Chapter 79.

DIVINE EFFICACY OF PRAYER

All the greatest needs, both of the Church and of the world, may be included in one: the need of a higher standard of godliness; and the all embracing secret of a truly godly life is close and constant contact with the unseen God; that contact is learned and practiced, as nowhere else, in the secret place of supplication and intercession.

Our Lord’s first lesson in the school of prayer was, and still is: "ENTER INTO THY CLOSET" (Matthew 6:6). The "closet" is the closed place, where we are shut in alone with God, where the human spirit waits upon an unseen Presence, learns to recognize Him who is a Spirit, and cultivates His acquaintance, fellowship, and friendship.

Everything else, therefore, depends upon prayer. To the praying soul there becomes possible the faith which is the grasp of the human spirit upon the realities and verities of the unseen world. To the praying soul there becomes possible and natural the obedience which is the daily walk of the disciple with the unseen God. To the praying soul there becomes possible the patience, which is the habit of waiting for results yet unseen and hopes yet unrealized. To the praying soul there becomes possible the love that, like a celestial flood, drowns out evil tempers and hateful dispositions, and introduces us to a new world of gentle and generous frames. To the praying soul there becomes possible and increasingly real the holiness which is personal conformity to an unseen Divine image and ideal, and the innermost secret of a heavenly bliss.

Those who yearn for revivals naturally lay much stress on preaching. But what is preaching without praying! Sermons are but pulpit performances, learned essays, rhetorical orations, popular lectures, or it may be political harangues, until God gives, in answer to earnest prayer, the preparation of the heart, and the answer of the tongue. It is only he who prays that can truly preach. Many a sermon that has shown no intellectual genius and has violated all homiletic rules and standards has had dynamic spiritual force.

Somehow it has moved men, melted them, molded them. The man whose lips are touched by God’s living coal from off the altar may even stammer, but his hearers soon find out that he is on fire with one consuming passion to save souls. We need saints in the pew as well as in the pulpit, and saintship everywhere is fed and nourished on prayer. The man of business who prays, learns to abide in his calling with God; his secular affairs and transactions become sacred by being brought into the searchlight of God’s presence. His own business becomes his Father’s business. He does not trample on God’s commands in order to make money, nor does he drive his trade and traffic through the sacred limits of the Lord’s day, or defraud his customers, "breaking God’s law for a dividend."

Praying souls become prevailing saints. Those who get farthest on in the school of prayer and learn most of its hidden secrets often develop a sort of prescience which comes nearest to the prophetic spirit, the Holy Spirit showing them "things to come." They seem, like Savonarola, to know something of the purpose of God, to anticipate His plans, and to forecast the history of their own times. The great supplicators have been also the seers.

There is no higher virtue in a church than that it should be a praying church, for it is prayer that makes eternal realities both prominent and dominant. A church and a pastor may have any one of the current, popular types of "religious" life, and souls may not be saved; but, as the late Dr. Skinner, of New York, used to say: "If the peculiar type of piety is that which is inspired by a sense of the powers of the world to come; sinners will be saved and saints edified." Even the world that now is will feel the power of such piety.

Praying feeds missions at home and abroad. It promotes giving. Parsimony is stifled in the atmosphere of God’s presence. Gifts are multiplied and magnified when the giver is consecrated. When disciples begin to pray for souls they begin to yearn over them and to be willing to make sacrifices for their salvation. The key that can unlock the treasury of God’s promises has marvelous power also to unlock the treasures of hoarded wealth, and makes even the abundance of deep poverty to abound into the riches of liberality till the widow’s mites drop into the Lord’s hands even more frequently than the millions of merchant princes. No man can breathe freely in the atmosphere of prayer while he stifles benevolent impulses. The giving of money prepares for the giving of self, and thus prayer makes missionary workers as well as missionary givers and supporters. Few, even amongst the most devout, have ever fully felt how far workers in "the mine of heathendom" depend on those who "hold the ropes." James Gilmour, whose rare and radiant spirit so impressed the rude Mongolians, said that, un-prayed for, he would feel like a diver in the river bottom with no air to breathe, or like a fireman on a blazing building with no water in his empty hose.

Prayer is not to be thought the less of because we are so often driven to the throne of grace as a last resort. It is part of the philosophy of prayer that it shall reveal its full efficacy only when and where all beside fails us. Here, as in all else, it is only at the end of self with all its inventions. that we find the beginning of God with all His interpositions. A praying heart is the one thing that the devil cannot easily counterfeit. It is easy enough to imitate praying lips, so that hypocrites and Pharisees feign devoutness. But only God can open in the heart’s depths those springs of supplication that often find no channel in language, but flow out in groanings which cannot be uttered.

It is not worth while to waste much time in defending or advocating prayer. Experiment makes argument needless. This is not so much a science to be mastered by study as an art to be learned by practice. Like the Bible, prayer is self-evidencing. It is a mysterious union of Divine and human elements not easy of explanation; but to him who prays and puts God to the test along the lines of His own precepts and promises, God proves how real a force prayer is in His moral universe. The best way to prop up prayer is to practice it.

The pivot of piety, therefore, is prayer. A pivot is of double use, it acts as a fastener and as a center; it holds other parts in place, and it is the axis of revolution. Prayer likewise, keeps one steadfast in faith and helps to all holy activity. Hence, as surely as God is lifting His people to a higher level of spirituality, and moving them to a more unselfish and self-denying service, there will be new emphasis laid by them upon supplication, and especially upon intercession.

The revival of the praying-spirit is not only first in order of development, but it is first in order of importance, for without it there is no advance. Generally, if not uniformly prayer is both starting-point and goal to every movement in which are the elements of permanent progress. Whenever the Church’s sluggishness is aroused and the world’s wickedness arrested, somebody has been praying. If the secret history of all true spiritual advance could be written and read. there would be found some intercessors who, like Job, Samuel. Daniel, Elijah, Paul and James; like Jonathan Edwards, William Carey, George Muller, and Hudson Taylor, have been led to shut themselves in the secret place with God, and have labored fervently in prayer. And as the starting-point is thus found in supplication and intercession, so the final outcome must be that God’s people shall have learned to pray; otherwise there will be rapid reaction and disastrous relapse from the better conditions secured.

PRAYER PUTS MEN IN TOUCH WITH GOD

There is a divine philosophy behind this fact. The greatest need is to keep in close touch with God; the greatest risk is the loss of the sense of the Divine. In a world where every appeal is to the physical senses and through them, reality is in direct proportion to the power and freedom of contact.

What we see, hear, taste, touch or smell — what is material and sensible — we can not doubt. The present and material absorbs a but the future, the immaterial, the invisible, the spiritual, seem vague, distant, illusive, imaginary. Practically the unseen has little or no reality and influence with the vast majority of mankind. Even the unseen God Himself is to most men less a verity than the commonest object of vision; to many He, the highest verity, is really vanity, while the world’s vanities are practically the highest verities.

God’s great corrective for this most disastrous inversion and perversion of the true relation of things is prayer. "Enter into thy closet." There all is silence, secrecy, solitude, seclusion. Within that holy of holies the disciple is left alone — all others shut out, that the suppliant may be shut in — with God. The silence is in order to the hearing of the still, small voice that is drowned in worldly clamor, and which even a human voice may cause to be unheard or indistinct. The secrecy is in order to a meeting with Him who seeth in secret and is best seen in secret. The solitude is for the purpose of being alone with One who can fully impress with His presence only when there is no other presence to divert thought. the place of seclusion with God is the one school where we learn that He is, and is the rewarder of those that diligently seek Him. The closet is "not only the oratory, it is the observatory," not for prayer only, but for prospect — the wide-reaching, clear-seeing, outlook upon the eternal! The decline of prayer is therefore the decay of piety; and, for prayer to cease altogether, would be spiritual death, for it is to every child of God the breath of life.

We cannot too strongly emphasize this fact, that to keep in dose touch with God in the secret chamber of His presence is the great fundamental underlying purpose of prayer. To speak with God is a priceless privilege; but what shall be said of having and hearing Him speak with us! We can tell Him nothing He does not know; but He can tell us what we do not know, no imagination has ever conceived, no research ever unveiled. The highest of all possible attainments is the knowledge of God, and this is the practical mode of His revelation of Himself. Even His holy Word needs to be read in the light of His own presence if it is to be understood. The praying soul hears God speak.

"And when Moses was gone into the tabernacle of the congregation to speak with Him, then he heard the voice of One speaking unto him from off the mercy seat that was upon the ark of testimony — from between the two cherubim, and He spake unto him" (Numbers 7:89).

Where there is this close touch with God, and this clear insight into His name which is His nature, and into His Word which is His will made known, there will be a new power to walk with Him in holiness, and work with Him in service. "He made known His ways unto Moses, His acts unto the children of Israel." The mass of the people stood afar off and saw His deeds, such as the overthrowing of Pharaoh’s hosts in the Red Sea; but Moses drew near into the thick darkness where God was, and in that thick darkness he found a light such as never shone elsewhere, and in that light he read God’s secret plans and purposes and interpreted His wondrous ways of working.

All practical power over sin and over men depends on maintaining this secret communion. Elijah was bidden, first, "go, hide thyself," and then, "go shew thyself." Those who abide in the secret place with God come forth to show themselves mighty to conquer evil, and strong to work and to walk for God. They are permitted to read the secrets of His covenant; they know His will; they are the meek whom He guides in judgment and teaches His way. They are His prophets, who speak for Him to others; because they watch the signs of the times, discern. His tokens, and read His signals. We sometimes count as mystics those who, like Savonarola and Catherine of Siena, claim to have communications from God; to have revelations of a definite plan of God for His Church, or for themselves as individuals, like the reformer of Erfurt, the founder of the Bristol Orphanages, or the leader of the China Inland Mission. But may it not be that if we stumble at these experiences it is because we do not have them ourselves? Have not many of these men and women afterward proved by their lives that they were not mistaken, and that God has led them by a way that no other eye could trace?

PRAYER IMPARTS GOD’S POWER

In favor of close contact with the living God in prayer, there is another reason that rises perhaps to a still higher level. Prayer not only puts us in touch with God, and gives knowledge of Him and His ways, but it imparts to us His power. It is the touch which brings virtue out of Him. It is the hand upon the pole of a celestial battery, which charges us with His secret life, energy, efficiency. Things which are impossible with man are possible with God, and with a man in whom God is. Prayer is the secret of imparted power from God, and nothing else can take its place. Absolute weakness follows the neglect of secret communion with God — and the weakness is the more deplorable, because it is often unconscious and unsuspected, especially when one has never yet known what true power is.

We see men of prayer quietly achieving results of the most surprising character. They have the calm of God, no hurry, or worry, or flurry; no anxiety, or care, no excitement or hustle or bustle — they do great things for God, and, like John the Baptist, are great in His eyes, yet they are little in their own eyes; they carry great loads, and yet are not weary nor faint; they face great crises, and yet are not troubled. And those who know not what treasures of wisdom and strength and courage and power are hidden in God’s pavilion wonder how it is. They try to account for all this by something in the man — his talent, or tact, original methods, or favoring circumstances. Perhaps they try to imitate such a career by securing the patronage of the rich and mighty, or by dependence on organization, or fleshly energy — or what men call "determination to succeed" — they bustle about, labor incessantly, appeal for money and co-operation, and work out an apparent success, but there is none of that power of God in it which cannot be imitated. They compass themselves about with sparks, but there is no fire of God; they build up a great structure, but it is wood, hay, stubble; they make a great noise, but God is not in the clamor.

Nothing is at once so undisputable and so over-awing as the way in which a few men of God have lived in Him and He in them. The fact is, that in the disciple’s life the fundamental law is, "Not I, but Christ in me." In a grandly true sense there is but one Worker, one Agent, and He Divine; and all other so-called "workers" are instruments, and instruments only, in His hands. The first quality of a true instrument is passivity. An active instrument would defeat its own purpose; all its activity must be dependent upon the man who uses it. Sometimes a machine becomes uncontrollable, and then it not only becomes useless, but it becomes dangerous, and works damage and disaster. What would a man do with a plane, a knife, an axe, a saw, a bow, that had any will of its own and moved of itself? Does it mean nothing when, in the Word of God, we meet so frequently the symbols of passive service — the rod, the staff, the saw, the hammer, the sword, the spear, the threshing instrument, the flail; and, in the New Testament, the vessel? Does it mean that in proportion as a man is willful God can not use him; that the first condition of service is that the human will is to be lost in God’s so that it presents no resistance to His, no persistence beyond or apart from His, and even ventures to offer no assistance to His? George Muller well taught that we are to wait to know whether a certain work is God’s; then whether it is ours, as being committed to us; but, even then, we need to wait for God’s way and God’s time to do His own work, otherwise we rush precipitately into that which He means us to do, but only at His signal; or else, perhaps, we go on doing when He calls a halt. Many a true servant of God has, like Moses, begun before his Master was ready, or kept on working when his Master’s time was past.

Continuation: http://thatblessedhope.ucoz.com/index/0-67