A Plea for More Prayer. Our Only Hope
What a difference between the first mountain springs where a great river has its rise, and the vast expanse of water where it reaches the sea and carries fleets on its bosom. Such, and even much greater, is the difference between prayer in the simplicity of its first beginnings, and the incomprehensible mystery of what it becomes when it makes man a partner with God in the rule of the world. Instead of its being the simple channel through which a child or a newly converted heathen obtains his request from God, it becomes the heavenly power that can dispose of all the riches of God and bring down the blessings of the Spirit on countless souls.
What a study prayer is! I know not whether to thank God most for prayer in its blessed simplicity, as it is the comfort of those who hardly ever go beyond their personal needs, or in the profound depths in which it reveals to us how close and wonderful the union is between God and man.
I feel as if I cannot end this book without
once again attempting to point the reader to this latter aspect of it. I do so with fear and trembling; the thoughts are so wonderful and beyond our reach that one hardly ventures to hope that he can make them plain. And yet with God’s help we must make the attempt.
When God undertook the stupendous work of creating man in His own image and after His likeness, His great object was to have a being in whom He could perfectly reveal all the glory of His Divine power. Man was to be here on earth what God is in heaven, the king and ruler. He was made in the image of God in this specially, that just as God is self-determined, and is what He is by His own blessed will, so man also, as far as a creature dependent on God could become so, was to have the fashioning of his own character and being, and so fitting himself for the power of ruling others. As we have it in the New Testament, we are made kings and priests unto God. As priests we turn our face Godward to worship and receive His blessing. As kings, we turn manward to dispense that blessing in ruling and guiding them.
The great thought of God was thus to train man for the place that he is to have with Christ upon the throne. God’s purpose was that man should so rule that God would do nothing but through him, and that man should understand that he would do nothing but through God. It is in this wonderful relationship that prayer has its mystery and its glory. God promises to dispense His Spirit and to exercise His power according to the wish of man. If man will avail himself of his high prerogative, and fully yield himself to the Holy Spirit’s teaching in regard to the will of God, God will make literally true, what Christ promised, “If ye abide in Me, and My words abide in you, YE SHALL ASK WHAT YE WILL AND IT SHALL BE DONE UNTO YOU.” The prayer of faith will remove mountains.
We are told that in Nature every spirit seeks to clothe itself in a suitable body. The life in a tree creates for itself in the fruit the embodiment of its inmost nature. And so with God, Who is Spirit. The creation of man was not an after thought but part of His eternal purpose to reveal Himself completely throughout all creation. The first step in that path was the creation of man out of the dust, in His image and likeness. The next was the coming of the Eternal Son to unite and forever to identify Himself with human nature. Then followed the resurrection from the dead, and ascension to heaven of Christ in His glorified humanity. And last of all came the outpouring of the Holy Spirit by which the Church became His body, the fulness of Him that filleth all in all. In that body Christ is to be revealed when He comes in glory, and in that body the Father will dwell in the Son. Through all eternity man is to be the revelation of what God is, and through man Christ will rule the world.
And it is in prayer that even now man takes his part in the rule of the world. As a preparation for his future glory he even now, in the holy priesthood of intercession, begins to understand what the inconceivable power of prayer can be, because it is the highest proof of the image of God in which we have been created, and of the exercise of our kinglike privilege of ruling the world.
The point at which it becomes difficult for us to believe all this is when we are told that God is longing to pour out blessing, but is prevented by His people. They are the hindrance in the way. God allows His work to suffer loss, terrible loss, because He will not break the law He Him self made. He respects the liberty He Himself gave man; in infinite long-suffering He bides His time till man becomes willing to pray and receive His blessing. In Vol. VI. the Report says, “We must make men understand that it is only their lack of faith and half-hearted consecration that hinders the rapid advance of the work, only their own coldness that keeps back His redemption from a lost world. We must ever bear in mind that He is eager and able to save the world already redeemed by Him, if only we, His professed followers on earth, were willing that He should.”
One would think that men on hearing this would say: It is impossible; it cannot be true that millions are perishing, because God’s people are not praying. But it is true. But a truth which the natural mind cannot grasp. It is only the Holy Spirit that can enlighten the heart to apprehend the spiritual reality of this wonderful partnership into which God has taken up His people in the salvation of the world. One would say, How can the Church be so infatuated as to spend all her strength in doing a work that is comparatively a failure, that ends in a decline of membership, when she has the Divine promise that in answer to prayer the power of the Holy Spirit can make the dry bones to live? There is no explanation but this: People hear it with the hearing of the ear, but the truth has no power over them, simply because they do not yield themselves, in holy fellowship with God, to receive the Spirit and the Spirit-born conviction that prayer can bring down into the heart the life that there is in Christ Jesus.
How often the complaint is heard that it is so hard to pray aright, to pray enough, to pray in power. The reason is simple. We think very much of prayer as a means of getting blessing for ourselves. We enter so little into the thought of yielding ourselves entirely to the holy fellowship with God, and the self-denying sacrifice needed in bearing the needs of our fellow-men. We are so little conscious of our being kings; no wonder that the confidence of our priestly access to God for the work of bringing down blessing on the world, is but feeble. A man’s thought rules his actions; the ideas he fosters make his character. Oh that God’s children might take hold of the wonderful promises that whatsoever they ask in the name of Jesus it shall be done unto them, and learn to look upon themselves as God’s chosen intercessors, the channels without whom His love cannot do its work. They may be sure that prayer will begin to have a new attraction, and fellowship with God will become their highest privilege.
I fear of wearying my reader by the repetition of the chief thoughts that occupy us in this book as a plea for more prayer. And yet I will risk once again summing up what it is that I think God wants us to consider.
The verdict of the World Missionary Conference that the Church is unwilling and unfit for doing the work God puts before her.
The confession of the Churches that they are impotent to keep hold of their members; the world spirit is too strong.
The sad truth that both these things are owing to a lack of that spiritual life and power without which our work must be in vain.
The conviction that nothing but the power of God’s Holy Spirit in our heart and life can cure the evil.
The faith that God longs with all His heart to give His Spirit to the fervent prayer of the righteous man that availeth much, and so to lift His Church to the life that there is for her in Christ Jesus.
As we study and pray over these thoughts, step by step, in God’s presence, the mystery of prayer will open out to us. We shall see that God has actually made us “partners in the business,” made us kings and priests to dispense His blessings to a feeble Church and a perishing world. We shall hear a call to forsake that half-hearted, selfish, prayerless life in which we have lived, and to begin as intercessors to take our place before God, in the assurance that He has put the quickening of the Church in our hands, and will give to persevering, believing intercession the high honour of restoring His children to the life which He has meant for them.
Let each of us take a prayer-card, and write upon it the five points we have just mentioned. Let us think and pray over them until we realise that there is really something that needs praying for, and our hearts get so interested in it that prayer shall become the spontaneous expression of our strong desire for God’s blessing on His Church.