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.