Helping by Prayer
“Yes, pray for whom thou lovest; if uncounted wealth were thine — The treasures of the boundless deep, the riches of the mine — Thou couldst not to thy cherished friends a gift so dear impart, As the earnest benediction of a deeply prayerful heart.”
FRIENDSHIP which does not pray lacks a most sacred element. It leaves God out, and that is leaving out friendship’s best possibilities of blessing. Earth’s sweetest joy needs heaven to make it complete. Wisely has it been writ ten, “Pray for whom thou lovest; thou wilt never have any comfort of his friendship for whom thou dost not pray.” Certain it is, at least, that truest, deepest, realest comfort can not come to us from a friend whose name we do not speak to God in love’s pleading. The holiest experience of friendship is in communion with God. Only to God can the heart’s most sacred longings for a friend be uttered.
“Yes, pray for whom thou lovest; thou mayest vainly, idly seek
The fervid thoughts of tenderness by feeble words to speak.
Go, kneel before thy Father’s throne, and meekly, humbly there
Ask blessing for the loved one in the silent hour of prayer.
And should thy flowery path of life become a path of
pain, The friendship formed in bonds like these thy spirit
shall sustain; Years may not chill, nor change invade, nor poverty
impair The love that grew and flourished at the holy time of
God has put it in our power to help each other in many ways, — sometimes by deeds that lift away burdens, sometimes by words that inspire courage and strength, sometimes by sympathy that halves sorrow; but there is no other way in which we can serve our friends so wisely, so effectively, so divinely, as by inter cession for them. Our hands are’ clumsy and unskilful, and ofttimes hurt the life we would heal with our touch, or strengthen and uphold with our strength; but in prayer we can reach our friend through God, and God’s hand is infinitely gentle, and never hurts a life. We lack wisdom, and ofttimes the help we give is untimely or unwise. We would lift away burdens that God wants our friend to carry. We would make the way easy for him when God has made it hard for his own good, for the development of his powers. We would save our friend from hardship or self-denial, or hold him back from perilous duty or exhausting service, when these are the very paths in which God would lead him — the paths to honor, to larger usefulness, to nobler life. Ofttimes our love is short sighted. We think we are helping our friend, when really we are hindering him in the things that most deeply concern his life. But we can pray and ask God to help him, not in our way, but in his own way, and God’s help is never unwise nor untimely. He never lifts away a load which our friend would be the better for carrying. He never does things for him which he would better be left to do for himself, nor spares him hardness or suffering which will make him more a man.
There are times, too, when we can help with our love in no other way but by prayer. The friend is beyond our reach, or his experiences of need are such that we can do nothing for him. Human capacity for helpfulness is very small. We can give a piece of bread when one is hungry, or a cup of cold water when one is thirsty, or raiment when one is naked, or medicine when one is sick. But in the deeper needs of life we can do nothing. Our words are only mockeries. Yet we can pray, and God can send his own help to the heart in any experience.
Thus we get hints of the truth that the noblest, divinest way of helping our friends is by prayer. It follows, therefore, that we sin against them when we do not help them in this best and truest of all ways — by praying for them. The parent who does not pray for a child, whatever else he may do for him, sins against the child. Whoever fails to pray for one he loves fails in the most sacred duty of love, because he withholds love’s best help. “A prayerless love may be very tender, and may speak murmuring words of sweetest sound; but it lacks the deepest expression and the noblest music of speech. We never help our dear ones so well as when we pray for them.”
It is pleasant to think that this best of all service for others we can render even when unable to do any active work on their behalf. A “shut in” who can run no errands and lift no burdens and speak no words of cheer to busy toilers and sore stragglers in the great world, can yet pray for them, and God will send truest help. Said a good man, when laid aside from active service: “One thought has assumed a new reality in my mind of late, as an offshoot of my useless life. When a man can do nothing else, he can add his little rill to the great river of intercessory prayer which is always rolling up to the throne of God. The river is made up of such rills, as the ocean is of drops. A praying man can never be a useless man.”
Again the same writer says: “You do not know how my soul longs to get into closei friendship with Christ, and to pray — which is about the only mode of usefulness left to me — as he prayed. To touch the springs of the universe as he touched them! One can almost feel the electric thrill of it.” We cannot tell what intercessory prayer does for the world — for our own lives.
“More things are wrought by prayer
Than this world dreams of.”
It is well, also, that we think carefully of the things we ask for our friends. There is the same danger that exists in prayers for ourselves — that we press only our own will for them, and request for them only things of an earthly kind. There is a good model for all intercession in the way Epaphras prayed for his friends in Colosse: “Always laboring fervently for you in prayers, that ye may stand perfect and complete in all the will of God.” It is not merely health and prosperity and success in life that we are to ask for those we love, but that God’s will may be done in them, and that they may fulfil his plan and purpose for them.
The mother’s prayer for her children should not be, first, that they may win worldly honor, but that they may be complete in all God’s will, may be what God made them to be. The best place they can reach in this world is that for which God designed them when he gave them their being.
Ofttimes we are led to pray for our friends when they are in some trouble. For example, one we love is sick. We are touched with sym pathy, and go to God with our heart’s burden. What shall our prayer be? That our friend may recover? Yes, that is love’s right and natural prayer, and we may ask this very earnestly. Jesus prayed three times that his own cup of sorrow might pass. But that must not be all of our prayer. It would be very sad if our friend were to get well, and were not to take some blessing out of his sick-room with him when he leaves it. Therefore we are to pray that he may be enriched in spiritual experience; that he may be made a better man through his illness; that he may be brought into closer relation with Christ; that his life may be purified; that he may be made more thoughtful, gentle, unselfish, unworldly, more like Christ; in a word, that he may be made perfect and complete in all the will of God.
It may become needful to qualify the prayer that our friend shall recover. It may be God’s will that he should now go home. We may still give full vent to love’s yearning that he shall get well; but at the close of our intense supplication we must submit it all to God’s wis dom in the refrain, “Nevertheless, not as I will, but as thou wilt.” If love be true, it is always the very best thing that we ask for our dear ones when we pray for them; and the best — God’s best — for them may be, not longer life in this world, but heaven, the crowning of their life in immortal glory and blessedness.
Or our friend may be in some trouble. He may be staggering under a heavy load, and it may seem to us that the best blessing which could come to him would be the lifting away of the load. But, as we begin to pray, we remember that the truest and most loving prayer for him must be .that he shall stand perfect and complete in all God’s will. Possibly his load is part of God’s will to bring out the best that is in him.
In all our praying for our friends we are to think first of their higher, spiritual good. We are to seek for them above all things that they may grow into all the beauty of perfect Christian character. It is a poor, superficial friendship which desires chiefly our friend’s present ease and mere earthly good. It is asking for him a stone instead of bread, a scorpion in stead of an egg, or a serpent instead of a fish. Those who seek for their friends only earthly things, are choosing for them only the husks, and omitting to choose for them the golden grain which would feed their immortal nature. We sin against our loved ones when we seek for them merely the things our own frail, short sighted judgment may desire for them. Love is true only when it rises into heavenly heights, and craves, for those that are dear, the things of God’s own blessed, perfect will. This is not always easy. It is hard for us to say, “Tinwill be done,” when it means that our lowd one must endure sore pain, or walk in deep
HELPING BY PRAYER. l6?
shadows, or be humbled under God’s mighty hand.
But, whether for our friends or for ourselves, we dare not in prayers press our own wishes against God’s. “Even though it be a cross that raiseth” must be our cry for our dearest as well as for ourselves. The standard of pleading must be the same. And some day we shall see and know that our love was truest when it asked even pain and loss for one who was dear, because it was God’s will.
“I sometimes think God’s heart must ache, Listening to all the sad, complaining cries, That from our weak, impatient souls arise,
Because we do not see that for our sake He answers not, or answers otherwise Than seems the best to our tear-blinded eyes.
This is love’s hardest task, to do hard things
For love’s own sake, then bear the murmurings Of ignorance, too dull to judge aright The love that rises to this wond’rous height
He knows we have not yet attained; and so He wearies not, but bears complaint and moan, And shields each willing heart against his own,
Knowing that some glad day we too shall know.”