tinkling
cymbal" for permanent God-honoring, soul-saving uses.
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 so 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 there
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.
WHILE many private prayers, in the nature of things, must be short; while
public prayers, as a rule, ought to be short and condensed; while there is
ample room for and value put on ejaculatory prayer -- yet in our private
communions with God time is a feature essential to its value. Much time spent
with God is the secret of all successful praying. Prayer which is felt as a
mighty force is the mediate or immediate product of much time spent with God.
Our short prayers owe their point and efficiency to the long ones that have
preceded them. The short prevailing prayer cannot be prayed by one who has not
prevailed with God in a mightier struggle of long continuance. Jacob's victory
of faith could not have been gained without that all-night wrestling. God's
acquaintance is not made by pop calls. God does not bestow his gifts on the
casual or hasty comers and goers. Much with God alone is the secret of knowing
him and of influence with him. He yields to the persistency of a faith that
knows him. He bestows his richest gifts upon those who declare their desire for
and appreciation of those gifts by the constancy as well as earnestness of
their importunity. Christ, who in this as well as other things is our Example,
spent many whole nights in prayer. His custom was to pray much. He had his
habitual place to pray. Many long seasons of praying make up his history and
character. Paul prayed day and night. It took time from very important
interests for Daniel to pray three times a day. David's morning, noon, and
night praying were doubtless on many occasions very protracted. While we have
no specific account of the time these Bible saints spent in prayer, yet the
indications are that they consumed much time in prayer, and on some occasions
long seasons of praying was their custom.
We would not have any think that the value of their prayers is to be measured
by the clock, but our purpose is to impress on our minds the necessity of being
much alone with God; and that if this feature has not been produced by our
faith, then our faith is of a feeble and surface type.
The men who have most fully illustrated Christ in their character, and have
most powerfully affected the world for him, have been men who spent so much
time with God as to make it a notable feature of their lives. Charles Simeon
devoted the hours from four till eight in the morning to God. Mr. Wesley spent
two hours daily in prayer. He began at four in the morning. Of him, one who
knew him well wrote: "He thought prayer to be more his business than anything
else, and I have seen him come out of his closet with a serenity of face next
to shining." John Fletcher stained the walls of his room by the breath of his
prayers. Sometimes he would pray all night; always, frequently, and with great
earnestness. His whole life was a life of prayer. "I would not rise from my
seat," he said, "without lifting my heart to God." His greeting to a friend was
always: "Do I meet you praying?" Luther said: "If I fail to spend two hours in
prayer each morning, the devil gets the victory through the day. I have so much
business I cannot get on without spending three hours daily in prayer." He had
a motto: "He that has prayed well has studied well."
Archbishop Leighton was so much alone with God that he seemed to be in a
perpetual meditation. "Prayer and praise were his business and his pleasure,"
says his biographer. Bishop Ken was so much with God that his soul was said to
be God-enamored. He was with God before the clock struck three every morning.
Bishop Asbury said: "I propose to rise at four o'clock as often as I can and
spend two hours in prayer and meditation." Samuel Rutherford, the fragrance of
whose piety is still rich, rose at three in the morning to meet God in prayer.
Joseph Alleine arose at four o'clock for his business of praying till eight. If
he heard other tradesmen plying their business before he was up, he would
exclaim: "O how this shames me! Doth not my Master deserve more than theirs?"
He who has learned this trade well draws at will, on sight, and with acceptance
of heaven's unfailing bank.
One of the holiest and among the most gifted of Scotch preachers says: "I ought
to spend the best hours in communion with God. It is my noblest and most
fruitful employment, and is not to be thrust into a corner. The morning hours,
from six to eight, are the most uninterrupted and should be thus employed.
After tea is my best hour, and that should be solemnly dedicated to God. I
ought not to give up the good old habit of prayer before going to bed; but
guard must be kept against sleep. When I awake in the night, I ought to rise
and pray. A little time after breakfast might be given to intercession." This
was the praying plan of Robert McCheyne. The memorable Methodist band in their
praying shame us. "From four to five in the morning, private prayer; from five
to six in the evening, private prayer."
John Welch, the holy and wonderful Scotch preacher, thought the day ill spent
if he did not spend eight or ten hours in prayer. He kept a plaid that he might
wrap himself when he arose to pray at night. His wife would complain when she
found him lying on the ground weeping. He would reply: "O woman, I have the
souls of three thousand to answer for, and I know not how it is with many of
them!"
BISHOP WILSON says: In H. Martyn's journal the spirit of prayer, the time he
devoted to the duty, and his fervor in it are the first things which strike
me."
Payson wore the hard-wood boards into grooves where his knees pressed so often
and so long. His biographer says: "His continuing instant in prayer, be his
circumstances what they might, is the most noticeable fact in his history, and
points out the duty of all who would rival his eminency. To his ardent and
persevering prayers must no doubt be ascribed in a great measure his
distinguished and almost uninterrupted success."
The Marquis DeRenty, to whom Christ was most precious, ordered his servant to
call him from his devotions at the end of half an hour. The servant at the time
saw his face through an aperture. It was marked with such holiness that he
hated to arouse him. His lips were moving, but he was perfectly silent. He
waited until three half hours had passed; then he called to him, when he arose
from his knees, saying that the half hour was so short when he was communing
with Christ.
Brainerd said: "I love to be alone in my cottage, where I can spend much time
in prayer."
William Bramwell is famous in Methodist annals for personal holiness and for
his wonderful success in preaching and for the marvelous answers to his
prayers. For hours at a time he would pray. He almost lived on his knees. He
went over his circuits like a flame of fire. The fire was kindled by the time
he spent in prayer. He often spent as much as four hours in a single season of
prayer in retirement.
Bishop Andrewes spent the greatest part of five hours every day in prayer and
devotion.
Sir Henry Havelock always spent the first two hours of each day alone with God.
If the encampment was struck at 6 A.M., he would rise at four.
Earl Cairns rose daily at six o'clock to secure an hour and a half for the
study of the Bible and for prayer, before conducting family worship at a
quarter to eight.
Dr. Judson's success in prayer is attributable to the fact that he gave much
time to prayer. He says on this point: "Arrange thy affairs, if possible, so
that thou canst leisurely devote two or three hours every day not merely to
devotional exercises but to the very act of secret prayer and communion with
God. Endeavor seven times a day to withdraw from business and company and lift
up thy soul to God in private retirement. Begin the day by rising after
midnight and devoting some time amid the silence and darkness of the night to
this sacred work. Let the hour of opening dawn find thee at the same work. Let
the hours of nine, twelve, three, six, and nine at night witness the same. Be
resolute in his cause. Make all practicable sacrifices to maintain it. Consider
that thy time is short, and that business and company must not be allowed to
rob thee of thy God." Impossible, say we, fanatical directions! Dr. Judson
impressed an empire for Christ and laid the foundations of God's kingdom with
imperishable granite in the heart of Burmah. He was successful, one of the few
men who mightily impressed the world for Christ. Many men of greater gifts and
genius and learning than he have made no such impression; their religious work
is like footsteps in the sands, but he has engraven his work on the adamant.
The secret of its profundity and endurance is found in the fact that he gave
time to prayer. He kept the iron red-hot with prayer, and God's skill fashioned
it with enduring power. No man can do a great and enduring work for God who is
not a man of prayer, and no man can be a man of prayer who does not give much
time to praying.
Is it true that prayer is simply the compliance with habit, dull and
mechanical? A petty performance into which we are trained till tameness,
shortness, superficiality are its chief elements? "Is it true that prayer is,
as is assumed, little else than the half-passive play of sentiment which flows
languidly on through the minutes or hours of easy reverie?" Canon Liddon
continues: "Let those who have really prayed give the answer. They sometimes
describe prayer with the patriarch Jacob as a wrestling together with an Unseen
Power which may last, not unfrequently in an earnest life, late into the night
hours, or even to the break of day. Sometimes they refer to common intercession
with St. Paul as a concerted struggle. They have, when praying, their eyes
fixed on the Great Intercessor in Gethsemane, upon the drops of blood which
fall to the ground in that agony of resignation and sacrifice. Importunity is
of the essence of successful prayer. Importunity means not dreaminess but
sustained work. It is through prayer especially that the kingdom of heaven
suffereth violence and the violent take it by force. It was a saying of the
late Bishop Hamilton that "No man is likely to do much good in prayer who does
not begin by looking upon it in the light of a work to be prepared for and
persevered in with all the earnestness which we bring to bear upon subjects
which are in our opinion at once most interesting and most necessary."
THE men who have done the most for God in this world have been early on their
knees. He who fritters away the early morning, its opportunity and freshness,
in other pursuits than seeking God will make poor headway seeking him the rest
of the day. If God is not first in our thoughts and efforts in the morning, he
will be in the last place the remainder of the day.
Behind this early rising and early praying is the ardent desire which presses
us into this pursuit after God. Morning listlessness is the index to a listless
heart. The heart which is behindhand in seeking God in the morning has lost its
relish for God. David's heart was ardent after God. He hungered and thirsted
after God, and so he sought God early, before daylight. The bed and sleep could
not chain his soul in its eagerness after God. Christ longed for communion with
God; and so, rising a great while before day, he would go out into the mountain
to pray. The disciples, when fully awake and ashamed of their indulgence, would
know where to find him. We might go through the list of men who have mightily
impressed the world for God, and we would find them early after God.
A desire for God which cannot break the chains of sleep is a weak thing and
will do but little good for God after it has indulged itself fully. The desire
for God that keeps so far behind the devil and the world at the beginning of
the day will never catch up.
It is not simply the getting up that puts men to the front and makes them
captain generals in God's hosts, but it is the ardent desire which stirs and
breaks all self-indulgent chains. But the getting up gives vent, increase, and
strength to the desire. If they had lain in bed and indulged themselves, the
desire would have been quenched. The desire aroused them and put them on the
stretch for God, and this heeding and acting on the call gave their faith its
grasp on God and gave to their hearts the sweetest and fullest revelation of
God, and this strength of faith and fullness of revelation made them saints by
eminence, and the halo of their sainthood has come down to us, and we have
entered on the enjoyment of their conquests. But we take our fill in enjoyment,
and not in productions. We build their tombs and write their epitaphs, but are
careful not to follow their examples.
We need a generation of preachers who seek God and seek him early, who give the
freshness and dew of effort to God, and secure in return the freshness and
fullness of his power that he may be as the dew to them, full of gladness and
strength, through all the heat and labor of the day. Our laziness after God is
our crying sin. The children of this world are far wiser than we. They are at
it early and late. We do not seek God with ardor and diligence. No man gets God
who does not follow hard after him, and no soul follows hard after God who is
not after him in early morn.
NEVER was there greater need for saintly men and women; more imperative still
is the call for saintly, God-devoted preachers. The world moves with gigantic
strides. Satan has his hold and rule on the world, and labors to make all its
movements subserve his ends. Religion must do its best work, present its most
attractive and perfect models. By every means, modern sainthood must be
inspired by the loftiest ideals and by the largest possibilities through the
Spirit. Paul lived on his knees, that the Ephesian Church might measure the
heights, breadths, and depths of an unmeasurable saintliness, and "be filled
with all the fullness of God." Epaphras laid himself out with the exhaustive
toil and strenuous conflict of fervent prayer, that the Colossian Church might
"stand perfect and complete in all the will of God." Everywhere, everything in
apostolic times was on the stretch that the people of God might each and "all
come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a
perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ." No
premium was given to dwarfs; no encouragement to an old babyhood. The babies
were to grow; the old, instead of feebleness and infirmities, were to bear
fruit in old age, and be fat and flourishing. The divinest thing in religion is
holy men and holy women.
No amount of money, genius, or culture can move things for God. Holiness
energizing the soul, the whole man aflame with love, with desire for more
faith, more prayer, more zeal, more consecration -- this is the secret of
power. These we need and must have, and men must be the incarnation of this
God-inflamed devotedness. God's advance has been stayed, his cause crippled:
his name dishonored for their lack. Genius (though the loftiest and most
gifted), education (though the most learned and refined), position, dignity,
place, honored names, high ecclesiastics cannot move this chariot of our God.
It is a fiery one, and fiery forces only can move it. The genius of a Milton
fails. The imperial strength of a Leo fails. Brainerd's spirit can move it.
Brainerd's spirit was on fire for God, on fire for souls. Nothing earthly,
worldly, selfish came in to abate in the least the intensity of this
all-impelling and all-consuming force and flame.
Prayer is the creator as well as the channel of devotion. The spirit of
devotion is the spirit of prayer. Prayer and devotion are united as soul and
body are united, as life and the heart are united. There is no real prayer
without devotion, no devotion without prayer. The preacher must be surrendered
to God in the holiest devotion. He is not a professional man, his ministry is
not a profession; it is a divine institution, a divine devotion. He is devoted
to God. His aim, aspirations, ambition are for God and to God, and to such
prayer is as essential as food is to life.
The preacher, above everything else, must be devoted to God. The preacher's
relations to God are the insignia and credentials of his ministry. These must
be clear, conclusive, unmistakable. No common, surface type of piety must be
his. If he does not excel in grace, he does not excel at all. If he does not
preach by life, character, conduct, he does not preach at all. If his piety be
light, his preaching may be as soft and as sweet as music, as gifted as Apollo,
yet its weight will be a feather's weight, visionary, fleeting as the morning
cloud or the early dew. Devotion to God -- there is no substitute for this in
the preacher's character and conduct. Devotion to a Church, to opinions, to an
organization, to orthodoxy -- these are paltry, misleading, and vain when they
become the source of inspiration, the animus of a call. God must be the
mainspring of the preacher's effort, the fountain and crown of all his toil.
The name and honor of Jesus Christ, the advance of his cause, must be all in
all. The preacher must have no inspiration but the name of Jesus Christ, no
ambition but to have him glorified, no toil but for him. Then prayer will be a
source of his illuminations, the means of perpetual advance, the gauge of his
success. The perpetual aim, the only ambition, the preacher can cherish is to
have God with him.
Never did the cause of God need perfect illustrations of the possibilities of
prayer more than in this age. No age, no person, will be ensamples of the
gospel power except the ages or persons of deep and earnest prayer. A
prayerless age will have but scant models of divine power. Prayerless hearts
will never rise to these Alpine heights. The age may be a better age than the
past, but there is an infinite distance between the betterment of an age by the
force of an advancing civilization and its betterment by the increase of
holiness and Christlikeness by the energy of prayer. The Jews were much better
when Christ came than in the ages before. It was the golden age of their
Pharisaic religion. Their golden religious age crucified Christ. Never more
praying, never less praying; never more sacrifices, never less sacrifice; never
less idolatry, never more idolatry; never more of temple worship, never less of
God worship; never more of lip service, never less of heart service (God
worshiped by lips whose hearts and hands crucified God's Son!); never more of
churchgoers, never less of saints.
It is prayer-force which makes saints. Holy characters are formed by the power
of real praying. The more of true saints, the more of praying; the more of
praying, the more of true saints.
God has now, and has had, many of these devoted, prayerful preachers -- men in
whose lives prayer has been a mighty, controlling, conspicuous force. The world
has felt their power, God has felt and honored their power, God's cause has
moved mightily and swiftly by their prayers, holiness has shone out in their
characters with a divine effulgence.
God found one of the men he was looking for in David Brainerd, whose work and
name have gone into history. He was no ordinary man, but was capable of shining
in any company, the peer of the wise and gifted ones, eminently suited to fill
the most attractive pulpits and to labor among the most refined and the
cultured, who were so anxious to secure him for their pastor. President Edwards
bears testimony that he was "a young man of distingushed talents, had
extraordinary knowledge of men and things, had rare conversational powers,
excelled in his knowledge of theology, and was truly, for one so young, an
extraordinary divine, and especially in all matters relating to experimental
religion. I never knew his equal of his age and standing for clear and accurate
notions of the nature and essence of true religion. His manner in prayer was
almost inimitable, such as I have very rarely known equaled. His learning was
very considerable, and he had extraordinary gifts for the pulpit."
No sublimer story has been recorded in earthly annals than that of David
Brainerd; no miracle attests with diviner force the truth of Christianity than
the life and work of such a man. Alone in the savage wilds of America,
struggling day and night with a mortal disease, unschooled in the care of
souls, having access to the Indians for a large portion of time only through
the bungling medium of a pagan interpreter, with the Word of God in his heart
and in his hand, his soul fired with the divine flame, a place and time to pour
out his soul to God in prayer, he fully established the worship of God and
secured all its gracious results. The Indians were changed with a great change
from the lowest besotments of an ignorant and debased heathenism to pure,
devout, intelligent Christians; all vice reformed, the external duties of
Christianity at once embraced and acted on; family prayer set up; the Sabbath
instituted and religiously observed; the internal graces of religion exhibited
with growing sweetness and strength. The solution of these results is found in
David Brainerd himself, not in the conditions or accidents but in the man
Brainerd. He was God's man, for God first and last and all the time. God could
flow unhindered through him. The omnipotence of grace was neither arrested nor
straightened by the conditions of his heart; the whole channel was broadened
and cleaned out for God's fullest and most powerful passage, so that God with
all his mighty forces could come down on the hopeless, savage wilderness, and
transform it into his blooming and fruitful garden; for nothing is too hard for
God to do if he can get the right kind of a man to do it with.
Brainerd lived the life of holiness and prayer. His diary is full and
monotonous with the record of his seasons of fasting, meditation, and
retirement. The time he spent in private prayer amounted to many hours daily.
"When I return home," he said, "and give myself to meditation, prayer, and
fasting, my soul longs for mortification, self-denial, humility, and
divorcement from all things of the world." "I have nothing to do," he said,
"with earth but only to labor in it honestly for God. I do not desire to live
one minute for anything which earth can afford." After this high order did he
pray: "Feeling somewhat of the sweetness of communion with God and the
constraining force of his love, and how admirably it captivates the soul and
makes all the desires and affections to center in God, I set apart this day for
secret fasting and prayer, to entreat God to direct and bless me with regard to
the great work which I have in view of preaching the gospel, and that the Lord
would return to me and show me the light of his countenance. I had little life
and power in the forenoon. Near the middle of the afternoon God enabled me to
wrestle ardently in intercession for my absent friends, but just at night the
Lord visited me marvelously in prayer. I think my soul was never in such agony
before. I felt no restraint, for the treasures of divine grace were opened to
me. I wrestled for absent friends, for the ingathering of souls, for multitudes
of poor souls, and for many that I thought were the children of God,
personally, in many distant places. I was in such agony from sun half an hour
high till near dark that I was all over wet with sweat, but yet it seemed to me
I had done nothing. O, my dear Saviour did sweat blood for poor souls! I longed
for more compassion toward them. I felt still in a sweet frame, under a sense
of divine love and grace, and went to bed in such a frame, with my heart set on
God." It was prayer which gave to his life and ministry their marvelous
power.
The men of mighty prayer are men of spiritual might. Prayers never die.
Brainerd's whole life was a life of prayer. By day and by night he prayed.
Before preaching and after preaching he prayed. Riding through the interminable
solitudes of the forests he prayed. On his bed of straw he prayed. Retiring to
the dense and lonely forests, he prayed. Hour by hour, day after day, early
morn and late at night, he was praying and fasting, pouring out his soul,
interceding, communing with God. He was with God mightily in prayer, and God
was with him mightily, and by it he being dead yet speaketh and worketh, and
will speak and work till the end comes, and among the to glorious ones of that
glorious day he will be with the first.
Jonathan Edwards says of him: "His life shows the right way to success in the
works of the ministry. He sought it as the soldier seeks victory in a siege or
battle; or as a man that runs a race for a great prize. Animated with love to
Christ and souls, how did he labor? Always fervently. Not only in word and
doctrine, in public and in private, but in prayers by day and night, wrestling
with God in secret and travailing in birth with unutterable groans and agonies,
until Christ was formed in the hearts of the people to whom he was sent. Like a
true son of Jacob, he persevered in wrestling through all the darkness of the
night, until the breaking of the day!"
PRAYER, with its manifold and many-sided forces, helps the mouth to utter the
truth in its fullness and freedom. The preacher is to be prayed for, the
preacher is made by prayer. The preacher's mouth is to be prayed for; his mouth
is to be opened and filled by prayer. A holy mouth is made by praying, by much
praying; a brave mouth is made by praying, by much praying. The Church and the
world, God and heaven, owe much to Paul's mouth; Paul's mouth owed its power to
prayer.
How manifold, illimitable, valuable, and helpful prayer is to the preacher in
so many ways, at so many points, in every way! One great value is, it helps his
heart.
Praying makes the preacher a heart preacher. Prayer puts the preacher's heart
into the preacher's sermon; prayer puts the preacher's sermon into the
preacher's heart.
The heart makes the preacher. Men of great hearts are great preachers. Men of
bad hearts may do a measure of good, but this is rare. The hireling and the
stranger may help the sheep at some points, but it is the good shepherd with
the good shepherd's heart who will bless the sheep and answer the full measure
of the shepherd's place.
We have emphasized sermon-preparation until we have lost sight of the important
thing to be prepared -- the heart. A prepared heart is much better than a
prepared sermon. A prepared heart will make a prepared sermon.
Volumes have been written laying down the mechanics and taste of sermon-making,
until we have become possessed with the idea that this scaffolding is the
building. The young preacher has been taught to lay out all his strength on the
form, taste, and beauty of his sermon as a mechanical and intellectual product.
We have thereby cultivated a vicious taste among the people and raised the
clamor for talent instead of grace, eloquence instead of piety, rhetoric
instead of revelation, reputation and brilliancy instead of holiness. By it we
have lost the true idea of preaching, lost preaching power, lost pungent
conviction for sin, lost the rich experience and elevated Christian character,
lost the authority over consciences and lives which always results from genuine
preaching.
It would not do to say that preachers study too much. Some of them do not study
at all; others do not study enough. Numbers do not study the right way to show
themselves workmen approved of God. But our great lack is not in head culture,
but in heart culture; not lack of knowledge but lack of holiness is our sad and
telling defect -- not that we know too much, but that we do not meditate on God
and his word and watch and fast and pray enough. The heart is the great
hindrance to our preaching. Words pregnant with divine truth find in our hearts
nonconductors; arrested, they fall shorn and powerless.
Can ambition, that lusts after praise and place, preach the gospel of Him who
made himself of no reputation and took on Him the form of a servant? Can the
proud, the vain, the egotistical preach the gospel of him who was meek and
lowly? Can the bad-tempered, passionate, selfish, hard, worldly man preach the
system which teems with long-suffering, self-denial, tenderness, which
imperatively demands separation from enmity and crucifixion to the world? Can
the hireling official, heartless, perfunctory, preach the gospel which demands
the shepherd to give his life for the sheep? Can the covetous man, who counts
salary and money, preach the gospel till he has gleaned his heart and can say
in the spirit of Christ and Paul in the words of Wesley: "I count it dung and
dross; I trample it under my feet; I (yet not I, but the grace of God in me)
esteem it just as the mire of the streets, I desire it not, I seek it not?"
God's revelation does not need the light of human genius, the polish and
strength of human culture, the brilliancy of human thought, the force of human
brains to adorn or enforce it; but it does demand the simplicity, the docility,
humility, and faith of a child's heart.
It was this surrender and subordination of intellect and genius to the divine
and spiritual forces which made Paul peerless among the apostles. It was this
which gave Wesley his power and radicated his labors in the history of
humanity. This gave to Loyola the strength to arrest the retreating forces of
Catholicism.
Our great need is heart-preparation. Luther held it as an axiom: "He who has
prayed well has studied well." We do not say that men are not to think and use
their intellects; but he will use his intellect best who cultivates his heart
most. We do not say that preachers should not be students; but we do say that
their great study should be the Bible, and he studies the Bible best who has
kept his heart with diligence. We do not say that the preacher should not know
men, but he will be the greater adept in human nature who has fathomed the
depths and intricacies of his own heart. We do say that while the channel of
preaching is the mind, its fountain is the heart; you may broaden and deepen
the channel, but if you do not look well to the purity and depth of the
fountain, you will have a dry or polluted channel. We do say that almost any
man of common intelligence has sense enough to preach the gospel, but very few
have grace enough to do so. We do say that he who has struggled with his own
heart and conquered it; who has taught it humility, faith, love, truth, mercy,
sympathy, courage; who can pour the rich treasures of the heart thus trained,
through a manly intellect, all surcharged with the power of the gospel on the
consciences of his hearers -- such a one will be the truest, most successful
preacher in the esteem of his Lord.
We believe that one of the serious and most popular errors of the modern pulpit
is the putting of more thought than prayer, of more head than of heart in its
sermons. Big hearts make big preachers; good hearts make good preachers. A
theological school to enlarge and cultivate the heart is the golden desideratum
of the gospel. The pastor binds his people to him and rules his people by his
heart. They may admire his gifts, they may be proud of his ability, they may be
affected for the time by his sermons; but the stronghold of his power is his
heart. His scepter is love. The throne of his power is his heart.
The good shepherd gives his life for the sheep. Heads never make martyrs. It is
the heart which surrenders the life to love and fidelity. It takes great
courage to be a faithful pastor, but the heart alone can supply this courage.
Gifts and genius may be brave, but it is the gifts and genius of the heart and
not of the head.
It is easier to fill the head than it is to prepare the heart. It is easier to
make a brain sermon than a heart sermon. It was heart that drew the Son of God
from heaven. It is heart that will draw men to heaven. Men of heart is what the
world needs to sympathize with its woe, to kiss away its sorrows, to
compassionate its misery, and to alleviate its pain. Christ was eminently the
man of sorrows, because he was preeminently the man of heart.
"Give me thy heart," is God's requisition of men. "Give me thy heart!" is man's
demand of man.
A professional ministry is a heartless ministry. When salary plays a great part
in the ministry, the heart plays little part. We may make preaching our
business, and not put our hearts in the business. He who puts self to the front
in his preaching puts heart to the rear. He who does not sow with his heart in
his study will never reap a harvest for God. The closet is the heart's study.
We will learn more about how to preach and what to preach there than we can
learn in our libraries. "Jesus wept" is the shortest and biggest verse in the
Bible. It is he who goes forth weeping (not preaching great sermons),
bearing precious seed, who shall come again rejoicing, bringing his sheaves
with him.
Praying gives sense, brings wisdom, broadens and strengthens the mind. The
closet is a perfect school-teacher and schoolhouse for the preacher. Thought is
not only brightened and clarified in prayer, but thought is born in prayer. We
can learn more in an hour praying, when praying indeed, than from many hours in
the study. Books are in the closet which can be found and read nowhere else.
Revelations are made in the closet which are made nowhere else.
ALEXANDER KNOX, a Christian philosopher of the days of Wesley, not an adherent
but a strong personal friend of Wesley, and with much spiritual sympathy with
the Wesleyan movement, writes: "It is strange and lamentable, but I verily
believe the fact to be that except among Methodists and Methodistical
clergyman, there is not much interesting preaching in England. The clergy, too
generally have absolutely lost the art. There is, I conceive, in the great laws
of the moral world a kind of secret understanding like the affinities in
chemistry, between rightly promulgated religious truth and the deepest feelings
of the human mind. Where the one is duly exhibited, the other will respond. Did
not our hearts burn within us? -- but to this devout feeling is indispensable
in the speaker. Now, I am obliged to state from my own observation that this
onction, as the French not unfitly term it, is beyond all comparison
more likely to be found in England in a Methodist conventicle than in a parish
Church. This, and this alone, seems really to be that which fills the Methodist
houses and thins the Churches. I am, I verily think, no enthusiast; I am a most
sincere and cordial churchman, a humble disciple of the School of Hale and
Boyle, of Burnet and Leighton. Now I must aver that when I was in this country,
two years ago, I did not hear a single preacher who taught me like my own great
masters but such as are deemed Methodistical. And I now despair of getting an
atom of heart instruction from any other quarter. The Methodist preachers
(however I may not always approve of all their expressions) do most assuredly
diffuse this true religion and undefiled. I felt real pleasure last Sunday. I
can bear witness that the preacher did at once speak the words of truth and
soberness. There was no eloquence -- the honest man never dreamed of such a
thing -- but there was far better: a cordial communication of vitalized truth.
I say vitalized because what he declared to others it was impossible not to
feel he lived on himself."
This unction is the art of preaching. The preacher who never had this unction
never had the art of preaching. The preacher who has lost this unction has lost
the art of preaching. Whatever other arts he may have and retain -- the art of
sermon-making, the art of eloquence, the art of great, clear thinking, the art
of pleasing an audience -- he has lost the divine art of preaching. This
unction makes God's truth powerful and interesting, draws and attracts,
edifies, convicts, saves.
This unction vitalizes God's revealed truth, makes it living and life-giving.
Even God's truth spoken without this unction is light, dead, and deadening.
Though abounding in truth, though weighty with thought, though sparkling with
rhetoric, though pointed by logic, though powerful by earnestness, without this
divine unction it issues in death and not in life. Mr. Spurgeon says: "I wonder
how long we might beat our brains before we could plainly put into word what is
meant by preaching with unction. Yet he who preaches knows its presence, and he
who hears soon detects its absence. Samaria, in famine, typifies a discourse
without it. Jerusalem, with her feast of fat things, full of marrow, may
represent a sermon enriched with it. Every one knows what the freshness of the
morning is when orient pearls abound on every blade of grass, but who can
describe it, much less produce it of itself? Such is the mystery of spiritual
anointing. We know, but we cannot tell to others what it is. It is as easy as
it is foolish, to counterfeit it. Unction is a thing which you cannot
manufacture, and its counterfeits are worse than worthless. Yet it is, in
itself, priceless, and beyond measure needful if you would edify believers and
bring sinners to Christ."
UNCTION is that indefinable, indescribable something which an old, renowned
Scotch preacher describes thus: "There is sometimes somewhat in preaching that
cannot be ascribed either to matter or expression, and cannot be described what
it is, or from whence it cometh, but with a sweet violence it pierceth into the
heart and affections and comes immediately from the Word; but if there be any
way to obtain such a thing, it is by the heavenly disposition of the
speaker."
We call it unction. It is this unction which makes the word of God "quick and
powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing
asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and a discerner of
the thoughts and intents of the heart." It is this unction which gives the
words of the preacher such point, sharpness, and power, and which creates such
friction and stir in many a dead congregation. The same truths have been told
in the strictness of the letter, smooth as human oil could make them; but no
signs of life, not a pulse throb; all as peaceful as the grave and as dead. The
same preacher in the meanwhile receives a baptism of this unction, the divine
inflatus is on him, the letter of the Word has been embellished and fired by
this mysterious power, and the throbbings of life begin -- life which receives
or life which resists. The unction pervades and convicts the conscience and
breaks the heart.
This divine unction is the feature which separates and distinguishes true
gospel preaching from all other methods of presenting the truth, and which
creates a wide spiritual chasm between the preacher who has it and the one who
has it not. It backs and impregns revealed truth with all the energy of God.
Unction is simply putting God in his own word and on his own preachers. By
mighty and great prayerfulness and by continual prayerfulness, it is all
potential and personal to the preacher; it inspires and clarifies his
intellect, gives insight and grasp and projecting power; it gives to the
preacher heart power, which is greater than head power; and tenderness, purity,
force flow from the heart by it. Enlargement, freedom, fullness of thought,
directness and simplicity of utterance are the fruits of this unction.
Often earnestness is mistaken for this unction. He who has the divine unction
will be earnest in the very spiritual nature of things, but there may be a vast
deal of earnestness without the least mixture of unction.
Earnestness and unction look alike from some points of view. Earnestness may be
readily and without detection substituted or mistaken for unction. It requires
a spiritual eye and a spiritual taste to discriminate.
Earnestness may be sincere, serious, ardent, and persevering. It goes at a
thing with good will, pursues it with perseverance, and urges it with ardor;
puts force in it. But all these forces do not rise higher than the mere human.
The man is in it -- the whole man, with all that he has of will and
heart, of brain and genius, of planning and working and talking. He has set
himself to some purpose which has mastered him, and he pursues to master it.
There may be none of God in it. There may be little of God in it, because there
is so much of the man in it. He may present pleas in advocacy of his earnest
purpose which please or touch and move or overwhelm with conviction of their
importance; and in all this earnestness may move along earthly ways, being
propelled by human forces only, its altar made by earthly hands and its fire
kindled by earthly flames. It is said of a rather famous preacher of gifts,
whose construction of Scripture was to his fancy or purpose, that he "grew very
eloquent over his own exegesis." So men grow exceeding earnest over their own
plans or movements. Earnestness may be selfishness simulated.
What of unction? It is the indefinable in preaching which makes it preaching.
It is that which distinguishes and separates preaching from all mere human
addresses. It is the divine in preaching. It makes the preaching sharp to those
who need sharpness. It distills as the dew to those who need to he refreshed.
It is well described as:
"a two-edged sword
Of heavenly temper keen,
And double were the wounds it made
Wherever it glanced between.
'Twas death to silt; 'twas life
To all who mourned for sin.
It kindled and it silenced strife,
Made war and peace within."
This unction comes to the preacher not in the study but in the closet. It is
heaven's distillation in answer to prayer. It is the sweetest exhalation of the
Holy Spirit. It impregnates, suffuses, softens, percolates, cuts, and soothes.
It carries the Word like dynamite, like salt, like sugar; makes the Word a
soother, an arranger, a revealer, a searcher; makes the hearer a culprit or a
saint, makes him weep like a child and live like a giant; opens his heart and
his purse as gently, yet as strongly as the spring opens the leaves. This
unction is not the gift of genius. It is not found in the halls of learning. No
eloquence can woo it. No industry can win it. No prelatical hands can confer
it. It is the gift of God -- the signet set to his own messengers. It is
heaven's knighthood given to the chosen true and brave ones who have sought
this anointed honor through many an hour of tearful, wrestling prayer.
Earnestness is good and impressive: genius is gifted and great. Thought kindles
and inspires, but it takes a diviner endowment, a more powerful energy than
earnestness or genius or thought to break the chains of sin, to win estranged
and depraved hearts to God, to repair the breaches and restore the Church to
her old ways of purity and power. Nothing but this holy unction can do this.
IN the Christian system unction is the anointing of the Holy Ghost, separating
unto God's work and qualifying for it. This unction is the one divine
enablement by which the preacher accomplishes the peculiar and saving ends of
preaching. Without this unction there are no true spiritual results
accomplished; the results and forces in preaching do not rise above the results
of unsanctified speech. Without unction the former is as potent as the
pulpit.
This divine unction on the preacher generates through the Word of God the
spiritual results that flow from the gospel; and without this unction, these
results are not secured. Many pleasant impressions may be made, but these all
fall far below the ends of gospel preaching. This unction may be simulated.
There are many things that look like it, there are many results that resemble
its effects; but they are foreign to its results and to its nature. The fervor
or softness excited by a pathetic or emotional sermon may look like the
movements of the divine unction, but they have no pungent, perpetrating
heart-breaking force. No heart-healing balm is there in these surface,
sympathetic, emotional movements; they are not radical, neither sin-searching
nor sin-curing.
This divine unction is the one distinguishing feature that separates true
gospel preaching from all other methods of presenting truth. It backs and
interpenetrates the revealed truth with all the force of God. It illumines the
Word and broadens and enrichens the intellect and empowers it to grasp and
apprehend the Word. It qualifies the preacher's heart, and brings it to that
condition of tenderness, of purity, of force and light that are necessary to
secure the highest results. This unction gives to the preacher liberty and
enlargement of thought and soul -- a freedom, fullness, and directness of
utterance that can be secured by no other process.
Without this unction on the preacher the gospel has no more power to propagate
itself than any other system of truth. This is the seal of its divinity.
Unction in the preacher puts God in the gospel. Without the unction, God is
absent, and the gospel is left to the low and unsatisfactory forces that the
ingenuity, interest, or talents of men can devise to enforce and project its
doctrines.
It is in this element that the pulpit oftener fails than in any other element.
Just at this all-important point it lapses. Learning it may have, brilliancy
and eloquence may delight and charm, sensation or less offensive methods may
bring the populace in crowds, mental power may impress and enforce truth with
all its resources; but without this unction, each and all these will be but as
the fretful assault of the waters on a Gibraltar. Spray and foam may cover and
spangle; but the rocks are there still, unimpressed and unimpressible. The
human heart can no more be swept of its hardness and sin by these human forces
than these rocks can be swept away by the ocean's ceaseless flow.
This unction is the consecration force, and its presence the continuous test of
that consecration. It is this divine anointing on the preacher that secures his
consecration to God and his work. Other forces and motives may call him to the
work, but this only is consecration. A separation to God's work by the power of
the Holy Spirit is the only consecration recognized by God as legitimate.
The unction, the divine unction, this heavenly anointing, is what the pulpit
needs and must have. This divine and heavenly oil put on it by the imposition
of God's hand must soften and lubricate the whole man -- heart, head, spirit --
until it separates him with a mighty separation from all earthly, secular,
worldly, selfish motives and aims, separating him to everything that is pure
and Godlike.
It is the presence of this unction on the preacher that creates the stir and
friction in many a congregation. The same truths have been told in the
strictness of the letter, but no ruffle has been seen, no pain or pulsation
felt. All is quiet as a graveyard. Another preacher comes, and this mysterious
influence is on him; the letter of the Word has been fired by the Spirit, the
throes of a mighty movement are felt, it is the unction that pervades and stirs
the conscience and breaks the heart. Unctionless preaching makes everything
hard, dry, acrid, dead.
This unction is not a memory or an era of the past only; it is a present,
realized, conscious fact. It belongs to the experience of the man as well as to
his preaching. It is that which transforms him into the image of his divine
Master, as well as that by which he declares the truths of Christ with power.
It is so much the power in the ministry as to make all else seem feeble and
vain without it, and by its presence to atone for the absence of all other and
feebler forces.
This unction is not an inalienable gift. It is a conditional gift, and its
presence is perpetuated and increased by the same process by which it was at
first secured; by unceasing prayer to God, by impassioned desires after God, by
estimating it, by seeking it with tireless ardor, by deeming all else loss and
failure without it.
How and whence comes this unction? Direct from God in answer to prayer. Praying
hearts only are the hearts filled with this holy oil; praying lips only are
anointed with this divine unction.
Prayer, much prayer, is the price of preaching unction; prayer, much prayer, is
the one, sole condition of keeping this unction. Without unceasing prayer the
unction never comes to the preacher. Without perseverance in prayer, the
unction, like the manna overkept, breeds worms.
THE apostles knew the necessity and worth of prayer to their ministry. They
knew that their high commission as apostles, instead of relieving them from the
necessity of prayer, committed them to it by a more urgent need; so that they
were exceedingly jealous else some other important work should exhaust their
time and prevent their praying as they ought; so they appointed laymen to look
after the delicate and engrossing duties of ministering to the poor, that they
(the apostles) might, unhindered, "give themselves continually to prayer and to
the ministry of the word." Prayer is put first, and their relation to prayer is
put most strongly -- "give themselves to it," making a business of it,
surrendering themselves to praying, putting fervor, urgency, perseverance, and
time in it.
How holy, apostolic men devoted themselves to this divine work of prayer!
"Night and day praying exceedingly," says Paul. "We will give ourselves
continually to prayer" is the consensus of apostolic devotement. How these New
Testament preachers laid themselves out in prayer for God's people! How they
put God in full force into their Churches by their praying! These holy apostles
did not vainly fancy that they had met their high and solemn duties by
delivering faithfully God's word, but their preaching was made to stick and
tell by the ardor and insistence of their praying. Apostolic praying was as
taxing, toilsome, and imperative as apostolic preaching. They prayed mightily
day and night to bring their people to the highest regions of faith and
holiness. They prayed mightier still to hold them to this high spiritual
altitude. The preacher who has never learned in the school of Christ the high
and divine art of intercession for his people will never learn the art of
preaching, though homiletics be poured into him by the ton, and though he be
the most gifted genius in sermon-making and sermon-delivery.
The prayers of apostolic, saintly leaders do much in making saints of those who
are not apostles. If the Church leaders in after years had been as particular
and fervent in praying for their people as the apostles were, the sad, dark
times of worldliness and apostasy had not marred the history and eclipsed the
glory and arrested the advance of the Church. Apostolic praying makes apostolic
saints and keeps apostolic times of purity and power in the Church.
What loftiness of soul, what purity and elevation of motive, what
unselfishness, what self-sacrifice, what exhaustive toil, what ardor of spirit,
what divine tact are requisite to be an intercessor for men!
The preacher is to lay himself out in prayer for his people; not that they
might be saved, simply, but that they be mightily saved. The apostles laid
themselves out in prayer that their saints might be perfect; not that they
should have a little relish for the things of God, but that they "might be
filled with all the fullness of God." Paul did not rely on his apostolic
preaching to secure this end, but "for this cause he bowed his knees to the
Father of our Lord Jesus Christ." Paul's praying carried Paul's converts
farther along the highway of sainthood than Paul's preaching did. Epaphras did
as much or more by prayer for the Colossian saints than by his preaching. He
labored fervently always in prayer for them that "they might stand perfect and
complete in all the will of God."
Preachers are preeminently God's leaders. They are primarily responsible for
the condition of the Church. They shape its character, give tone and direction
to its life.
Much every way depends on these leaders. They shape the times and the
institutions. The Church is divine, the treasure it incases is heavenly, but it
bears the imprint of the human. The treasure is in earthen vessels, and it
smacks of the vessel. The Church of God makes, or is made by, its leaders.
Whether it makes them or is made by them, it will be what its leaders are;
spiritual if they are so, secular if they are, conglomerate if its leaders are.
Israel's kings gave character to Israel's piety. A Church rarely revolts
against or rises above the religion of its leaders. Strongly spiritual leaders;
men of holy might, at the lead, are tokens of God's favor; disaster and
weakness follow the wake of feeble or worldly leaders. Israel had fallen low
when God gave children to be their princes and babes to rule over them. No
happy state is predicted by the prophets when children oppress God's Israel and
women rule over them. Times of spiritual leadership are times of great
spiritual prosperity to the Church.
Prayer is one of the eminent characteristics of strong spiritual leadership.
Men of mighty prayer are men of might and mold things. Their power with God has
the conquering tread.
How can a man preach who does not get his message fresh from God in the closet?
How can he preach without having his faith quickened, his vision cleared, and
his heart warmed by his closeting with God? Alas, for the pulpit lips which are
untouched by this closet flame. Dry and unctionless they will ever be, and
truths divine will never come with power from such lips. As far as the real
interests of religion are concerned, a pulpit without a closet will always be a
barren thing.
A preacher may preach in an official, entertaining, or learned way without
prayer, but between this kind of preaching and sowing God's precious seed with
holy hands and prayerful, weeping hearts there is an immeasurable distance.
A prayerless ministry is the undertaker for all God's truth and for God's
Church. He may have the most costly casket and the most beautiful flowers, but
it is a funeral, notwithstanding the charmful array. A prayerless Christian
will never learn God's truth; a prayerless ministry will never be able to teach
God's truth. Ages of millennial glory have been lost by a prayerless Church.
The coming of our Lord has been postponed indefinitely by a prayerless Church.
Hell has enlarged herself and filled her dire caves in the presence of the dead
service of a prayerless Church.
The best, the greatest offering is an offering of prayer. If the preachers of
the twentieth century will learn well the lesson of prayer, and use fully the
power of prayer, the millennium will come to its noon ere the century closes.
"Pray without ceasing" is the trumpet call to the preachers of the twentieth
century. If the twentieth century will get their texts, their thoughts, their
words, their sermons in their closets, the next century will find a new heaven
and a new earth. The old sin-stained and sin-eclipsed heaven and earth will
pass away under the power of a praying ministry.
SOMEHOW the practice of praying in particular for the preacher has fallen into
disuse or become discounted. Occasionally have we heard the practice arraigned
as a disparagement of the ministry, being a public declaration by those who do
it of the inefficiency of the ministry. It offends the pride of learning and
self-sufficiency, perhaps, and these ought to be offended and rebuked in a
ministry that is so derelict as to allow them to exist.
Prayer, to the preacher, is not simply the duty of his profession, a privilege,
but it is a necessity. Air is not more necessary to the lungs than prayer is to
the preacher. It is absolutely necessary for the preacher to pray. It is an
absolute necessity that the preacher be prayed for. These two propositions are
wedded into a union which ought never to know any divorce: the preacher must
pray; the preacher must be prayed for. It will take all the praying he can
do, and all the praying he can get done, to meet the fearful responsibilities
and gain the largest, truest success in his great work. The true preacher, next
to the cultivation of the spirit and fact of prayer in himself, in their
intensest form, covets with a great covetousness the prayers of God's people.
The holier a man is, the more does he estimate prayer; the clearer does he see
that God gives himself to the praying ones, and that the measure of God's
revelation to the soul is the measure of the soul's longing, importunate prayer
for God. Salvation never finds its way to a prayerless heart. The Holy Spirit
never abides in a prayerless spirit. Preaching never edifies a prayerless soul.
Christ knows nothing of prayerless Christians. The gospel cannot be projected
by a prayerless preacher. Gifts, talents, education, eloquence, God's call,
cannot abate the demand of prayer, but only intensify the necessity for the
preacher to pray and to be prayed for. The more the preacher's eyes are opened
to the nature, responsibility, and difficulties in his work, the more will he
see, and if he be a true preacher the more will he feel, the necessity of
prayer; not only the increasing demand to pray himself, but to call on others
to help him by their prayers.
Paul is an illustration of this. If any man could project the gospel by dint of
personal force, by brain power, by culture, by personal grace, by God's
apostolic commission, God's extraordinary call, that man was Paul. That the
preacher must be a man given to prayer, Paul is an eminent example. That the
true apostolic preacher must have the prayers of other good people to give to
his ministry its full quota of success, Paul is a preeminent example. He asks,
he covets, he pleads in an impassioned way for the help of all God's saints. He
knew that in the spiritual realm, as elsewhere, in union there is strength;
that the concentration and aggregation of faith, desire, and prayer increased
the volume of spiritual force until it became overwhelming and irresistible in
its power. Units of prayer combined, like drops of water, make an ocean which
defies resistance. So Paul, with his clear and full apprehension of spiritual
dynamics, determined to make his ministry as impressive, as eternal, as
irresistible as the ocean, by gathering all the scattered units of prayer and
precipitating them on his ministry. May not the solution of Paul's preeminence
in labors and results, and impress on the Church and the world, be found in
this fact that he was able to center on himself and his ministry more of prayer
than others? To his brethren at Rome he wrote: "Now I beseech you, brethren,
for the Lord Jesus Christ's sake, and for the love of the Spirit, that ye
strive together with me in prayers to God for me." To the Ephesians he says:
"Praying always with all prayer and supplication in the Spirit, and watching
thereunto with all perseverance and supplication for all saints; and for me,
that utterance may be given unto me, that I may open my mouth boldly, to make
known the mystery of the gospel." To the Colossians he emphasizes: "Withal
praying also for us, that God would open unto us a door of utterance, to speak
the mystery of Christ, for which I am also in bonds: that I may make it
manifest as I ought to speak." To the Thessalonians he says sharply, strongly:
"Brethren, pray for us." Paul calls on the Corinthian Church to help him: "Ye
also helping together by prayer for us." This was to be part of their work.
They were to lay to the helping hand of prayer. He in an additional and closing
charge to the Thessalonian Church about the importance and necessity of their
prayers says: "Finally, brethren, pray for us, that the word of the Lord may
have free course, and be glorified, even as it is with you: and that we may be
delivered from unreasonable and wicked men." He impresses the Philippians that
all his trials and opposition can be made subservient to the spread of the
gospel by the efficiency of their prayers for him. Philemon was to prepare a
lodging for him, for through Philemon's prayer Paul was to be his guest.
Paul's attitude on this question illustrates his humility and his deep insight
into the spiritual forces which project the gospel. More than this, it teaches
a lesson for all times, that if Paul was so dependent on the prayers of God's
saints to give his ministry success, how much greater the necessity that the
prayers of God's saints be centered on the ministry of to-day!
Paul did not feel that this urgent plea for prayer was to lower his dignity,
lessen his influence, or depreciate his piety. What if it did? Let dignity go,
let influence be destroyed, let his reputation be marred -- he must have their
prayers. Called, commissioned, chief of the Apostles as he was, all his
equipment was imperfect without the prayers of his people. He wrote letters
everywhere, urging them to pray for him. Do you pray for your preacher? Do you
pray for him in secret? Public prayers are of little worth unless they are
founded on or followed up by private praying. The praying ones are to the
preacher as Aaron and Hur were to Moses. They hold up his hands and decide the
issue that is so fiercely raging around them.
The plea and purpose of the apostles were to put the Church to praying. They
did not ignore the grace of cheerful giving. They were not ignorant of the
place which religious activity and work occupied an the spiritual life; but not
one nor all of these, in apostolic estimate or urgency, could at all compare in
necessity and importance with prayer. The most sacred and urgent pleas were
used, the most fervid exhortations, the most comprehensive and arousing words
were uttered to enforce the all-important obligation and necessity of prayer.
"Put the saints everywhere to praying" is the burden of the apostolic effort
and the keynote of apostolic success. Jesus Christ had striven to do this in
the days of his personal ministry. As he was moved by infinite compassion at
the ripened fields of earth perishing for lack of laborers and pausing in his
own praying -- he tries to awaken the stupid sensibilities of his disciples to
the duty of prayer as he charges them, "Pray ye the Lord of the harvest that he
will send forth laborers into his harvest." "And he spake a parable unto them
to this end, that men ought always to pray and not to faint."
OUR devotions are not measured by the clock, but time is of their essence. The
ability to wait and stay and press belongs essentially to our intercourse with
God. Hurry, everywhere unseeming and damaging, is so to an alarming extent in
the great business of communion with God. Short devotions are the bane of deep
piety. Calmness, grasp, strength, are never the companions of hurry. Short
devotions deplete spiritual vigor, arrest spiritual progress, sap spiritual
foundations, blight the root and bloom of spiritual life. They are the prolific
source of backsliding, the sure indication of a superficial piety; they
deceive, blight, rot the seed, and impoverish the soil.
It is true that Bible prayers in word and print are short, but the praying men
of the Bible were with God through many a sweet and holy wrestling hour. They
won by few words but long waiting. The prayers Moses records may be short, but
Moses prayed to God with fastings and mighty cryings forty days and nights.
The statement of Elijah's praying may be condensed to a few brief paragraphs,
but doubtless Elijah, who when "praying he prayed," spent many hours of fiery
struggle and lofty intercourse with God before he could, with assured boldness,
say to Ahab, "There shall not be dew nor rain these years, but according to my
word." The verbal brief of Paul's prayers is short, but Paul "prayed night and
day exceedingly." The "Lord's Prayer" is a divine epitome for infant lips, but
the man Christ Jesus prayed many an all-night ere his work was done; and his
all-night and long-sustained devotions gave to his work its finish and
perfection, and to his character the fullness and glory of its divinity.
Spiritual work is taxing work, and men are loath to do it. Praying, true
praying, costs an outlay of serious attention and of time, which flesh and
blood do not relish. Few persons are made of such strong fiber that they will
make a costly outlay when surface work will pass as well in the market. We can
habituate ourselves to our beggarly praying until it looks well to us, at least
it keeps up a decent form and quiets conscience -- the deadliest of opiates! We
can slight our praying, and not realize the peril till the foundations are
gone. Hurried devotions make weak faith, feeble convictions, questionable
piety. To be little with God is to be little for God. To cut short the praying
makes the whole religious character short, scrimp, niggardly, and slovenly.
It takes good time for the full flow of God into the spirit. Short devotions
cut the pipe of God's full flow. It takes time in the secret places to get the
full revelation of God. Little time and hurry mar the picture.
Henry Martyn laments that "want of private devotional reading and shortness of
prayer through incessant sermon-making had produced much strangeness between
God and his soul." He judged that he had dedicated too much time to public
ministrations and too little to private communion with God. He was much
impressed to set apart times for fasting and to devote times for solemn prayer.
Resulting from this he records: "Was assisted this morning to pray for two
hours." Said William Wilberforce, the peer of kings: "I must secure more time
for private devotions. I have been living far too public for me. The shortening
of private devotions starves the soul; it grows lean and faint. I have been
keeping too late hours." Of a failure in Parliament he says: "Let me record my
grief and shame, and all, probably, from private devotions having been
contracted, and so God let me stumble." More solitude and earlier hours was his
remedy.
More time and early hours for prayer would act like magic to revive and
invigorate many a decayed spiritual life. More time and early hours for prayer
would be manifest in holy living. A holy life would not be so rare or so
difficult a thing if our devotions were not so short and hurried. A Christly
temper in its sweet and passionless fragrance would not be so alien and
hopeless a heritage if our closet stay were lengthened and intensified. We live
shabbily because we pray meanly. Plenty of time to feast in our closets will
bring marrow and fatness to our lives. Our ability to stay with God in our
closet measures our ability to stay with God out of the closet. Hasty closet
visits are deceptive, defaulting. We are not only deluded by them, but we are
losers by them in many ways and in many rich legacies. Tarrying in the closet
instructs and wins. We are taught by it, and the greatest victories are often
the results of great waiting -- waiting till words and plans are exhausted, and
silent and patient waiting gains the crown. Jesus Christ asks with an affronted
emphasis, "Shall not God avenge his own elect which cry day and night unto
him?"
To pray is the greatest thing we can do: and to do it well there must be
calmness, time, and deliberation; otherwise it is degraded into the littlest
and meanest of things. True praying has the largest results for good; and poor
praying, the least. We cannot do too much of real praying; we cannot do too
little of the sham. We must learn anew the worth of prayer, enter anew the
school of prayer. There is nothing which it takes more time to learn. And if we
would learn the wondrous art, we must not give a fragment here and there -- "A
little talk with Jesus," as the tiny saintlets sing -- but we must demand and
hold with iron grasp the best hours of the day for God and prayer, or there
will be no praying worth the name.
This, however, is not a day of prayer. Few men there are who pray. Prayer is
defamed by preacher and priest. In these days of hurry and bustle, of
electricity and steam, men will not take time to pray. Preachers there are who
"say prayers" as a part of their programme, on regular or state occasions; but
who "stirs himself up to take hold upon God?" Who prays as Jacob prayed -- till
he is crowned as a prevailing, princely intercessor? Who prays as Elijah prayed
-- till all the locked-up forces of nature were unsealed and a famine-stricken
land bloomed as the garden of God? Who prayed as Jesus Christ prayed as out
upon the mountain he "continued all night in prayer to God?" The apostles "gave
themselves to prayer" -- the most difficult thing to get men or even the
preachers to do. Laymen there are who will give their money -- some of them in
rich abundance -- but they will not "give themselves" to prayer, without which
their money is but a curse. There are plenty of preachers who will preach and
deliver great and eloquent addresses on the need of revival and the spread of
the kingdom of God, but not many there are who will do that without which all
preaching and organizing are worse than vain -- pray. It is out of date, almost
a lost art, and the greatest benefactor this age could have is the man who will
bring the preachers and the Church back to prayer.
ONLY glimpses of the great importance of prayer could the apostles get before
Pentecost. But the Spirit coming and filling on Pentecost elevated prayer to
its vital and all-commanding position in the gospel of Christ. The call now of
prayer to every saint is the Spirit's loudest and most exigent call.
Sainthood's piety is made, refined, perfected, by prayer. The gospel moves with
slow and timid pace when the saints are not at their prayers early and late and
long.
Where are the Christly leaders who can teach the modern saints how to pray and
put them at it? Do we know we are raising up a prayerless set of saints? Where
are the apostolic leaders who can put God's people to praying? Let them come to
the front and do the work, and it will be the greatest work which can be done.
An increase of educational facilities and a great increase of money force will
be the direst curse to religion if they are not sanctified by more and better
praying than we are doing. More praying will not come as a matter of course.
The campaign for the twentieth or thirtieth century fund will not help our
praying but hinder if we are not careful. Nothing but a specific effort from a
praying leadership will avail. The chief ones must lead in the apostolic effort
to radicate the vital importance and fact of prayer in the heart and
life of the Church. None but praying leaders can have praying followers.
Praying apostles will beget praying saints. A praying pulpit will beget praying
pews. We do greatly need some body who can set the saints to this business of
praying. We are not a generation of praying saints. Non-praying saints are a
beggarly gang of saints who have neither the ardor nor the beauty nor the power
of saints. Who will restore this breach? The greatest will he be of reformers
and apostles, who can set the Church to praying.
We put it as our most sober judgment that the great need of the Church in this
and all ages is men of such commanding faith, of such unsullied holiness, of
such marked spiritual vigor and consuming zeal, that their prayers, faith,
lives, and ministry will be of such a radical and aggressive form as to work
spiritual revolutions which will form eras in individual and Church life.
We do not mean men who get up sensational stirs by novel devices, nor those who
attract by a pleasing entertainment; but men who can stir things, and work
revolutions by the preaching of God's Word and by the power of the Holy Ghost,
revolutions which change the whole current of things.
Natural ability and educational advantages do not figure as factors in this
matter; but capacity for faith, the ability to pray, the power of thorough
consecration, the ability of self-littleness, an absolute losing of one's self
in God's glory, and an ever-present and insatiable yearning and seeking after
all the fullness of God -- men who can set the Church ablaze for God; not in a
noisy, showy way, but with an intense and quiet heat that melts and moves
everything for God.
God can work wonders if he can get a suitable man. Men can work wonders if they
can get God to lead them. The full endowment of the spirit that turned the
world upside down would be eminently useful in these latter days. Men who can
stir things mightily for God, whose spiritual revolutions change the whole
aspect of things, are the universal need of the Church.
The Church has never been without these men; they adorn its history; they are
the standing miracles of the divinity of the Church; their example and history
are an unfailing inspiration and blessing. An increase in their number and
power should be our prayer.
That which has been done in spiritual matters can be done again, and be better
done. This was Christ's view. He said "Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that
believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than
these shall he do; because I go unto my Father." The past has not exhausted the
possibilities nor the demands for doing great things for God. The Church that
is dependent on its past history for its miracles of power and grace is a
fallen Church.
God wants elect men -- men out of whom self and the world have gone by a severe
crucifixion, by a bankruptcy which has so totally ruined self and the world
that there is neither hope nor desire of recovery; men who by this insolvency
and crucifixion have turned toward God perfect hearts.
Let us pray ardently that God's promise to prayer may be more than realized.
Prayer is conversing and petition to God. We read of prayer ages before god directly enjoined it, and in such a way that we can only believe that the idea of prayer to be intuitive. Man naturally turns to God in prayer. Jung: "You have already heard in some books on prayer that the soul is advised to enter within itself; well that's the very thing I'm advising." Prayer and meditation can also be helpful in strengthening the mystical capability within you, allowing the opportunity to flow through the quiet stream of religious contemplation, which can take place anywhere, not necessarily in a church.
But you can not pray without surrender
You can fight and not ever win,
But you never truly win without a fight.
Follows is the classic book on prayer by Edward M. Bounds. I read this as a young Christian and again in Bible College. I recommend that you read it and then read it again. Prayerfully of course.
POWER THROUGH PRAYER
EDWARD M. BOUNDS
1 Men of Prayer Needed
Study universal holiness of life. Your whole usefulness depends on
this, for your sermons last but an hour or two; your life preaches all the
week. If Satan can only make a covetous minister a lover of praise, of
pleasure, of good eating, he has ruined your ministry. Give yourself to prayer,
and get your texts, your thoughts, your words from God. Luther spent his best
three hours in prayer. -- Robert Murray McCheyne
2 Our Sufficiency Is of God
But above all he excelled in prayer. The inwardness and weight of
his spirit, the reverence and solemnity of his address and behavior, and the
fewness and fullness of his words have often struck even strangers with
admiration as they used to reach others with consolation. The most awful,
living, reverend frame I ever felt or beheld, I must say, was his prayer. And
truly it was a testimony. He knew and lived nearer to the Lord than other men,
for they that know him most will see most reason to approach him with reverence
and fear. -- William Penn of George Fox
3
The Letter Killeth
During this affliction I was brought to examine my life in relation
to eternity closer than I had done when in the enjoyment of health. In this
examination relative to the discharge of my duties toward my fellow creatures
as a man, a Christian minister, and an officer of the Church, I stood approved
by my own conscience; but in relation to my Redeemer and Saviour the result was
different. My returns of gratitude and loving obedience bear no proportion to
my obligations for redeeming, preserving, and supporting me through the
vicissitudes of life from infancy to old age. The coldness of my love to Him
who first loved me and has done so much for me overwhelmed and confused me; and
to complete my unworthy character, I had not only neglected to improve the
grace given to the extent of my duty and privilege, but for want of improvement
had, while abounding in perplexing care and labor, declined from first zeal and
love. I was confounded, humbled myself, implored mercy, and renewed my covenant
to strive and devote myself unreservedly to the Lord. -- Bishop
McKendree
4
Tendencies to Be Avoided
Let us often look at Brainerd in the woods of America pouring out
his very soul before God for the perishing heathen without whose salvation
nothing could make him happy. Prayer -- secret fervent believing prayer -- lies
at the root of all personal godliness. A competent knowledge of the language
where a missionary lives, a mild and winning temper, a heart given up to God in
closet religion -- these, these are the attainments which, more than all
knowledge, or all other gifts, will fit us to become the instruments of God in
the great work of human redemption. -- Carrey's Brotherhood,
Serampore
5
Prayer, the Great Essential
You know the value of prayer: it is precious beyond all price.
Never, never neglect it -- Sir Thomas Buxton
Prayer is the first thing, the second thing, the third thing necessary to a
minister. Pray, then, my dear brother: pray, pray, pray -- Edward Payson
PRAYER, in the preacher's life, in the preacher's study, in the
preacher's pulpit, must be a conspicuous and an all-impregnating force and an
all-coloring ingredient. It must play no secondary part, be no mere coating. To
him it is given to be with his Lord "all night in prayer." The preacher, to
train himself in self-denying prayer, is charged to look to his Master, who,
"rising up a great while before day, went out, and departed into a solitary
place, and there prayed." The preacher's study ought to be a closet, a Bethel,
an altar, a vision, and a ladder, that every thought might ascend heavenward
ere it went manward; that every part of the sermon might be scented by the air
of heaven and made serious, because God was in the study.6
A Praying Ministry Successful
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
7
Much Time Should Be Given to Prayer
The great masters and teachers in Christian doctrine have always
found in prayer their highest source of illumination. Not to go beyond the
limits of the English Church, it is recorded of Bishop Andrews that he spent
five hours daily on his knees. The greatest practical resolves that have
enriched and beautified human life in Christian times have been arrived at in
prayer. -- Canon Liddon
8
Examples of Praying Men
The act of praying is the very highest energy of which the human
mind is capable; praying, that is, with the total concentration of the
faculties. The great mass of worldly men and of learned men are absolutely
incapable of prayer. -- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
9
Begin the Day with Prayer
I ought to pray before seeing any one. Often when I sleep long, or
meet with others early, it is eleven or twelve o'clock before I begin secret
prayer. This is a wretched system. It is unscriptural. Christ arose before day
and went into a solitary place. David says: "Early will I seek thee"; "Thou
shalt early hear my voice.'' Family prayer loses much of its power and
sweetness, and I can do no good to those who come to seek from me. The
conscience feels guilty, the soul unfed, the lamp not trimmed. Then when in
secret prayer the soul is often out of tune, I feel it is far better to begin
with God -- to see his face first, to get my soul near him before it is near
another. -- Robert Murray McCheyne
10
Prayer and Devotion United
There is a manifest want of spiritual influence on the ministry of
the present day. I feel it in my own case and I see it in that of others. I am
afraid there is too much of a low, managing, contriving, maneuvering temper of
mind among us. We are laying ourselves out more than is expedient to meet one
man's taste and another man's prejudices. The ministry is a grand and holy
affair, and it should find in us a simple habit of spirit and a holy but humble
indifference to all consequences. The leading defect in Christian ministers is
want of a devotional habit. -- Richard Cecil
11
An Example of Devotion
I urge upon you communion with Christ a growing communion. There
are curtains to be drawn aside in Christ that we never saw, and new foldings of
love in him. I despair that I shall ever win to the far end of that love, there
are so many plies in it. Therefore dig deep, and sweat and labor and take pains
for him, and set by as much time in the day for him as you can. We will be won
in the labor. -- Samuel Rutherford
12
Heart Preparation Necessary
For nothing reaches the heart but what is from the heart or pierces
the conscience but what comes from a living conscience. -- William Penn
In the morning was more engaged in preparing the head than the heart. This has
been frequently my error, and I have always felt the evil of it especially in
prayer. Reform it then, O Lord! Enlarge my heart and I shall preach. -- Robert
Murray McCheyne
A sermon that has more head infused into it than heart will not borne home with
efficacy to the hearers. -- Richard Cecil
13
Grace from the Heart Rather than the Head
Study not to be a fine preacher. Jerichos are blown down with rams'
horns. Look simply unto Jesus for preaching food; and what is wanted will be
given, and what is given will be blessed, whether it be a barley grain or a
wheaten loaf, a crust or a crumb. Your mouth will be a flowing stream or a
fountain sealed, according as your heart is. Avoid all controversy in
preaching, talking, or writing; preach nothing down but the devil, and nothing
up but Jesus Christ. -- Berridge
THE heart is the Saviour of the world. Heads do not save. Genius,
brains, brilliancy, strength, natural gifts do not save. The gospel flows
through hearts. All the mightiest forces are heart forces. All the sweetest and
loveliest graces are heart graces. Great hearts make great characters; great
hearts make divine characters. God is love. There is nothing greater than love,
nothing greater than God. Hearts make heaven; heaven is love. There is nothing
higher, nothing sweeter, than heaven. It is the heart and not the head which
makes God's great preachers. The heart counts much every way in religion. The
heart must speak from the pulpit. The heart must hear in the pew. In fact, we
serve God with our hearts. Head homage does not pass current in heaven.14
Unction a Necessity
One bright benison which private prayer brings down upon the
ministry is an indescribable and inimitable something -- an unction from the
Holy One . . . . If the anointing which we bear come not from the Lord of
hosts, we are deceivers, since only in prayer can we obtain it. Let us continue
instant constant fervent in supplication. Let your fleece lie on the thrashing
floor of supplication till it is wet with the dew of heaven. -- Charles Haddon
Spurgeon
15
Unction, the Mark of True Gospel Preaching
Speak for eternity. Above all things, cultivate your own spirit. A
word spoken by you when your conscience is clear and your heart full of God's
Spirit is worth ten thousand words spoken in unbelief and sin. Remember that
God, and not man, must have the glory. If the veil of the world's machinery
were lifted off, how much we would find is done in answer to the prayers of
God's children. -- Robert Murray McCheyne
16
Much Prayer the Price of Unction
All the minister's efforts will be vanity or worse than vanity if
he have not unction. Unction must come down from heaven and spread a savor and
feeling and relish over his ministry; and among the other means of qualifying
himself for his office, the Bible must hold the first place, and the last also
must be given to the Word of God and prayer. -- Richard Cecil
17
Prayer Marks Spiritual Leadership
Give me one hundred preachers who fear nothing but sin and desire
nothing but God, and I care not a straw whether they be clergymen or laymen;
such alone will shake the gates of hell and set up the kingdom of heaven on
earth. God does nothing but in answer to prayer. -- John Wesley
18
Preachers Need the Prayers of the People
If some Christians that have been complaining of their ministers
had said and acted less before men and had applied themselves with all their
might to cry to God for their ministers -- had, as it were, risen and stormed
heaven with their humble, fervent and incessant prayers for them -- they would
have been much more in the way of success. -- Jonathan Edwards
19
Deliberation Necessary to Largest Results from Prayer
This perpetual hurry of business and company ruins me in soul if
not in body. More solitude and earlier hours! I suspect I have been allotting
habitually too little time to religious exercises, as private devotion and
religious meditation, Scripture-reading, etc. Hence I am lean and cold and
hard. I had better allot two hours or an hour and a half daily. I have been
keeping too late hours, and hence have had but a hurried half hour in a morning
to myself. Surely the experience of all good men confirms the proposition that
without a due measure of private devotions the soul will grow lean. But all may
be done through prayer -- almighty prayer, I am ready to say -- and why not?
For that it is almighty is only through the gracious ordination of the God of
love and truth. O then, pray, pray, pray! -- William Wilberforce
20
A Praying Pulpit Begets a Praying Pew
I judge that my prayer is more than the devil himself; if it were
otherwise, Luther would have fared differently long before this. Yet men will
not see and acknowledge the great wonders or miracles God works in my behalf.
If I should neglect prayer but a single day, I should lose a great deal of the
fire of faith. -- Martin Luther
[90, 107, 124, 135, 162, 204, 257, 309, 313, 332, 340, 377, 392. Prayer is an ongoing item of the latter rain discussion list]
