"There are those who will mock me, and tell me to
stick to my trade as a cobbler, and not trouble my mind with philosophy
and theology. But the truth of God did so burn in my bones, that I took
my pen in hand and began to set down what I had seen." -- JACOB
BEHMEN.
DESIRE is not merely a simple wish; it is a deep seated craving; an intense
longing, for attainment. In the realm of spiritual affairs, it is an important
adjunct to prayer. So important is it, that one might say, almost, that
desire is an absolute essential of prayer. Desire precedes prayer, accompanies
it, is followed by it. Desire goes before prayer, and by it, created and
intensified. Prayer is the oral expression of desire. If prayer is asking
God for something, then prayer must be expressed. Prayer comes out into
the open. Desire is silent. Prayer is heard; desire, unheard. The deeper
the desire, the stronger the prayer. Without desire, prayer is a meaningless
mumble of words. Such perfunctory, formal praying, with no heart, no feeling,
no real desire accompanying it, is to be shunned like a pestilence. Its
exercise is a waste of precious time, and from it, no real blessing accrues.
And yet even if it be discovered that desire is honestly absent,
we should pray, anyway. We ought to pray. The "ought" comes
in, in order that both desire and expression be cultivated. God's Word commands
it. Our judgment tells us we ought to pray -- to pray whether we feel like
it or not -- and not to allow our feelings to determine our habits of prayer.
In such circumstance, we ought to pray for the desire to pray; for
such a desire is God-given and heaven-born. We should pray for desire; then,
when desire has been given, we should pray according to its dictates. Lack
of spiritual desire should grieve us, and lead us to lament its absence,
to seek earnestly for its bestowal, so that our praying, henceforth, should
be an expression of "the soul's sincere desire."
A sense of need creates or should create, earnest desire. The stronger the
sense of need, before God, the greater should be the desire, the more earnest
the praying. The "poor in spirit" are eminently competent to pray.
Hunger is an active sense of physical need. It prompts the request for bread.
In like manner, the inward consciousness of spiritual need creates desire,
and desire breaks forth in prayer. Desire is an inward longing for something
of which we are not possessed, of which we stand in need -- something which
God has promised, and which may be secured by an earnest supplication of
His throne of grace.
Spiritual desire, carried to a higher degree, is the evidence of the new
birth. It is born in the renewed soul:
"As newborn babes, desire the sincere milk of the word,
that ye may grow thereby."
The absence of this holy desire in the heart is presumptive proof, either
of a decline in spiritual ecstasy, or, that the new birth has never taken
place.
"Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after
righteousness: for they shall be filled."
These heaven-given appetites are the proof of a renewed heart, the evidence
of a stirring spiritual life. Physical appetites are the attributes of a
living body, not of a corpse, and spiritual desires belong to a soul made
alive to God. And as the renewed soul hungers and thirsts after righteousness,
these holy inward desires break out into earnest, supplicating prayer.
In prayer, we are shut up to the Name, merit and intercessory virtue of
Jesus Christ, our great High Priest. Probing down, below the accompanying
conditions and forces in prayer, we come to its vital basis, which is seated
in the human heart. It is not simply our need; it is the heart's yearning
for what we need, and for which we feel impelled to pray. Desire is the
will in action; a strong, conscious longing, excited in the inner nature,
for some great good. Desire exalts the object of its longing, and fixes
the mind on it. It has choice, and fixedness, and flame in it, and prayer,
based thereon, is explicit and specific. It knows its need, feels and sees
the thing that will meet it, and hastens to acquire it.
Holy desire is much helped by devout contemplation. Meditation on our spiritual
need, and on God's readiness and ability to correct it, aids desire to grow.
Serious thought engaged in before praying, increases desire, makes it more
insistent, and tends to save us from the menace of private prayer -- wandering
thought. We fail much more in desire, than in its outward expression. We
retain the form, while the inner life fades and almost dies.
One might well ask, whether the feebleness of our desires for God, the Holy
Spirit, and for all the fulness of Christ, is not the cause of our so little
praying, and of our languishing in the exercise of prayer? Do we really
feel these inward pantings of desire after heavenly treasures? Do the inbred
groanings of desire stir our souls to mighty wrestlings? Alas for us! The
fire burns altogether too low. The flaming heat of soul has been tempered
down to a tepid lukewarmness. This, it should be remembered, was the central
cause of the sad and desperate condition of the Laodicean Christians, of
whom the awful condemnation is written that they were "rich, and increased
in goods and had need of nothing," and knew not that they "were
wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind."
Again: we might well inquire -- have we that desire which presses us to
close communion with God, which is filled with unutterable burnings, and
holds us there through the agony of an intense and soul-stirred supplication?
Our hearts need much to be worked over, not only to get the evil out of
them, but to get the good into them. And the foundation and inspiration
to the incoming good, is strong, propelling desire. This holy and fervid
flame in the soul awakens the interest of heaven, attracts the attention
of God, and places at the disposal of those who exercise it, the exhaustless
riches of Divine grace.
The dampening of the flame of holy desire, is destructive of the vital and
aggressive forces in church life. God requires to be represented by a fiery
Church, or He is not in any proper sense, represented at all. God, Himself,
is all on fire, and His Church, if it is to be like Him, must also be at
white heat. The great and eternal interests of heaven-born, God-given religion
are the only things about which His Church can afford to be on fire. Yet
holy zeal need not to be fussy in order to be consuming. Our Lord was the
incarnate antithesis of nervous excitability, the absolute opposite of intolerant
or clamorous declamation, yet the zeal of God's house consumed Him; and
the world is still feeling the glow of His fierce, consuming flame and responding
to it, with an ever-increasing readiness and an ever-enlarging response.
A lack of ardour in prayer, is the sure sign of a lack of depth and of intensity
of desire; and the absence of intense desire is a sure sign of God's absence
from the heart! To abate fervour is to retire from God. He can, and does,
tolerate many things in the way of infirmity and error in His children.
He can, and will pardon sin when the penitent prays, but two things are
intolerable to Him -- insincerity and lukewarmness. Lack of heart and lack
of heat are two things He loathes, and to the Laodiceans He said, in terms
of unmistakable severity and condemnation:
"I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou
art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of My mouth."
This was God's expressed judgment on the lack of fire in one of the Seven
Churches, and it is His indictment against individual Christians for the
fatal want of sacred zeal. In prayer, fire is the motive power. Religious
principles which do not emerge in flame, have neither force nor effect.
Flame is the wing on which faith ascends; fervency is the soul of prayer.
It was the "fervent, effectual prayer" which availed much. Love
is kindled in a flame, and ardency is its life. Flame is the air which true
Christian experience breathes. It feeds on fire; it can withstand anything,
rather than a feeble flame; and it dies, chilled and starved to its vitals,
when the surrounding atmosphere is frigid or lukewarm.
True prayer, must be aflame. Christian life and character need to
be all on fire. Lack of spiritual heat creates more infidelity than lack
of faith. Not to be consumingly interested about the things of heaven, is
not to be interested in them at all. The fiery souls are those who conquer
in the day of battle, from whom the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence,
and who take it by force. The citadel of God is taken only by those, who
storm it in dreadful earnestness, who besiege it, with fiery, unabated zeal.
Nothing short of being red hot for God, can keep the glow of heaven in our
hearts, these chilly days. The early Methodists had no heating apparatus
in their churches. They declared that the flame in the pew and the fire
in the pulpit must suffice to keep them warm. And we, of this hour, have
need to have the live coal from God's altar and the consuming flame from
heaven glowing in our hearts. This flame is not mental vehemence nor fleshy
energy. It is Divine fire in the soul, intense, dross-consuming -- the very
essence of the Spirit of God.
No erudition, no purity of diction, no width of mental outlook, no flowers
of eloquence, no grace of person, can atone for lack of fire. Prayer ascends
by fire. Flame gives prayer access as well as wings, acceptance as well
as energy. There is no incense without fire; no prayer without flame.
Ardent desire is the basis of unceasing prayer. It is not a shallow, fickle
inclination, but a strong yearning, an unquenchable ardour, which impregnates,
glows, burns and fixes the heart. It is the flame of a present and active
principle mounting up to God. It is ardour propelled by desire, that burns
its way to the Throne of mercy, and gains its plea. It is the pertinacity
of desire that gives triumph to the conflict, in a great struggle of prayer.
It is the burden of a weighty desire that sobers, makes restless, and reduces
to quietness the soul just emerged from its mighty wrestlings. It is the
embracing character of desire which arms prayer with a thousand pleas, and
robes it with an invincible courage and an all-conquering power.
The Syrophenician woman is an object lesson of desire, settled to its consistency,
but invulnerable in its intensity and pertinacious boldness. The importunate
widow represents desire gaining its end, through obstacles insuperable to
feebler impulses.
Prayer is not the rehearsal of a mere performance; nor is it an indefinite,
widespread clamour. Desire, while it kindles the soul, holds it to the object
sought. Prayer is an indispensable phase of spiritual habit, but it ceases
to be prayer when carried on by habit alone. It is depth and intensity of
spiritual desire which give intensity and depth to prayer. The soul cannot
be listless when some great desire fires and inflames it. The urgency of
our desire holds us to the thing desired with a tenacity which refuses to
be lessened or loosened; it stays and pleads and persists, and refuses to
let go until the blessing has been vouchsafed.
"Lord, I cannot let Thee go, Till a blessing Thou bestow;
Do not turn away Thy face; Mine's an urgent, pressing case."
The secret of faint heartedness, lack of importunity, want of courage and
strength in prayer, lies in the weakness of spiritual desire, while the
non-observance of prayer is the fearful token of that desire having ceased
to live. That soul has turned from God whose desire after Him no longer
presses it to the inner chamber. There can be no successful praying without
consuming desire. Of course there can be much seeming to pray, without
desire of any kind.
Many things may be catalogued and much ground covered. But does desire compile
the catalogue? Does desire map out the region to be covered? On the answer,
hangs the issue of whether our petitioning be prating or prayer. Desire
is intense, but narrow; it cannot spread itself over a wide area. It wants
a few things, and wants them badly, so badly, that nothing but God's willingness
to answer, can bring it easement or content.
Desire single-shots at its objective. There may be many things desired,
but they are specifically and individually felt and expressed. David did
not yearn for everything; nor did he allow his desires to spread out everywhere
and hit nothing. Here is the way his desires ran and found expression:
"One thing have I desired of the Lord, that will I
seek after; that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of
my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord, and to enquire in His temple."
It is this singleness of desire, this definiteness of yearning, which counts
in praying, and which drives prayer directly to core and centre of supply.
In the Beatitudes Jesus voiced the words which directly bear upon the innate
desires of a renewed soul, and the promise that they will be granted: "Blessed
are they that do hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be
filled."
This, then, is the basis of prayer which compels an answer -- that strong
inward desire has entered into the spiritual appetite, and clamours to be
satisfied. Alas for us! It is altogether too true and frequent, that our
prayers operate in the arid region of a mere wish, or in the leafless area
of a memorized prayer. Sometimes, indeed, our prayers are merely stereotyped
expressions of set phrases, and conventional proportions, the freshness
and life of which have departed long years ago.
Without desire, there is no burden of soul, no sense of need, no ardency,
no vision, no strength, no glow of faith. There is no mighty pressure, no
holding on to God, with a deathless, despairing grasp -- "I will not
let Thee go, except Thou bless me." There is no utter self-abandonment,
as there was with Moses, when, lost in the throes of a desperate, pertinacious,
and all-consuming plea he cried: "Yet now, if Thou wilt forgive their
sin; if not, blot me, I pray Thee, out of Thy book." Or, as there was
with John Knox when he pleaded: "Give me Scotland, or I die!"
God draws mightily near to the praying soul. To see God, to know God, and
to live for God -- these form the objective of all true praying. Thus praying
is, after all, inspired to seek after God. Prayer-desire is inflamed to
see God, to have clearer, fuller, sweeter and richer revelation of God.
So to those who thus pray, the Bible becomes a new Bible, and Christ
a new Saviour, by the light and revelation of the inner chamber.
We iterate and reiterate that burning desire -- enlarged and ever enlarging
-- for the best, and most powerful gifts and graces of the Spirit of God,
is the legitimate heritage of true and effectual praying. Self and service
cannot be divorced -- cannot, possibly, be separated. More than that: desire
must be made intensely personal, must be centered on God with an insatiable
hungering and thirsting after Him and His righteousness. "My soul thirsteth
for God, the living God." The indispensable requisite for all true
praying is a deeply seated desire which seeks after God Himself, and remains
unappeased, until the choicest gifts in heaven's bestowal, have been richly
and abundantly vouchsafed. |