Pray Always Part 2

BLJ: We continue with the subject, pray always. Prayer will keep you on fire for God, touch the supernatural, keep you from sin, and make you a light to all those in darkness around you. So why do you not pray?

In an ordination sermon it was said to the preacher being ordained:

Give yourself to prayers and the ministry of the Word. If you do not pray, God will probably lay you aside from your ministry, as he did me, to teach you to pray. Remember Luther's maxim, "To have prayed well is to have studied well." Get your texts from God, your thoughts, your words. Carry the names of the little flock upon your breast like the High Priest. Wrestle for the unconverted. Luther spent his last three hours in prayer; John Welch prayed seven or eight hours a day.

He used to keep a plaid blanket on his bed that he might wrap himself in when he rose during the night. Sometimes his wife found him on the ground lying weeping. When she complained, he would say, "O woman, I have the souls of three thousand to answer for, and I know not how it is with many of them." The people he exhorted and charged: "Pray for your pastor. Pray for his body, that he may be kept strong and spared many years. Pray for his soul, that he may be kept humble and holy, a burning and shining light. Pray for his ministry that it may be abundantly blessed, that he may be anointed to preach good tidings. Let there be no secret prayer without naming him before your God, no family prayer without carrying your pastor in your hearts to God."

"Two things," says his biographer, "he seems never to have ceased from -- the cultivation of personal holiness and the most anxious efforts to win souls." The two are the inseparable attendants on the ministry of prayer. Prayer fails when the desire and effort for personal holiness fail. No person is a soul-winner who is not adept in the ministry of prayer. "It is the duty of ministers," says this holy man, "to begin the reformation of religion and manner with themselves, families, etc., with confession of past sin, earnest prayer for direction, grace and full purpose of heart." He begins with himself under the head of "Reformation in Secret Prayer," and he resolves:

I ought not to omit any of the parts of prayer -- confession, adoration, thanksgiving, petition and intercession. There is a fearful tendency to omit confession proceeding from low views of God and his law, slight views of my heart, and the sin of my past life. This must be resisted. There is a constant tendency to omit adoration when I forget to whom I am speaking, when I rush heedlessly into the presence of Jehovah without thought of his awful name and character. When I

have little eyesight for his glory, and little admiration of his wonders, I have the native tendency of the heart to omit giving thanks, and yet it is specially commanded. Often when the heart is dead to the salvation of others I omit intercession, and yet it especially is the spirit of the great advocate who has the name of Israel on his heart. I ought to pray before seeing anyone. Often when I sleep long, or meet with others early, and then have family prayer and breakfast and forenoon callers, it is eleven or twelve o'clock before I begin secret prayer. This is a wretched system; it is unscriptural. Christ rose before day and went into a solitary place. David says, "Early will I seek thee; thou shalt early hear my voice." Mary Magdalene came to the sepulcher while it was yet dark. Family prayer loses much of its power and sweetness; and I can do no good to those who come to seek from me. The conscience feels guilty, the soul unfed, the lamp not trimmed. I feel it is far better to begin with God, to see his face first, to get my soul near him before it is near another. "When I awake I am still with Thee." If I have slept too long, or I am going on an early journey, or my time is in any way shortened, it is best to dress hurriedly and have a few minutes alone with God than to give up all for lost. But in general it is best to have at least one hour alone with God before engaging in anything else. I ought to spend the best hours of the day in communion with God. When I awake in the night I ought to rise and pray as David and John Welch.

McCheyne believed in being always in prayer, and his fruitful life, short though that life was, affords an illustration of the power that comes from long and frequent visits to the secret place where we keep tryst with our Lord.

Men of McCheyne's stamp are needed today -- praying men, who know how to give themselves to the greatest task demanding their time and their attention; men who can give their whole heart to the holy task of intercession, men who can pray through. God's cause is committed to men; God commits himself to men. Praying men are the deputies of God; they do his work and carry out his plans.
We are obliged to pray if we are citizens of God's kingdom. Prayerlessness is expatriation, or worse, from God's kingdom. It is outlawry a high crime, a constitutional breach. The Christian who relegates prayer to a subordinate place in his life soon loses whatever spiritual zeal he may have once possessed, and the church that makes little of prayer cannot maintain vital piety, and is powerless to advance the Gospel. The gospel cannot live, fight, conquer without prayer -- prayer unceasing, instant, and ardent.

Little prayer is the characteristic of a backslidden age and of a backslidden church. Whenever there is little praying in the pulpit or in the pew, spiritual bankruptcy is imminent and inevitable.
The cause of God has no commercial age, no cultured age, no age of education, no age of money. But it has one golden age, and that is the age of prayer. When its leaders are men of prayer, when prayer is the prevailing element of worship, like the incense giving continual fragrance to its service, then the cause of God will be triumphant.

Better praying and more of it, that is what we need. We need holier men, and more of them, holier women, and more of them, to pray -- women like Hannah, who, out of their greatest griefs and temptations brewed their greatest prayers. Through prayer Hannah found her relief.

Everywhere the church was backslidden and apostate, her foes were victorious. Hannah gave herself to prayer, and in sorrow she multiplied her praying. She saw a great revival born of her praying. When the whole nation was oppressed, prophet and priest Samuel was born to establish a new line of priesthood, and her praying warmed into life a new life for God. Everywhere religion revived and flourished. God, true to his promise, "Ask of me," heard and answered, sending a new day of holy gladness to revive his people.

So once more, let us apply the emphasis and repeat that the great need of the church in this and all ages is men of such commanding faith, of such unsullied holiness, of such marked spiritual vigor and consuming zeal, that they will work spiritual revolutions through their mighty praying.

Natural ability and educational advantages do not figure as factors in this matter; but a capacity for faith, the ability to pray, the power of a thorough consecration, the ability of self-denegration, an absolute losing of one's self in God's glory and an ever present and insatiable yearning and seeking after all the fullness of God. Such pray-ers can set the church ablaze for God, not in a noisy, showy way, but with an intense and quiet heat that melts and moves everything for God.

And, to return to the vital point, secret praying is the test, the gauge, the conserver of man's relation to God. The prayer chamber, while it is the test of the sincerity of our devotion to God, becomes also the measure of the devotion. The self-denial, the sacrifices which we make for our prayer-chambers, the frequency of our visits to that hallowed place of meeting with the Lord, the lingering to stay, the loathness to leave, are values which we put on communion alone with God, the price we pay for the Spirit's trysting hours of heavenly love.

The prayer chamber conserves our relation to God. It hems every raw edge; it tucks up every flowing and entangling garment; girds up every fainting loin. The sheet-anchor holds not the ship more surely and safely than the prayer chamber holds to God. Satan has to break our hold on, and close up our way to the prayer chambers, ere he can break our hold on God or close up our way to heaven.
Be not afraid to pray; to pray is right;
Pray if thou canst with hope, but ever pray, 
Though hope be weak or sick with long delay; 
Pray in the darkness if there be no light;
And if for any wish thou dare not pray
Then pray to God to cast that wish away.