Marching Orders, No. VI
“Tray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest, that He would send forth laborers into His harvest.” — Luke
X. 2.
.Most likely we never went to a missionary meeting in our lives but what we were told to pray for the work. We are quite used to it, we take it as a matter of course, and as the right and proper thing to be said. Nobody disputes for an instant that it is a Christian duty. But — are we doing il P
As il is an acknowledged obligation upon all who profess to love the Lord Jesus Christ that they should obey His commandments, it is clearly a real obligation upon us, upon you and me, to obey this commandment. And if we are not doing it, we are equally clearly directly disobeying our dear Master, and failing in the one test of personal love to Himself which He gave us in the same night in which He was betrayed.
Yes, we we doing it? Did you pray this morning what He bade you pray? Did you yesterday? Or last week? Surely it is no light thing to go on from day to day leaving undone a thing which we ought to have done, and about which His own lips gave the most explicit direction!
How often we have sorrowfully felt that “we know not what we should pray for as we ought!” Now here is something that we know we are to pray for. We know that it is according to His will, or He would not have bidden us ask it. And “if we ask anything according to His will, He heareth us.” And if we know that He hears us in whatsoever we ask, we know that we have the petitions that we desired of Him. See what a splendid conclusion we reach! Oh, “pray ye therefore!” And if we thus pray, like little children, exactly what Jesus bids us pray, see if we do not find a real and probably conscious and immediate blessing in the very act — the floodgates opened, the spirit of grace and of supplication poured out, and the parched tongue filled with prayer and praise!
It is an immense help to be systematic in prayer. Many are finding it useful to take one of the seven petitions of the Lord’s prayer as the keynote of their own each morning. This brings “Thy kingdom come” to Monday morning. What if all the readers of the Church Missionary Gleaner and of Woman’s Work should accept this as a continual reminder, and at least that once in each week join in fervent pleading of this Christ-taught petition, including in it the special one that the Lord would send forth laborers! Let us agree as touching this that we shall ask, in the obedience of faith and in the name of Jesus.