The principal cause of my leanness and unfruitfulness
is owing to an unaccountable backwardness to pray. I can write or read
or converse or hear with a ready heart; but prayer is more spiritual and
inward than any of these, and the more spiritual any duty is the more
my carnal heart is apt to start from it. Prayer and patience and faith
are never disappointed. I have long since learned that if ever I was to
be a minister faith and prayer must make me one. When I can find my heart
in frame and liberty for prayer, everything else is comparatively easy.
-- Richard Newton
IT may be put down as a spiritual axiom that in every truly successful ministry
prayer is an evident and controlling force -- evident and controlling in
the life of the preacher, evident and controlling in the deep spirituality
of his work. A ministry may be a very thoughtful ministry without prayer;
the preacher may secure fame and popularity without prayer; the whole machinery
of the preacher's life and work may be run without the oil of prayer or
with scarcely enough to grease one cog; but no ministry can be a spiritual
one, securing holiness in the preacher and in his people, without prayer
being made an evident and controlling force.
The preacher that prays indeed puts God into the work. God does not come
into the preacher's work as a matter of course or on general principles,
but he comes by prayer and special urgency. That God will be found of us
in the day that we seek him with the whole heart is as true of the preacher
as of the penitent. A prayerful ministry is the only ministry that brings
the preacher into sympathy with the people. Prayer as essentially unites
to the human as it does to the divine. A prayerful ministry is the only
ministry qualified for the high offices and responsibilities of the preacher.
Colleges, learning, books, theology, preaching cannot make a preacher, but
praying does. The apostles' commission to preach was a blank till filled
up by the Pentecost which praying brought. A prayerful minister has passed
beyond the regions of the popular, beyond the man of mere affairs, of secularities,
of pulpit attractiveness; passed beyond the ecclesiastical organizer or
general into a sublimer and mightier region, the region of the spiritual.
Holiness is the product of his work; transfigured hearts and lives emblazon
the reality of his work, its trueness and substantial nature. God is with
him. His ministry is not projected on worldly or surface principles. He
is deeply stored with and deeply schooled in the things of God. His long,
deep communings with God about his people and the agony of his wrestling
spirit have crowned him as a prince in the things of God. The iciness of
the mere professional has long since melted under the intensity of his praying.
The superficial results of many a ministry, the deadness of others, are
to be found in the lack of praying. No ministry can succeed without much
praying, and this praying must be fundamental, ever-abiding, ever-increasing.
The text, the sermon, should be the result of prayer. The study should be
bathed in prayer, all its duties so impregnated with prayer, its whole spirit
the spirit of prayer. "I am sorry that I have prayed so little,"
was the deathbed regret of one of God's chosen ones, a sad and remorseful
regret for a preacher. "I want a life of greater, deeper, truer prayer,"
said the late Archbishop Tait. So may we all say, and this may we all secure.
God's true preachers have been distinguished by one great feature: they
were men of prayer. Differing often in many things, they have always had
a common center. They may have started from different points, and traveled
by different roads, but they converged to one point: they were one in prayer.
God to there was the center of attraction, and prayer was the path that
led to God. These men prayed not occasionally, not a little at regular or
at odd times; but they so prayed that their prayers entered into and shaped
their characters; they so prayed as to affect their own lives and the lives
of others; they so prayed as to make the history of the Church and influence
the current of the times. They spent much time in prayer, not because they
marked the shadow on the dial or the hands on the clock, but because it
was to them so momentous and engaging a business that they could scarcely
give over.
Prayer was to them what it was to Paul, a striving with earnest effort of
soul; what it was to Jacob, a wrestling and prevailing; what it was to Christ,
"strong crying and tears." They "prayed always with all prayer
and supplication in the Spirit, and watching thereunto with all perseverance."
"The effectual, fervent prayer" has been the mightiest weapon
of God's mightiest soldiers. The statement in regard to Elijah -- that he
"was a man subject to like passions as we are, and he prayed earnestly
that it might not rain: and it rained not on the earth by the space of three
years and six months. And he prayed again, and the heaven gave rain, and
the earth brought forth her fruit" - comprehends all prophets and preachers
who have moved their generation for God, and shows the instrument by which
they worked their wonders. |