At the outset of New Year 2013, let me take this time to give thanks to the God Almighty for the way in which He is leading each of us in a tremendous way.
Also I am taking this opportunity to express my gratitude to all my readers and visitors for their relentless support by visiting and expressing their feelings through the comment columns. I continue to seek my Lord’s guidance and help in to go forward in this sin stricken world.
Let me begin this year’s writings with an important or vital issue all of us need to note. That is nothing but PRAYER.
Here is a must read article written by the 20th century Christian writer E M Bounds.
This is an adaptation from the book "A TREASURY OF PRAYER"—The Best of E M Bounds, compiled and condensed by yet another famous Christian writer Leonard Ravenhill.
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| Pic. Credit: mpbonline.org |
The Reality of Prayer
By E M Bounds
“Non-praying is lawlessness, discord, anarchy. Prayer, in the moral government of God, is a
strong and far reaching as the law of gravitation in the material world, and it
is necessary as gravitation to hold things in their proper atmosphere and in
life.
The space occupied by prayer in the Sermon on the Mount
bespeaks its estimate by Christ and the importance it holds in His system. Many important principles are discussed in a
verse or two. The sermon consists of one
hundred and eleven verses, and eighteen are about prayer directly, and other
indirectly.
Prayer was one of the cardinal principles of piety in every
dispensation and to every child of God.
It did not pertain to the business of Christ to originate duties, but to
recover, to recaste to spiritualize, and to re-in force those duties which are
cardinal and original.
With Moses the great features of prayer are prominent. He never beats the air nor fights a sham
battle. The most serious and strenuous
business of his serious strenuous life was prayer. He is as much at it with the earnestness of
his soul.
Intimate as he was with God, his intimacy did not abate the
necessity of prayer. This intimacy only
brought clearer insight into the nature and necessity of prayer, and led him to
see the greater obligations to prayer, and to discover the larger results of
praying. In reviewing one of the crises
through which Israel passed, when the very existence of the nation was in
peril, he writes: “I fell down before the Lord forty days and forty
nights.” Wonderful praying and wonderful
results! Moses knew how to do wonderful praying, and God
knew how to give wonderful results.
The whole force of Bible statement is to increase our faith
in the doctrine that prayer affects God, secures favor from God, which can be
secured in no other way, and which will not be bestowed by God if we do not
pray. The whole canon of Bible teaching is to
illustrate the great truth that God bears and answers prayer. One of the great purposes of God in His Book
is to impress upon us indelibly the great importance, the priceless value, and
the absolute necessity of asking God for the things we need for time and
eternity. He urges us by every
consideration, and presses and warns us by very interest. He points us to His own Son, turned over to
us for our good, as His pledge that prayer will be answered, teaching us that
God is our Father, able to do all things for us and to give all things to us,
much more that earthly parents are able or willing to do for their children.
Let us thoroughly understand ourselves and understand, also,
this great business of prayer. Our one
great business is prayer, and we will never do it well unless we fasten to it
by all binding force. We will never do it
well without arranging the best conditions of doing it well. Satan has suffered so much by good praying
that all his wily, shrewd and ensnaring devices will be used to cripple its
performances.
We must, by all the fastenings we can find, cable ourselves to
prayer. To be loose in time and place is
to open the door to Satan. To be exact,
prompt, unswerving, and careful in even the little things, is to buttress
ourselves against the evil one.
Prayer, by all the fastening we can find, cable ourselves to
prayer. To be loose in time and place is
to open the door to satan. To be exact,
prompt, unswerving and careful in even the little things, is to buttress
ourselves against the evil one.
Prayer, by God’s very oath, is put in the very stories of
God’s foundations, as eternal as its companion.
“And men shall pray for him continually.” This is the eternal conditions which advances
His cause, and makes it powerfully aggressive.
Men are to always pray for it.
Its strength, beauty and aggression lie in their prayers. Its power lies simply in its power to
pray. No power is found elsewhere but in
its ability to pray, “For my house shall
be called the house of prayer for all people.”
It is based on prayer, and carried on by the same means.
Prayer is a privilege, a sacred, princely privilege. Prayer is a duty, and obligation most
binding, and most imperative, which should hold us to it. But prayer is more than a privilege, more
than a duty. It is a means, an
instrument, a condition. Not to pray is
to lose much more than to fail in the exercise and enjoyment of a high or sweet
privilege. Not to pray is to fail among
lines far more important than even the violation of an obligation.
Prayer is the appointed condition of getting God’s aid. This aid is a manifold and illimitable as
God’s ability, and as varied and exhaust-less is this aid as man’s need. Prayer is the avenue through which God
supplies man’s wants.
Prayer is the channel through which all good flows from God
to man, and all good from men to men.
God is the Christian’s Father.
Asking and giving are in that relation.
Man is the one, more immediately concerned in this great
work of praying. It ennobles man’s
reason to empty it in prayer. The office
and work of prayer is the divinest engagement of man’s reason. Prayer makes man’s reason to shine. Intelligence of the highest order approves
prayer. He is the wisest man who prays
the most and the best. Prayer is the
school of wisdom as well as of piety.
Prayer is not a picture to handle, to admire, to look
at. It is not beauty, coloring, shape,
attitude, imagination, or genius. These
things do not pertain to its character or conduct. It is not poetry or music; its inspiration
and melody come from heaven. Prayer
belongs to the Spirit, and at times it possesses the spirit and stirs the
spirit with high and holy purposes and resolves.
The possibilities and necessity of prayer are graven in the
eternal foundations of the Gospel. The
relation that is established between the Father and the Son and decreed
covenant between the two has prayer as the base of its existence, and the
conditions of the advance and success of the gospel. Prayer is the condition by which all foes are
to be overcome and all the inheritance is to be possessed.
These are axiomatic truths, though they may be very homely
ones. But these are the times when Bible
axioms need to be stressed, pressed, iterated and reiterated. The very air is
rife with influences, practices and theories which sap foundations, and the
most veritable truths and the most self-evident axioms go down by insidious and
invisible attacks.
More than this: the tendency of these times is to an
ostentatious parade of doing, which enfeebles the life and dissipates
the spirit of praying. There may be
kneeling, and there may be standing in prayerful attitude. There may be much bowing of the head and yet
there may be no serious, real praying.
Prayer has in its keeping the very heart of worship.
Who can approach into God’s presence in prayer? Who can come before the great God, Maker of
all worlds, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who holds in His hand
all good, and who is all-powerful and able to do all things? Man’s approach to
this great God—what lowliness, what truth, what cleanness of hands, and purity
of heart is needed and demanded!
Definition of prayer scarcely belongs to Bible range at any
point.
Everywhere we are impressed that it is more important and
urgent that men pray, than that they be skilled in the homiletic didactics of
prayer.
This is a thing of the heart, not of the schools. It is more of feeling than of words.
Praying is the best school in which to learn to pray, prayer
the best dictionary to define the art and nature of praying.
We repeat and reiterate.
Prayer is not a mere habit, captivated by custom and memory, something
which must be gone through with, its value depending upon the decency and
perfection of the performance. Prayer is
not a duty which must be performed, to ease obligation and to quiet conscience.
Prayer is not mere privilege, a sacred indulgence to be
taken advantage of, at leisure, at
pleasure, at will, and no serious loss attending its omission.
Prayer is a solemn service due to God, an adoration, a
worship, an approach to God for some request, the presenting of some desire,
the expression of some need to Him, who, as a father, finds His greatest
pleasure in relieving the wants and granting the desires of His children.
Prayer is the child’s request, not to the winds, nor to the world,
but to the Father.
Prayer is the outstretched arms of the child for the
Father’s help.
Prayer is the child’s cry calling to the Father’s ear, the
Father’s heart, the Father’s ability, which the Father is to hear, the Father
is to feel, and which the Father is to relieve.
Prayer is the seeking of God’s great and greatest good,
which will not come if we do not pray.
Prayer is an ardent and believing cry to God for some
specific thing. God’s rule is to answer
prayer by giving the specific thing asked for.
With it may come much of other gifts and graces.
Strength, serenity, sweetness, and faith may come as the
bearers of the gifts. But even they come
because God hears and answers prayer.
Revelation does not deal in philosophical details, nor
verbal niceties and hair-splitting distinctions. It unfolds relationships, declares
principles, and enforces duties. The
heart must define, the experience must realize.
Paul came on the stage too late to define prayer. That which had been so well done by
patriarchs and prophets needed no return to dictionaries. Christ is himself the illustration and
definition of prayer. He prayed as man
had never prayed.
He put prayer on a higher basis, with grander results and
simpler being that it had ever known.
He taught Paul how to pray by the revelation of himself,
which is the first call to prayer, and the first lesson in praying.
Prayer, like love, is too ethereal and too heavenly to be
held in the gross rams of chilly definitions.
It belongs to heaven, and to the heart, and not to words and ideas only.
Prayer is no petty invention of man, a fancied relief for
fancied ills.
Prayer is no dreary performance, dead and death dealing, but
is God’s enabling act for man, living and life-giving, joy and joy-giving.
Prayer is the contact of a living soul with God. In prayer God stoops to kiss man, to bless
man, and to aid man in everything that
God can devise or man can need.
Prayer fills man’s
emptiness with God’s fullness. Prayer
fills man’s poverty with God’s
riches. Prayer puts away man’s
weakness with the coming of God’s strength.
It banishes man’s littleness with God’s greatness. Prayer
is God’s plan to supply man’s
great and continuous need with God’s great and continuous abundance.
What is this prayer to which men are called? It is not a
mere form, a child’s play. It is
serious, difficult work, the manliest, the mightiest work, the divinest work
which man can do.
Prayer lifts men out of the earthliness and links them with
the heavenlies. Men are never nearer
heaven , nearer God, never more God-like, never in deeper sympathy and truer
partnership with Jesus Christ, than when praying. Love, philanthropy, holy affiances, all of
them helpful and tender for men—are born and perfected by prayer.
Prayer is not merely a question of duty, but of
salvation. Are men saved who are not men
of prayer? Is not the gift, the
inclination, the habit of prayer, one of the elements or characteristics of
salvation? Can it be possible to be in affinity with Jesus Christ and not be
prayerful? Is it possible to have the
Holy Spirit and not have the spirit of prayer?
Is it possible to have the new birth and not be born to prayer? Is not
the life of the Spirit and the life of prayer coordinate and consistent? Can brotherly love be in the heart which is
unschooled in prayer?
We have two kinds of prayer named in the New
Testament—prayer and supplication.
Prayer denotes prayer in general. Supplication is more intense and more special
form of prayer. These two. Supplication and prayer, ought to be combined. Then we would have devotion in its widest and
sweetest form, and supplication with its most earnest and personal sense of
need.
“Prayer gives us eyes to see
God. Prayer is seeing God.” The prayer life is knowledge without and
within. All vigilance without, all vigilance within. There can be no intelligent prayer without
knowledge within. Our inner condition
and our inner needs must be felt and known.
It takes prayer to minister.
It takes life, the highest form of life, to minister. Prayer is the highest intelligence, the
profoundest wisdom, the most vital the most joyous, the most efficacious, the most
powerful of all vocations. It is life,
radiant, transporting, eternal life.
Away with dry forms, with dead, cold habits of prayer! Away with sterile
routine, with senseless performances and petty playthings in prayer!
Let us get at the serious work, the chief business of men,
that of prayer. Let us work at it
skillfully.
Let us seek to be expert in this great work of praying. Let us be master-workmen in this high art of
praying.
Let us be so in the habit of prayer, so devoted to prayer,
so filled with its rich spices, so ardent by its holy flame, that all heaven
and earth will be perfumed by its aroma, and nations yet in the womb will be
blessed by our prayers. Heaven will be
fuller and brighter in glorious inhabitants; earth will be better prepared for
its bridal day, and hell robbed of many of its victims, because we have lived
to pray.
Poverty of spirit enters into true praying. “Blessed are the poor in sprit, for theirs is
the kingdom of heaven.” “The poor” means
paupers, beggars, those who live on the bounty of others, who live by
begging. Christ’s people live by
asking. “Prayer is the Christian’s vital
breath.” It is his affluent inheritance,
his daily annuity.
In His own example, Christ illustrates the nature and
necessity of prayer. Everywhere He declares
that he who is on God’s mission in this world will pray. He is an illustrious example of the principle
that the more devoted the man is to God, the more prayerful will he be. The more divine the man, the more of the
Spirit of the Father and of the Son will he receive.
In the great events and crowning periods of the life of
Jesus we find Him in prayer—at the beginning of His ministry, at the fords of
the Jordan, when the Holy Spirit descended upon Him; just prior to the
transfiguration, and in the Garden of Gethsemane. Well do the words of Peter come in here: “Leaving us an example that ye should follow
in his steps.”
There is an important principle of prayer found in some of
the miracles of Christ. It is the
progressive nature of the answer to prayer.
Not at once does God always give the full answer to prayer but rather
progressively, step by step. Mark 8:22
describes a case which illustrates this important truth, too often overlooked.
What are the limitations of prayer? How far do its benefits
and possibilities reach? What part of
God’s dealings with man and with man’s world, is unaffected by prayer? Do the possibilities of prayer cover all
temporal and spiritual good? The answers
to these questions are of transcendental importance. The answer will gauge the effort and results
of our praying. The answer will greatly enhance
the value of prayer, or will greatly depress prayer. The answers to these important questions are
fully covered by Paul’s words on prayer:
“Be careful for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication,
with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known unto God” (Phil. 4:6).
“Christ is all. We
are complete in Him. He is the answer to
every need, the perfect Saviour. H needs
no decoration to heighten His beauty, no prop to increase His stability, no
girding to perfect His strength. Who can
gild refined gold, whiten the snow, perfume the rose, or heighten the colors of
the summer sunset? Who will prop the
mountains or help the great deep? It is
not Christ and philosophy, nor Christ and money, nor civilization, nor
diplomacy, nor science, nor organization.
It is Christ alone. He trod the
wine press alone. His own arm brought
salvation. He is enough. He is the comfort, the strength, the wisdom,
the righteousness, the sanctification of all men.” —C. L. Chilton
Source: Bethany House Publishers
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