I Will Stand upon My Watch

REAT,’ says Ewald, ‘as the prophet Habakkuk is in intellect and in inspired thought, he is no less great in literary skill. Habakkuk is master of a very beautiful Hebrew style. His descriptions of Israel and of Chaldea are most powerful pieces of prophetic literature. Indeed, this prophet has an artistic talent which is all his own — an artistic talent that orders and arranges everything with the most captivating effect. We admire in Habakkuk the genuine type and the full beauty of the best Hebrew prophecy.’

So far Ewald, our greatest authority on the prophets of Israel. But nowhere in all his book is Habakkuk more suggestive or more impressive or more powerful than just in the text. How many men of prayer both in ancient Israel and in our own land have been arrested and directed and encouraged by these so striking and so instructing words of his: ‘ I will stand upon my watch, and will set me upon my tower, and will watch to see what He will say to me, and what I shall answer when I am reproved.’

Now as it so happens, closely connected with this so pictorial and so impressive passage is the recorded confession of James Fraser, that true Habakkuk in our own Israel. ‘ I came to see,’ says that spiritual son of Habakkuk in our own covenanted Church and country: ‘ I came to see that the answers to my prayers were all but thrown away upon me, and that was so because I did not wait enough and watch enough for God’s answers to my prayers.’ Now I will take some lessons this evening both from this Hebrew prophet and from this Scottish preacher so that we may all learn the better how to pray, and especially that we may all learn the better how to behave ourselves before God immediately after our times of special prayer to Him; how to bear ourselves and how to behave ourselves so that the answers to our prayers, when they come, may not be wholly thrown away upon us.

‘ I came to see,’ says Fraser, ‘ that the answers to my prayers were all but thrown away upon me.’ And that was so because all his prayers at one time were so many opera operata, as he had been wont to accuse the Papists and the curates concerning all their religious exercises and all their devotional duties. But the inbred Popery of his own heart was at last laid bare to him when he was made to see and to confess his own mockery of prayer in kneeling down for a few seconds at his bedside and then going to sleep with a quiet conscience, till he awoke and went through the same operatic performance the next morning. For even had it been possible that any answer could have come from God to any such travesties of prayer as these prayers of his, he came to see that the answer would have been but thrown away upon him. And that was so, because he neither deserved an answer to such operatic prayers as these, nor did he, as a matter of fact, expect an answer, nor would he have recognised the answer even had it come to him. But the Hearer of prayer had mercy on that unspiritual and self-deceived Pharisee of ours. For he tells us, in his Memoirs of Himself, how God at last taught him to imitate David, who always, after every earnest prayer of his, looked up and expected an answer all that day. As also to imitate Habakkuk, who took his stand upon his watch, and set himself upon his tower, till he should see what the Lord would say to him after his prayer.

Again, the answers to this man’s prayers were sometimes quite thrown away upon him in this way. There had been seasons in his past life when he had simply besieged the mercy-seat day and night with all his passionateness and with all his importunity for some greatly desired and continually demanded thing. But by degrees his circumstances, and with them his feelings, became so completely changed that the passion and the importunity largely passed away from his prayer. So that when God’s time came to send the answer, behold, the praying man was gone away a thousand miles from the intensity and the importunity that had moved God to send the answer. And thus it was that the answer, which at one time would have been received as a never-to-be-forgotten miracle of God’s goodness, that same answer had now little or no attention paid to it. In his own words, that answer was now ‘as good as thrown away upon him.’ Now, is your experience in your life of prayer at all like that? For if that is at all your experience, then there are some Scriptures that are written for your special instruction and imitation. As for instance this psalm of David: ‘ Unto Thee, O Lord, do I lift up my soul. For Thou art the God of my salvation, and on Thee do I wait all the day.’ Or, as it is in the still more excellent metre: —

‘For Thou art God that dost
To me salvation send;

And I, upon Thee all the day,

Expecting’, do attend.’

Build you a tower of expectancy also, like Habakkuk. ‘For the vision is yet for an appointed time, but at the end it shall speak, and not lie: though it tarry, wait for it; because it will surely come, it will not tarry.’

But if God’s answer comes to you so late that you are now all but wholly oblivious of it, and are all but wholly indifferent to it, still let not all that keep you from receiving the answer as God’s un¬ doubted reply to all your former prayers. When the answer does come carry your memory back to those days and nights of prayer for this very answer till you are able to take the answer from God’s own hand, and that with something of the wonder and with something of the praise that you owe to God at all times. For this wonder and this praise, remember, are very acceptable with God at your hands. And this will recover all your lost relations of fellowship and communion with God: that fellowship and that communion of which all your prayers and all His answers are but the partial and the wholly inadequate expression.

A great authority on prayer says to us that the modifications, and the permutations, and the trans¬ mutations that God’s answers must, in the nature of things, often undergo — that is one great reason why so many of God’s answers to our prayers are so thrown away upon us; and that great authority has this striking illustration of his meaning. A home merchant has a trusty agent in a foreign land, and the home merchant sends out advices and orders to his correspondent continually — advices and orders instructing him how to buy, and how to sell, and how to make investments in this and in that commodity in which the home house deals; and, as a rule, the distant agent simply carries out his home instructions to the letter. But a sudden crisis occurs in the foreign market — a sudden crisis that the home merchant could not foresee, and therefore could not possibly send out the proper instructions for the sudden emergency. Instead of that, he has just sent out, and with the very last mail, the most urgent orders that the largest and the most immediate purchases and shipments are to be made of the foreign goods in which our home merchant deals. But the agent is on the spot, and he uses his own discretion, and he acts on his own responsibility; and accordingly, in this new crisis, he at once sets aside the home orders, and makes great purchases and immediate shipments of a kind of goods that were not ordered, but which, in the event, bring the greatest profit to that mercantile house. Such, indeed, is the ability and the wisdom of the foreign agent in this whole transaction that he is immediately promoted to a high place in the home house, to its daily enriching and to his high honour. The whole story is a bold but a true parable of the kingdom of heaven. You are the home merchant, and, vuth reverence be it said. Almighty God is your foreign agent, who knows infinitely better than you do when your prayers are to be answered to the letter, and when they are to be transmuted and modified to something of which you had no knowledge, till He has so enriched you by His adaptations and His transmutations of your prayers that you henceforth make Him the Pre¬ dominant Partner in all your undertakings, and till nothing of yours is transacted at home or abroad, on earth or in heaven, without His having the last word and the casting vote. Will you, then, issue all your future orders and offer all your future prayers, after this, in instant and in complete sub¬ mission to Him who has the insight and the fore¬ sight, and who has far more at stake in all your transactions and enterprises than you can possibly have? Now, will you do this? For no earthly merchant is so mulish as to repudiate or to be offended at the foreign transactions that have ended in making him a millionaire. Only, the children of this world are in their generation wiser than the children of light.

But by far the most enriching of all possible permutations and transformations of your prayers is in that case when you pray with all your passionateness and with all your importunity that God would give you some of His creatures to possess, and when, instead of any of His creatures. He gives you Himself in everlasting possession. He does not give you what you ask. Why, do yon think? Because He lias it in His eternal purpose to give you what it would never have entered into your highest imagination or ambition to ask — that is. Himself, very God Himself. In your so passion¬ ate and so importunate prayers you are often like young Saul, the son of Kish. That young farmer went out, you remember, to seek for some cattle that had strayed from his father’s fields, but, as God would have it, Saul came back with the crown of Israel upon his head. And you will come back from all your unanswered and from all your per¬ muted prayers with a grace and a glory on your head that will far outshine all the crowns of this world. That was Asaph’s experience, which he has recorded, for our encouragement, in his splendid psalm. His feet had almost gone and his steps had wellnigh slipped among his passionate questionings and among his unanswered prayers. ‘ So foolish was I, and ignorant,’ he tells us, ‘ I was as a beast before God. Nevertheless, now, whom have I in heaven but Thee? And there is none upon earth that I desire beside Thee. My flesh and heart faileth; but God is the strength of my heart and my portion for ever.’ And our own prophet has the same experience in this perfect expression of it: ‘ Although the fig-tree shall not blossom, neither shall fruit be in the vines: the labour of the olive fail, and the fields shall yield no meat: the flock shall be cut off from the fold, and there shall be no herd in the stalls: yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will joy in the God of my salvation. To the chief singer on my stringed instruments.’ My brethren, if God is, and if He is what He is, then there is no possible answer to your prayers for one moment to compare with this — that, in exchange for all else. He gives you God Himself.

Again, there are continually recurring occasions when the answers to our prayers are as good as thrown away upon us, because God answers us through the agency of second causes, as the school calls them. Such is the inborn ungodliness and such is the inveterate blindness and unbelief of our hearts that, if God sends His answers to us — as in 99 cases out of every 100 He does, as in 999 cases out of every 1000 He does — by the agency of

His daily providences, as we call them, we shut our eyes and refuse to see Him in the answer at all. We speak of everyday providences, and we belittle God’s immediate presence and His direct dealings with us in so speaking and in so thinking. For there are no everyday providences in the intimate and secret life of God and His children. You would not take it well at their hands if your children saw only the servants who brought them your good gifts and never acknowledged those good gifts by word or by look to yourselves. No, there are no second causes nor intervening servants in the household life of God and His loved and loving children. To the Son of God every drop of the early and the latter rain, and every ray of the summer sun, every morsel of bread He ate, and every drop of water He drank, came into His hand directly and immediately from His Father’s hand. And no little part of His teaching and preaching and example was to train and to practise His disciples into the same sonship mind and heart. ‘ Give us,’ He taught them to say, ‘ our daily bread.’ No, there were no such things as second causes to Him who walked with His Father till He lived, and moved, and had all His being in His Father. Second causes are among the ‘ idols,’ as Bacon has it, of the unbelieving and unfilial heart. Second causes have their own uses for the purposes of our logic and our science; but they are an intrusion and an impertinence when they come in between the Hearer of prayer and His praying and expecting people. Watch then. and among the daily providences and the second causes of every day and every hour, unveil and disentangle your God and Father Himself from among them, till you are able to say every day and every hour: Lo! this, and this, and this is my God and my Father! Lo! I have waited for Him, and I will rejoice and will be glad in this His secret and immediate answer to my prayer!

But such and so spiritual is the life of prayer that there is a much more serious misunderstanding and mistake made sometimes than any of those misunderstandings and mistakes that have just been mentioned. And that is a mistake which many of our best men are making every clay. God’s very best answer to their very best prayer is being thrown away on many of our very best men in this way. For years past they have been concentrating their prayers upon the Holy Ghost. As a great spiritual writer has it, they have given over every other life but the spiritual life. And thus, instead of the thousand things they at one time prayed for, they now ask but for one thing continually, and that one thing is the Holy Ghost, and their own true sanctification through His indwelling and through His spiritual operations. And their one perplexity now, both with God and with their own souls, is because with all their prayers for the Holy Ghost they are nothing better in their spiritual life, but are rather becoming worse. But stop! stop sir! and let us reason together for a moment on this great matter. Are you quite sure that in this you are not just another instance of the answer being thrown away upon you? Are you quite sure that the Holy Ghost has not been often and often given to you? In what way, and with what manifestation, did you expect Him to come to you? Did you expect Him to descend from heaven like a dove upon you when you were walking alone by your holiday riverside? Or did you look for Him to come and rest upon your head in your pew in this church like one of those flames of fire in the upper room at Pentecost? For His own special reasons He came in those visible manifestations in those early days. But all such times and seasons and manifestations of Himself are in the Spirit’s own power and wisdom. But this is the point: Are you quite sure that the Holy Ghost has not come into your heart and into your life often, and even this very day? Say what you will, in your unbelief and ingratitude, we will not believe you. We will rather say that the Holy Ghost has been thrown away upon you; that is to say, so far as your recognition of Him, and your enjoyment of Him, and your gratitude for Him are all concerned. But the answer has by no means been thrown away upon you, so far as your true and sure sanctification is concerned. ‘By their fruits you shall know them,’ said One whose words are true and sure. Well, we all know you. All who know you see and acknowledge the answer that you will not believe you have received. We see it every day in you, and there is scarcely a day that we do not congratulate one another about you. For one thing, we say to one another behind your back that you are not any longer such a proverb of self and of self-seeking as you once were. You are not so proud, nor so haughty, nor so hateful to all men as you once were. Your voice is not so often heard beating down all other men as it once was. You take a reproof and a correction from us as you once did not. He is not your enemy now who tells you the truth, as he once was. Again, you give now before you are asked to give. You give till we have to defend you from those who continually surround your door. And not your money only, but you give yourself, good measure, pressed down, and running over. Again, we often remark it in private and in public that when men smite you on one cheek you turn to them the other also. And who¬ ever compels you to go a mile with him, you go with him twain. And all the time your left hand does not know what your right hand is doing. In short, if the fruits of the Spirit are love, and peace, and longsuffering, and gentleness, and humility, and meekness, and easiness to live with in all things and at all times, then, if these things are

not in you and abound, we do not know where else to look for them in this world. To speak plainly, you are an extreme and a very blameworthy case of having the best of answers poured out upon you till it is quite thrown away upon you. Open your eyes and mend your ways, and admit and acknowledge that God has not withheld His Holy Spirit from you when you asked for Him with your whole heart.

But there is a previous question to all that. And I would be a timid friend to the truth — nay, I would be a false friend to the truth and a false friend to your immortal souls — if I did not wind up all this by warning you that there is a previous question to all that. And it is a previous question of the most tremendous importance to you, and of the most commanding urgency to you; to some of you; I fear to not a few of you. And that previous question is this; Do you ever pray at all? Do you ever pray at all to be called prayer? Do you ever give the Hearer of prayer an opportunity worth speaking about of answering you? Have you ever received, and into your mind and into your heart, these words, directly addressed to you by your Saviour: Ask, and it shall be given you? Begin to ask aright to-day; and always after this, as soon as you have asked for anything whatsoever, always say to yourself with the prophet Habakkuk: ‘ I will now stand upon my watch, and will set me upon my tower, and will watch to see what He will say unto me. For the vision is yet for an appointed time; and though it tarry, wait for it: because it will surely come, it will not tarry.’