Praying in the Power of the Holy Ghost

I want to speak to you this morningon prayer. Those of you who are students preparing for the work of makingknown the gospel of Christ can hardly realize the part prayer ought to play in your studies. People think a great deal of study. They study Latin, Greek, logic and science of all sorts. They will study music and theology and anything that will help them in the work of the ministry or in service of the gospel and yet very often forget what is the — it is a solemn thing to say — what is the most important part of the preparation for the work of serving God. That is fray er! And prayer is an art, a spiritual art that has to be studied like anything else. You know we don’t become perfect in anything without a great deal of exercise. When a person is learning to play the piano he spends, it may be, an hour every day, sometimes many hours, all for the sake of being perfect in his art. Do not let us think we can learn the art of prayer without a great deal of exercise. Just think what its importance is in preaching”, in visiting, in speaking-, in dealing with men, when God’s word tells me that all mj dealing is helpless except God’s power from heaven works. And the word tells me that the power will work in answer to the much prayer of faith, praying with importunity, and that alone. ’ ‘Paul may plant, Apollos water, but God giveth the increase.” Some one has said that farmers are a people who ought to learn to trust God. They can sow their corn but they must wait on God to give sunshine or rain for growth and increase. This is specially true for people who are going to work for God. I may plow, I may sow, I may work as hard as man can work, but God gives the increase. And God gives the increase in answer to prayer. And so for two reasons, dear students, you all ought to be men and women of prayer. One reason is for your own spiritual life. If the Holy Spirit is to live in your life it must come by prayer. The other is for the sake of those among whom you work. If the Holy Ghost is to work in them through the word it must come by prayer. And do not think after I become a minister, missionary, or teacher, then I will begin to pray, then I will learn to pray because I shall then feel the need. You say I cannot find time to pray now. I have so many lessons to prepare I need every moment for study, I cannot be behind in my class, I cannot givQ time to prayer. Oh! beware. Remember the same devil that teaches you this now will find you three years hence when your work is much heavier. He will tell you the same; that you have so much to do that you cannot find time to pray. Remember, the unconverted man says, conversion is easy to-morrow but hard to-day. Even so prayer that now is difficult, appears easy in the future. Alas, you will find it in the future just as hard as now. I pray that you students preparing for Christ’s work ask God to teach you how to pray. He cannot do that unless you give time to it. Reading a book about prayer, listeningto lectures and talkingabout it is very g-ood, but it wont teach you to pray. You g-et nothingwithout exercise, without practice. I might listen to a professor of music for a year playing the most beautiful music, but that won’t teach me to play. So take care that you don’t get beautiful thoughts about prayer; take care that you don’t get beautiful Scripture truths about prayer and yet don’t put them into practice by actually praying. The words that I want to speak on will put prayer before us in a wonderful way. It stands connected with the work of the Holy Ghost. They are found in the 8th chapter of Romans, 23rd verse. Let us read from the 22nd verse. ’ ‘For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now.” Paul says throughout creation there is a

groan of suffering and crying for deliverance to God and not only this creation is groaning but “we ourselves which have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan within ourselves waiting for the adoption, to wit: theredemptionof the body.” And also verses 26 and 27. Now in these two last verses I have read I think you will find four precious thoughts about prayer.

1. We are ignorant and do not know how to
pray.

2. The Holy Spirit is our helper in prayer.

3. The Holy Spirit prays for us not always in words or thoug-hts that we can understand, but with unutterable groanings, longings that cannot be expressed.

4. That God who searches the heart finds out what the mind of the Spirit is who always prays according to God’s will and God gives us the answer.

In the first place we are ignoront and know not how to pray. When I have got to do a thing and I am ignorant, it is of great importance that I should know my ignorance. If I were to ask a teacher of music to teach me to play on the piano and I sat down with the idea that I could do it, it would hinder him terribly. But if I sat down in my ignorance and said, please teach me how, then I am in the right position to be taught. So there are a great many who have the idea that they can pray. They say our mother taught us to pray, our minister taught us to pray. I know of many things I have gotten from God. They think every one can pray. How often we think we know how to pray, and go on for years with the idea we are praying right. Now, if you are ever to become powerful in prayer, the first thing in prayer must be that you fall down before God, under a sense of your ignorance, and say, I cannot pray as I ought. Ere you begin to pray just quietly say. Do I know what prayer is? Do I know what it is to meet the great

God? Do I know how to take hold of God and hold Plim fast? Do I know how to take hold of His streng-th? Do I know what the full fellowship and communion of God is? Beg-in to sit still until you realize His holy presence, and feel how little you are fit to speak to Him. Lord, I know, not how to pray. I may know manj’ thing’s to pray for but not what I need most. My prayer may be rig-ht — Lord deliver me from pride and self-will — and yet I may not know how sadly I need pride to be removed. Perhaps God wants me to be delivered from pride and I pray for that; and yet I have never seen myself as God sees me, I have never been truly convicted of my pride. So you can pray for other thing-s and never come to the real point of what you need. You need before everything- in prayer a deep consciousness of your ignorance. What a wonderful blessing if I come into this ig-norance. The Holy Spirit will be my helper in prayer. This blessed ignorance is one of the most remarkable elements of faith. Abraham went out not knowing- whither he went. It was a beautiful ignorance, it taught him to trust God. Look at the disciples. They once came to ask Jesus to give them a place on the throne. He said, “Ye know not what ye ask.” He brought them at once to the point. You think you are asking for what you need. No! you are foolish. You know not what you ask. Very often we pray for the baptism of the Holy Spirit and we don’t know what we are praying for. It is of the utmost importance that you know what you are praying for. I may utter thoughts that are true and yet my heart may not know what I ask. So, from the very beginning there should be in our prayers a sense of deep ignorance. Paul says no man knoweth the things of God but the Spirit of God. None of you can tell what I am thinking about. You do not know what is in my heart. No one can tell what is in the mind of God but the Spirit of God. If I come and pray from what I have learned out of a book or out of my experience, that is not enough. I want to be taught by the Spirit of God to pray as I ought, in unison with the will of God. Oh listen, the Holy Spirit cannot teach you until all your self-conceit and self-confidence is taken away and you get broken down into a nothingness that says. Lord, I know nothing. Thus will you learn to be quiet before God, and in your ignorance to wait on God to teach you.

2. What a blessed thought that the Holy Spirit is given to help our infirmities, and that He prays in us. What a blessed thought! You are believers in the Holy Trinity — Father, Son and Holy Ghost. The Father — He sits upon the throne as God. The Son sits on His right hand as Mediator and Intercessor — He lives ever to pray Think of that. The Son in His glory has got no other work but praying; His whole being. His presence before God as the Lamb that was slain, is one unceasing prayer, and we read that that is the reason He can save completely, because “He ever liveth to pra3” He is the King in glory, but His highest work is prayer, and continually there goes up to the Father from Him a stream of intercession: Father, bless Thy children, bless My people on earth. And unceasingly there comes from the Father in answer a stream of blessing. And unceasingly from the Son there streams out the flow of the Holy Spirit to bring the blessing to us. And the Spirit is in the heart of the believer to teach what this blessing is that Christ has for them; to teach them all that is prepared for them. But when we are self-satisfied, and imagine that we know how to pray, then we cannot wait for the Holy Spirit to teach us and we lose all the wonderful gifts He could reveal to us. Just think what it means. The Father on the throne to give; the Son at His right hand to bless, and down in your heart and mine the Holy Spirit, the third Person of the Blessed Trinity, proceeding from the Father. It is God giving, Christ praying, and the Holy Spirit receiving and imparting; teaching you to pray in perfect harmony with God and Christ. Have we actually believed, I have the Holy Spirit to help my infirmities in praj-er? Alas! No. “When we have felt our ignorance, felt we don’t know how to pray, we have begun mourning, and have become discouraged, we have kept away from our closet because we did not know how to pray as we wished. I tell you, brother, that is the very best time to go and pray. When you pray so glibly and easily it is very much human feeling and human words, and the power of the Holy Ghost is not there. When you feel you cannot pray, set yourself before God and say, I cannot pray, prayer is too high for me, let the Holy Spirit help my infirmities and come and pray in me. What a blessed truth it is the Holy Spirit prays in me and for me. He it is of whom we heard yesterday and the day before, that the Holy Spirit takes charge of our whole life and dwells in our hearts. If you will only take time to use your Heavenly Helper, He will do His work effectively. If I have a helper in any work, for example, in leading the singing this morning. I have a helper in Professor Towner. What do I do? When it is time for singing I give up to him and trust him for the music in the meeting. To this Holy Spirit, if He is to be my helper, I must give way, I must stand aside. How little we have acknowledged that the Holy Spirit has helped our infirmities. If you are to get the help of the Spirit let me give you one lesson, and let me urge this upon you, when you are in your closet to pray alone you should always take plenty of silent time before your prayers and in between your prayers. It is a solemn thing to think that I am going to exercise power on heaven and bring down here heavenly blessings upon myself and others, and I ought to be very quiet before God. Think of God, the Three One God, as engaged in your prayer. Let us always spend a few minutes, at least, in worship, until our faith realizes. Here is the Almighty God, waiting to bless me. He is longing to fill me with His Holy Spirit. This faith will not come unless w° take time to think about it. The Everlasting God is waiting to bless me. Let me believe God will bless. Just be quiet and sink down into nothingness and let the Holy Spirit pray in you. The Holy Spirit will do it. The Father has given you

His Spirit on purpose to do it. He will pray in you. Ag-ain when you have prayed, be quiet a little and just sit still until your heart g-ets fully into the faith that the Holy Spirit is doing- His work in you just now. He is g-iven to you actually and really to be your teacher and helper in prayer. When you feel very ignorant and helpless, pray. A lady once asked a minister for help. She had lost the joy of secret prayer. She asked what she had to do to get it back. She had done her best in striving- but had failed. He said, “You went the wrong- way about it. When you were unconverted )^ou tried to do everything right and did not succeed. How did you get life?”’ “I just trusted Jesus,” she said. “That’s what you have got to do again. When you have no inclination to pray, when your heart is very cold, just go to Jesus and say, Thou hast appointed prayer as the means to come to Thee, and my heart is cold. Thy heart is full of love, here I come in my feebleness. If you will abide in His presence He will meet you, and the Spirit will teach you to trust and to pray. The Holy Spirit is given to help our infirmities.”

We must take care of making a mistake. People often think that when the Holy Spirit comes and teaches them to pray there will be a great, burning rush of feeling and they will pray such beautiful prayers. Feeling may indeed stir and help you, but many times it is superficial. Let me read the words of the text again, “But the Spirit maketh intercession for us with groanings that cannot be uttered!” That is what the Spirit loves to do. He loves to keep us in our ig-norance, so that our mind cannot run away and occupy itself with the beautiful thoug-hts from the Holy Spirit. He goes deeper than our thoughts and minds into the heart and He prays there with groanings, with longings that cannot be expressed in words. He gives us a deep, an inexpressible yearning, a deep thirst for God and for God’s glory. Oh, my friends, we are proud of nothing so much as our minds, our intellects, and our thoughts. We want to understand everything, and to know everything. You listen to a sermon and get a beautiful thought, you tell your friends of it, you keep it to read over again. You have got something for your intellect but it has not got into your heart. A blind man can understand talk about the sun, and light, and know a great deal about it; the most ignorant man who has seen the sun knows more. A great many people know a great deal about prayer, but it does not help them to pray. We want our hearts filled with the Holy Spirit and He will bring us into the life of prayer. If the Holy Spirit alone can teach us to pray, have we not reason to confess that we have often prayed in the flesh? Oh, may the Blessed Teacher, Himself, live and breathe in us, that we may know how to pray. May the Holy Spirit, about whom we have been speaking and thinking these last few days, be to us a Spirit of prayer, as He is in us a Spirit of holiness and of power for work; the Spirit of love, and the Spirit that brings to us all that we had yesterday morning in the Epistle to the Romans. A Spirit of fellowship, of access to God, a Spirit of intercession, who give us boldness and power with God.

3. The Holy Spirit makes intercession in us. He prays in and for us in words and feelings that are as unutterable groaning-s. After Paul speaks of Him as the Spirit of intercession for all saints, he says He makes intercessionycpr the saints according-to the will of God. What that means we can understand if we look at the 23rd verse. “For the whole creation g-roaneth, “all the suffering- animals throughout the world, all the millions of little creatures around us, these are all groaning- for a different state of things. And not only so, but we ourselves g-roan within ourselves, thoug-h we have the first-fruits of the Spirit waiting- for the adoption, to wit: the redemption of the body. Paul says, believers should look forward to the full redemption, when the body shall be redeemed and made like Christ’s g-lorious body, and all believers gathered into one. Creation g-roans for its universal redemption, the Spirit groans not only for the individual but the united redemption of all saints. There is a great groaning in creation and a great groaning by the Holy Spirit in the hearts of believers, and these are things we cannot pray for as we ought, but God hears the unutterable groanings of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit makes intercession in us for all saints. It is your highest privilege as priests of God to be intercessors. Oh, the value of the intercession! When I pray for other people who may be at a distance, or when we gather in a small prayer-meeting, I sometimes say, what utter folly this would be if God’s word did not teach it. Here are 50 people praying for something in China, or Africa, or England, and these SO feeble ones believe that they can actually stir the Almighty Everlasting- God to action by their prayers, and that in answer to their prayers He would do something* that He would not have done if they had not prayed. This can only be true because the Holy Spirit dwells in the believer, and His prayer in us is from God as much as the answer. Children ol God! yield yourselves up to the Holy Spirit as the Spirit of intercession; study your work of intercession. If all believers were only to g-ive an hour a day for interceeding for the church of God! Oh, Pray for the church of God. If you would have your eyes opened, think of the state of Christendom. Take London with its five million, only one million of these go to church, four millions who practically are not Christians. ‘Think of Chicago with one million and a half and you have only 200,000 people going to church. Just imagine. Think of those who do go to church. Out of these how many go through mere formality; how many who are living in sin; how many who are not converted, and how many who are worldly. Think that this is not only true of London and Chicago, but of all the world. Upon you and me God has left the responsibility of praying and taking hold of Him. He has told us not to let Him go and has given us wonderful promises. Take time to pray. If we will give up ourselves to intercession God will bless. I would like to ask everyone here, Do you pray for the church of Christ in the United States? You talk about its worldliness, so much higher criticism and error, you talk about these, but, do you g-o to God and cry, Lord, visit Thy church? Oh, do cry to Him, Lord streng-then all Thy people who are trying to live true to Thee. It is one Spirit and one body and if you will give way to the Holy Spirit He will teach you to pray for the church. Paul says to the Ephesians, “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.” The Holy Spirit is not a selfish Spirit. The fruit of the Spirit is love and it is one Spirit and one body. May God make you young men and women, may God make all of us, men and women of intercession, filled with the power of the Holy Spirit, for this our highest and holiest work, to interceed for all saints.

4. Last we have the wonderful promise at the end of the verse. “He that searcheth the hearts knoweth what is the mind of the Spirit because He maketh intercession for the saints according to the will of God.” Just think of that. God is to come and search out our hearts. But have we not said in words what we want. Yes, but God is not deceived with words. God knows that the earnest Christian often prays in earnest words, and his heart does not truly and fully will what he has said, or, at the bottom of his heart, there may be needs he has not expressed. God goes deep into the heart and finds out what the Holy Spirit says. The mind of the Spirit prays according to the will of God. My beloved friends, it is a solemn thing to pray. I do beseech you take time to practice prayer and in your prayer every time learn more and more to yield yourself up to the Holy Spirit and say to Him that you set the very depths of your heart open to Him. If your inmost being- is humbly and patiently made subject to Him, He can take and make you, not a prayer machine, but a vessel in which He lives and in which He works His prayers down into your desires and will, so that you pray in the Spirit and the Spirit prays in you. May all of us learn the blessed privilege of intercession in the power of the Holy Ghost. May all of us know the joy of having God search our hearts and answering- us abundantly according to what He finds there of the need of the Spirit. May all of us know what it is to cry to God with unutterable and unceasing longings “for all saints,” that He might indeed visit and revive His people.