"St. Teresa rose off her deathbed to finish her
work. She inspected, with all her quickness of eye and love of order the
whole of the house in which she had been carried to die. She saw everything
put into its proper place, and every one answering to their proper order,
after which she attended the divine offices of the day. She then went
back to her bed, summoned her daughters around her . . . and, with the
most penitential of David's penitential prayers upon her tongue, Teresa
of Jesus went forth to meet her Bridegroom." -- ALEXANDER WHYTE.
PRAYER, without fervour, stakes nothing on the issue, because it has nothing
to stake. It comes with empty hands. Hands, too, which are listless, as
well as empty, which have never learned the lesson of clinging to the Cross.
Fervourless prayer has no heart in it; it is an empty thing, an unfit vessel.
Heart, soul, and life, must find place in all real praying. Heaven must
be made to feel the force of this crying unto God.
Paul was a notable example of the man who possessed a fervent spirit of
prayer. His petitioning was all-consuming, centered immovably upon the object
of his desire, and the God who was able to meet it.
Prayers must be red hot. It is the fervent prayer that is effectual and
that availeth. Coldness of spirit hinders praying; prayer cannot live in
a wintry atmosphere. Chilly surroundings freeze out petitioning; and dry
up the springs of supplication. It takes fire to make prayers go. Warmth
of soul creates an atmosphere favourable to prayer, because it is favourable
to fervency. By flame, prayer ascends to heaven. Yet fire is not fuss, nor
heat, noise. Heat is intensity -- something that glows and burns. Heaven
is a mighty poor market for ice.
God wants warm-hearted servants. The Holy Spirit comes as a fire,
to dwell in us; we are to be baptized, with the Holy Ghost and with fire.
Fervency is warmth of soul. A phlegmatic temperament is abhorrent to vital
experience. If our religion does not set us on fire, it is because we have
frozen hearts. God dwells in a flame; the Holy Ghost descends in fire. To
be absorbed in God's will, to be so greatly in earnest about doing it that
our whole being takes fire, is the qualifying condition of the man who would
engage in effectual prayer.
Our Lord warns us against feeble praying. "Men ought always to pray,"
He declares, "and not to faint." That means, that we are to possess
sufficient fervency to carry us through the severe and long periods of pleading
prayer. Fire makes one alert and vigilant, and brings him off, more than
conqueror. The atmosphere about us is too heavily charged with resisting
forces for limp or languid prayers to make headway. It takes heat, and fervency
and meteoric fire, to push through, to the upper heavens, where God dwells
with His saints, in light.
Many of the great Bible characters were notable examples of fervency of
spirit when seeking God. The Psalmist declares with great earnestness:
"My soul breaketh for the longing that it hath unto
Thy judgments at all times."
What strong desires of heart are here! What earnest soul longings for the
Word of the living God!
An even greater fervency is expressed by him in another place:
"As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth
my soul after Thee, O God. My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God:
when shall I come and appear before God?"
That is the word of a man who lived in a state of grace, which had been
deeply and supernaturally wrought in his soul.
Fervency before God counts in the hour of prayer, and finds a speedy and
rich reward at His hands. The Psalmist gives us this statement of what God
had done for the king, as his heart turned toward his Lord:
"Thou hast given him his heart's desire, and hast not
withholden the request of his lips."
At another time, he thus expresses himself directly to God in preferring
his request:
"Lord, all my desire is before Thee; and my groaning
is not hid from Thee."
What a cheering thought! Our inward groanings, our secret desires, our heart-longings,
are not hidden from the eyes of Him with whom we have to deal in prayer.
The incentive to fervency of spirit before God, is precisely the same as
it is for continued and earnest prayer. While fervency is not prayer, yet
it derives from an earnest soul, and is precious in the sight of God. Fervency
in prayer is the precursor of what God will do by way of answer. God stands
pledged to give us the desire of our hearts in proportion to the fervency
of spirit we exhibit, when seeking His face in prayer.
Fervency has its seat in the heart, not in the brain, nor in the intellectual
faculties of the mind. Fervency therefore, is not an expression of the intellect.
Fervency of spirit is something far transcending poetical fancy or sentimental
imagery. It is something else besides mere preference, the contrasting of
like with dislike. Fervency is the throb and gesture of the emotional nature.
It is not in our power, perhaps, to create fervency of spirit at will, but
we can pray God to implant it. It is ours, then, to nourish and cherish
it, to guard it against extinction, to prevent its abatement or decline.
The process of personal salvation is not only to pray, to express our desires
to God, but to acquire a fervent spirit and seek, by all proper means, to
cultivate it. It is never out of place to pray God to beget within us, and
to keep alive the spirit of fervent prayer.
Fervency has to do with God, just as prayer has to do with Him. Desire has
always an objective. If we desire at all, we desire something. The
degree of fervency with which we fashion our spiritual desires, will always
serve to determine the earnestness of our praying. In this relation, Adoniram
Judson says:
"A travailing spirit, the throes of a great burdened
desire, belongs to prayer. A fervency strong enough to drive away sleep,
which devotes and inflames the spirit, and which retires all earthly ties,
all this belongs to wrestling, prevailing prayer. The Spirit, the power,
the air, and food of prayer is in such a spirit."
Prayer must be clothed with fervency, strength and power. It is the force
which, centered on God, determines the outlay of Himself for earthly good.
Men who are fervent in spirit are bent on attaining to righteousness, truth,
grace, and all other sublime and powerful graces which adorn the character
of the authentic, unquestioned child of God.
God once declared, by the mouth of a brave prophet, to a king who, at one
time, had been true to God, but, by the incoming of success and material
prosperity, had lost his faith, the following message:
"The eyes of the Lord run to and fro throughout the
whole earth, to shew Himself strong in the behalf of them whose heart
is perfect toward Him. Herein hast thou done foolishly; therefore, from
henceforth thou shalt have wars."
God had heard Asa's prayer in early life, but disaster came and trouble
was sent, because he had given up the life of prayer and simple faith.
In Romans 15:30, we have the word, "strive," occurring, in the
request which Paul made for prayerful cooperation.
In Colossians 4:12, we have the same word, but translated differently: "Epaphras
always labouring fervently for you in prayer." Paul charged the Romans
to "strive together with him in prayer," that is, to help him
in his struggle of prayer. The word means to enter into a contest, to fight
against adversaries. It means, moreover, to engage with fervent zeal to
endeavour to obtain.
These recorded instances of the exercise and reward of faith, give us easily
to see that, in almost every instance, faith was blended with trust until
it is not too much to say that the former was swallowed up in the latter.
It is hard to properly distinguish the specific activities of these two
qualities, faith and trust. But there is a point, beyond all peradventure,
at which faith is relieved of its burden, so to speak; where trust comes
along and says: "You have done your part, the rest is mine!"
In the incident of the barren fig tree, our Lord transfers the marvellous
power of faith to His disciples. To their exclamation, "How soon is
the fig tree withered alway!" He said:
"If ye have faith, and doubt not, ye shall not only
do this which is done to the fig tree, but also if ye shall say unto this
mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea; it shall be
done. And all things, whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, ye
shall receive."
When a Christian believer attains to faith of such magnificent proportions
as these, he steps into the realm of implicit trust. He stands without a
tremor on the apex of his spiritual outreaching. He has attained faith's
veritable top stone which is unswerving, unalterable, unalienable trust
in the power of the living God. |