Prayer in Faith Better Than Faith in Prayer
There is a vast difference between prayer in faith and faith in prayer. Faith in prayer is very common; almost everybody has more or less of it. Prayer in faith is anything but common; so uncommon, in fact, that our Lord questions if he shall find any of it on the earth when he comes back again. Prayer in faith is a commanded. duty; faith in prayer is not commanded, nor is it justifiable. Prayer in faith is always reverent and spiritual; faith in prayer is too often superstitious and presuming, although again it is the unconscious reliance of reverent and spiritually minded — but sadly mistaken — Christian disciples.
Praying in faith is making known our requests unto God in full confidence that, Prayer
if we ask anything according to his will, he heareth us; and that according to our faith an answer to our prayers will be granted us. Having faith in prayer is believing that because certain prayers are ’ offered certain results will follow; that the ’ praying will secure the thing prayed for. Praying in faith comes of an abiding confidence in the Person prayed to: the confidence is in him; it is based on a knowledge of what he is, and on a conviction that he is every way worthy to be trusted. Faith in prayer is a blind, or a presuming, reliance on an agency of good; an unauthorized dependence on mere human means. Praying in faith is the act of a simple-hearted child of God. Faith in prayer is like the reliance of the heathen on their vain repetitions, “who think that they shall be heard for their much speaking.”
A well-known historical incident in America furnishes a good illustration of the difference between prayer in faith and Prayer in Faitb
faith in prayer. When, in 1881, President Garfield was stricken down by the hand of an assassin, and lay for a time with his life. in the balance, the Christians of the United States joined with a rare degree of unan-| imity in prayer to God for his recovery. So long as the suffering President lingered on the verge of the grave, it was difficult to say how much of the praying for him was praying in faith, and how much of it was a result of faith in prayer; but when the President was dead, the test of this. praying came to every one who had shared’ in it, or who had watched it curiously. Those who had had faith in prayer were amazed or bewildered; those who had prayed in faith were neither surprised nor disturbed. “Why, what does all this mean?” asked the former. “Where are
God’s promises now? If such united, fer-
vent, humble prayer from so many of God’s
people avails nothing, what can be claimed
for the power of prayer at any time, or for
any purpose? And what advantage has 55
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the Christian over the scoffing unbeliever in this agency of prayer?”
But those who had prayed in faith were reading this new providence in the light of their faith. Their faith rested in God. God was not dead. They had prayed for some things which they were sure would be in accordance with God’s will, and those things had been granted: they had prayed for others of which they were not so sure; and they had asked God to do concerning these things as he deemed best: he had done so. Their every prayer was answered, and they were grateful accordingly. Praying in faith was promoted by this providence in the case of President Garfield; but faith in prayer received a temporary shock.
At the first, in view of the fact that the assassin of the President claimed to be influenced by partisan motives, the nation started in horror at the possible conse- - quences of the crime. Everything for the moment seemed to pivot on that one Prayer in Faith
precious life. Greed for office was the crying curse of the hour. Partisan animosities were bitter and intense. The popular hope for the triumph of wise counsels and pure purposes over the follies of disappointed ambition and the crimes of government thieves, rested on the President and his immediate advisers.
In case of his death at that time, his successor would not have been judged fairly, nor have been given credit for even striving to do as well as he could. New divisions would have been made between old friends, and old enmities would have intensified. Fresh bickerings and heartburnings would have multiplied on every side. Confidence in our institutions and in the spirit of our people would have been shaken, if not destroyed; and there was more than the possibility of financial and political and moral disaster to our nation. Then it was that the people turned almost as one man to the Lord, and cried earnestly and longingly for help. Then it was Prayer
that those who prayed in faith and thox. who had faith in prayer were at one in supplicating God’s forgiveness and loving favor. And those prayers to God were answered.
The precious life was prolonged. Again and again as the sufferer seemed at the point to die, God heard the prayers that were offered for him, and the shadow went back on the dial, in order that the President might linger for the service desired through him. Meantime the things that the Christian believer had a right to ask for, were being secured to the nation by the workings of God’s providence. The voice of partisan strife was hushed over that sick-bed. The moral sense of the nation was raised to a higher level in condemnation of struggle for place and of betrayals of public trust. Common sympathy in a common sorrow flooded the barriers of party and of section, and brought men together in love and longing who had before felt that there was nothing in which Prayer in Faith
they could agree. Moreover, a sense of dependence on God brought men together before God. - The religious sentiment of the nation was aroused and newly disclosed, and all took heart because so many were ready to call upon God in their need.
Meantime the designated successor of the President gained steadily in the sympathy and confidence of the people, and in his own fitness, through the severity of this training for the high responsibilities to which he might, at any hour, be summoned. The dreaded disaster to the nation was averted in answer to faith-filled prayer; and only when the death of the President would cause no such harm to the nation as was imminent at the first, was the President permitted to die.
But it was for the “fe of the President that all these many prayers were offered, and that life was taken away in spite of these prayers! How can this be reconciled with God’s promise to answer the united prayers of his children? Just so far as Prayer
their country’s real interests were involved in that life, were God’s children justified in faith-filled prayer for its prolonging. Within those limits they could be sure that God would grant an answer of peace. Outside of that range was beyond their sphere of knowledge or of responsibility. There they must trust God to do as he alone could know to be best. While a sore peril of punishment or of disaster was overhanging the country, they had a right to pray in faith that God would avert that disaster; that he would forgive the na- ‘tional sin and turn away a national punishment. All this God did for his people in answer to their faith-filled prayers.
But when it came to the question, whether the further prolonging of the President’s life would be a blessing to him, and a blessing to the country, shat was for God alone to know and decide. Every right-minded child of God who prayed in faith admitted that he did not know as to
that point, and that he wanted God to do £0
Prayer in Faitb
what e knew to be good. In this, as in the other matters, God answered the faith-filled prayer; for no prayer can be in faith if it does not leave with God the settling of all those points where God alone can know what is best.
When we need wisdom as to our personal duty, or strength for our personal duty; when we need light or guidance or help in the line of our daily life, in material things as well as in things spiritual, — we can pray for it in the full assurance of an answer; for our need just there is unmistakable, and God will never fail to meet the need of one of his children in answer to the faith-filled prayer of that child. But we have no right to say that it is absolutely best for us that another’s life shall be spared for our welfare, that we have a positive need of that life. Therefore we have no right to pray for the sparing of such a life — except as God shall see it to be best for us. We have a right, however, to ask
that that life shall be prolonged to us until 61
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its taking away shall not be to our real and permanent injury, nor to the injury of its possessor, and God will hear and answer such asking. If he takes that life immediately after such a prayer, we may be sure that it was better for all that that life should go just then.
“But,” said many, “the ‘prayer-test’ has failed. Here was a grand opportunity for God to show the power of prayer; and the opportunity has been lost. Now, this will give tremendous vantage-ground to scoffers, and a great many who believed in prayer before will never believe in it again.” And do you suppose that God made any mistake just there? Was his cause any less dear to himself than to you? or was he any less familiar with its needs? No, no! The mistake was not in his failure to work a wonder at that time in proof of his power; but it was in men’s idea that a new wonder by him at any time would create faith in him, or bring men to an abiding belief in his power.
Prayer in Faith
All the wonders of God for Israel, in Egypt, at the Red Sea, and in the Wilderness, failed to bring as much of faith in God among the Israelites as there is among the people of the United States to-day; and if another similar series of wonders should be wrought in our sight at the present time, they would be no real help to the faith of the believer or to the conviction of the scoffer. It is an old mistake which is repeated continually, that
people who will not hear Moses and the
Prophets would be persuaded if one rose from the dead, or from the brink of death.
It was well that our unauthorized faith in prayer should be shaken, and that we should come to substitute for it an intelligent faith in God. It was the mistake of scoffing scientists, that they understood the Christian believer to claim an innate power in prayer, and therefore those mistaken scientists asked to have that power put to a scientific test. Prayer is not to be depended on; but God is. Prayer is not Prayer
to be tested; but God is: he invites all who will to put him to the test. Those who hoped for a new argument against the scoffers in the raising up of President Garfield were disappointed. God declined to enter the lists for a local controversy on a question which was the subject of bitter personal dispute.
God’s response to any call on him to show by a sign on which side he is in a purely personal discussion comes to-day as it came of old: “A wicked and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign; and there shall no sign be given to it but the sign of Jonah the prophet.” When Jonah prophesied judgment on Nineveh, and the Ninevites cried to God for mercy, God heard and answered their prayer. When the people of the United States seemed threatened with dire punishment in the sudden death of President Garfield, they cried to God for mercy, and God averted the judgment. A new generation had again the sign of the prophet Jonah.
Prayer in Faitb
The form of prayer used to-day by more persons than any other form the world over, is not even understood by millions who employ it. It is a sentence of six syllables in common use among Booddhists. Two of those syllables are mere ejaculations having no direct relation to the other four, and conveying no meaning to their average user. The other four syllables express a mere figure of speech, of which the primitive meaning is lost to the people who employ it.
This Booddhist prayer, “Om mani padmeflum,’ is not only repeated orally by myriads of devotees, but it is multiplied indefinitely by being inscribed on printed scrolls or engraved cylinders, and made to revolve, by water-power or other mechanical agency, as a means of obtaining a blessing for the one who sets the prayer going. It is faith in prayer that causes this praying; but there is no praying in faith by such a formal and mechanical use of an
unintelligible formula.
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The fatalist Muhammadans believe that praying is in itself both meritorious and potent; and their dervishes give themselves to continued cries on God in prayer hour after hour, in the conviction that so much praying must bring more or less of a blessing. And there is a great deal of this dervish faith in prayer among Christian believers. How often we hear it said of some wild and wayward boy: “Oh! he must be saved; for he is the child of many prayers.” “That boy’s mother’s prayers for him cannot have been in vain. They must be answered.” Not the mother’s faith is rested on, but the mother’s prayers — whether of faith or of doubting agony.
The writer of this, in the days of his army chaplaincy, once pressed the subject of personal religion on a dissolute and reprobate soldier. “Oh! I think more of those things than you suppose, Chaplain,” was the quick response. “I’ve got a praying mother; and I’ve great faith in her prayers. When I’m in a sharp fight, and Prayer in Faitb
men are dropping about me, I often feel that my mother’s prayers save me. I’ve great faith in those prayers.” And he took another drink of whisky, and died of delirium tremens in front of his colonel’s tent, without giving any sign of penitence, or of even offering a prayer in faith, with all his sentimental faith in prayer.
Jesus said to his disciples: “Have faith in God” — not Have faith in prayer, but you, Whosoéver shall say unto this mountain, Be thou taken up and cast into the sea; and shall not doubt in his heart, but shall believe that what he saith cometh to pass; he shall have it. Therefore I say unto you, All things whatsoever ye pray and ask for, believe that ye have received them, and ye shall have them.”
That promise has never failed the disciple of Jesus who prayed in faith; but it has. frightfully staggered many a disciple who had faith in prayer. That promise stands as firm to-day as ever. Whatsoever a child “ldecision — as the Naas jee ee Tear
in God never deceives us; faith in Aiey often does — as it ought to. s