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POWER THROUGH PRAYER
          by Edward M. Bounds

(copyright expired)  ISBN: 0-8010-0584-1

Available in print-media from
Baker Book House

Keyed into electronic media by
Clyde C. Price, Jr.,  
email:    76616.3452@compuserve.com
P.O.Box 667, Red Oak, GA 30272-0667 USA


CONTENTS

1    Men of Prayer Needed
2    Our sufficiency Is of God
3    The Letter Killeth
4    Tendencies to Be Avoided
5    Prayer, the Great Essential
6    A Praying Ministry Successful
7    Much Time Should Be Given to Prayer
8    Examples of Praying Men
9    Begin the Day with Prayer
10   Prayer and Devotion United
11   An Example of Devotion
12   Heart Preparation Necessary
13   Grace from the Heart Rather than the Head
14   Unction a Necessity
15   Unction, the Mark of True Gospel Preaching
16   Much Prayer the Price of Unction
17   Prayer Marks Spiritual Leadership
18   Preachers Need the Prayers of the People
19   Deliberation Necessary to Largest Results from Prayer
20   A Praying Pulpit Begets a Praying Pew


     Recreation to a minister must be as whetting is with
the mower - that is, to be used only so far as is necessary
for his work.  May a physician in plague-time take any more
relaxation or recreation than is necessary for his life,
when so many are expecting his help in a case of life and
death?  Will you stand by and see sinners gasping under the
pangs of death, and say:  "God doth not require me to  make
myself a drudge to save them"?  Is this the voice of
ministerial or Christian compassion or rather of sensual
laziness and diabolical cruelty?
                         --Richard Baxter


     Misemployment of time is injurious to the mind.  In
illness I have looked back with self-reproach on days spent
in my study; I was wading through history and poetry and
monthly journals, but I was in my study!  Another man's
trifling is notorious to all observers, but what am I
doing?  Nothing, perhaps, that has reference to the
spiritual good of my congregation.  Be much in retirement
and prayer.  Study the honor and glory of your Master.
                         --Richard Cecil

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1         MEN OF PRAYER NEEDED

Study the universal holiness of life.  Your whole
usefulness depends on this, for your sermons last but an
hour or two; your life preaches all the week.  If Satan can
only make a covetous minister a lover of praise, of
pleasure, of good eating, he has ruined your ministry.
Give yourself to prayer, and get your texts, your thoughts,
your words from God.  Luther spent his best three hours in
prayer.
                         --Robert Murray McCheyne


     We are constantly on a stretch, if not on a strain, to
devise new methods, new plans, new organizations to advance
the Church and secure enlargement and efficiency for the
gospel.  This trend of the day has a tendency to lose sight
of the man or sink the man in the plan or organization.
God's plan is to make much of the man, far more of him than
of anything else.  Men are God's method.  The Church is
looking for better methods; God is looking for better men.
"There was a man sent from God whose name was John."  The
dispensation that heralded and prepared the way for Christ
was bound up in that man John.  "Unto us a child is born,
unto us a son is given."  The world's salvation comes out
of that cradled Son.  When Paul appeals to the personal
character of the men who rooted the gospel in the world, he
solves the mystery of their success.  The glory and
efficiency of the gospel is staked on the men who proclaim
it.  When God declares that "the eyes of the Lord run to
and fro throughout the whole earth, to show himself strong
in the behalf of them whose heart is perfect toward him,"
he declares the necessity of men and his dependence on them
as a channel through which to exert his power upon the
world.  This vital, urgent truth is one that this age of
machinery is apt to forget.  The forgetting of it is as
baneful on the work of God as would be the striking of the
sun from his sphere.  Darkness, confusion, and death would
ensue.

     What the Church needs today is not more machinery or
better, not new organizations or more and novel methods,
but men whom the Holy Ghost can use - men of prayer, men
mighty in prayer.  The Holy Ghost does not flow through
methods, but through men.  He does not come on machinery,
but on men.  He does not anoint plans, but men - men of
prayer.

     An eminent historian has said that the accidents of
personal character have more to do with the revolutions of
nations than either philosophic historians or democratic
politicians will allow.  This truth has its application in
full tot he gospel of Christ, the character and conduct of
the followers of Christ - Christianize the world,
transfigure nations and individuals.  Of the preachers of
the gospel it is eminently true.

     The character as well as the fortunes of the gospel is
committed to the preacher.  He makes or mars the message
from God to man.  The preacher is the golden pipe through
which the divine oil flows.  The pipe must not only be
golden, but open and flawless, that the oil may have a
full, unhindered, unwasted flow.

     The man makes the preacher.  God must make the man.
The messenger is, if possible, more than the message.  The
preacher is more than the sermon.  The preacher makes the
sermon.  As the life-giving milk from the mother's bosom is
but the mother's life, so all the preacher says is
tinctured, impregnated by what the preacher is.  The
treasure is in earthen vessels, and the taste of the vessel
impregnates and may discolor.  The man, the whole man, lies
behind the sermon.  Preaching is not the performance of an
hour.  It is the outflow of a life.  It takes twenty years
to make a sermon, because it takes twenty years to make the
man.  The true sermon is a thing of life.  The sermon grows
because the man grows.  The sermon is forceful because the
man is forceful.  The sermon is holy because he man is
holy.  The sermon is full of the divine unction because the
man is full of the divine unction.

     Paul termed it "My gospel;" not that he had degraded
it by his personal eccentricities or diverted it by selfish
appropriation, but the gospel was put into the heart and
lifeblood of the man Paul, as a personal trust to be
executed by his Pauline traits, to be set aflame and
empowered by the fiery energy of his fiery soul.  Paul's
sermons - what were they?  Where are they?  Skeletons,
scattered fragments, afloat on the sea of inspiration!  But
the man Paul, greater than his sermons, lives forever, in
full form, feature and stature, with his molding hand on
the Church.  The preaching is but a voice.  The voice in
silence dies, the text is forgotten, the sermon fades from
memory; the preacher lives.

     The sermon cannot rise in its life-giving forces above
the man.  Dead men give out dead sermons, and dead sermons
kill.  Everything depends on the spiritual character of the
preacher.  Under the Jewish dispensation the high priest
had inscribed in jeweled letters on a golden frontlet:
"Holiness to the Lord."  So every preacher in Christ's
ministry must be molded into and mastered by this same holy
motto.  It is a crying shame for the Christian ministry to
fall lower in holiness of character and holiness of aim
than the Jewish priesthood.  Jonathan Edwards said:  "I
went on with my eager pursuit after more holiness and
conformity to Christ.  The heaven I desired was a heaven of
holiness."  The gospel of Christ does not move by popular
waves.  It has no self-propagating power.  It moves as the
men who have charge of it move.  The preacher must
impersonate the gospel.  Its divine, most distinctive
features must be embodied in him.  The constraining power
of love must be in the preacher as a projecting, eccentric,
an all-commanding, self-oblivious force.  The energy of
self-denial must be his being, his heart and blood and
bones.  He must go forth as a man among men, clothed with
humility, abiding in meekness, wise as a serpent, harmless
as a dove; the bonds of a servant with the spirit of a
king, a kind in high, royal, independent bearing, with the
simplicity and sweetness of a child.  The preacher must
throw himself, with all the abandon of a perfect,
self-emptying faith and a self-consuming zeal, into his
work for the salvation of men.  Hearty, heroic,
compassionate, fearless martyrs must the men be who take
hold of and shape a generation for God.  If they be timid
timeservers, place seekers, if they be men pleasers or men
fearers, if their faith has a weak hold on God or his Word,
if their denial be broken by any phase of self or the
world, they cannot take hold of the Church nor the world
for God.

     The preacher's sharpest and strongest preaching should
be to himself.  His most difficult, delicate, laborious,
and thorough work must be with himself.  The training of
the twelve was the great, difficult, and enduring work of
Christ.  Preachers are not sermon makers, but men makers
and saint makers, and he only is well-trained for this
business who has made himself a man and a saint.  It is not
great talents nor great learning nor great preachers that
God needs, but men great in holiness, great in faith, great
in love, great in fidelity, great for God - men always
preaching by holy sermons in the pulpit, by holy lives out
of it.  These can mold a generation for God.

     After this order, the early Christians were formed.
Men they were of solid mold, preachers after the heavenly
type - heroic, stalwart, soldierly, saintly.  Preaching
with them meant self-denying, self-crucifying, serious,
toilsome, martyr business.  They applied themselves to it
in a way that told on their generation, and formed in its
womb a generation yet unborn for God.  The preaching man is
to be the praying man.  Prayer is the preacher's mightiest
weapon.  An almighty force in itself, it gives life and
force to all.

     The real sermon is made in the closet.  The man -
God's man - is made in the closet.  His life and his
profoundest convictions were born in his secret communion
with God.  The burdened and tearful agony of his spirit,
his weightiest and sweetest messages were got when alone
with God.  Prayer makes the man; prayer makes the preacher;
prayer makes the pastor.

     The pulpit of this day is weak in praying.  The pride
of learning is against the dependent humility of prayer.
Prayer is with the pulpit too often only official - a
performance for the routine of service.  Prayer is not to
the modern pulpit the mighty force it was in Paul's life or
Paul's ministry.  Every preacher who does not make prayer a
mighty factor in his own life and ministry is weak as a
factor in God's work and is powerless to project God's
cause in this world.

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2         OUR SUFFICIENCY IS OF GOD

     But above all he excelled in prayer.  The inwardness
and weight of his spirit, the reverence and solemnity of
his address and behavior, and the fewness and fullness of
his words have often struck even strangers with admiration
as they used to reach others with consolation.  the most
awful, living, reverend frame I ever felt or beheld, I must
say, was his prayer.  And truly it was a testimony.  He
knew and lived nearer to the Lord than other men, for they
that know him most will see most reason to approach him
with reverence and fear.
                         --William Penn of George Fox


     The sweetest graces by a slight perversion may bear
the bitterest fruit.  The sun gives life, but sunstrokes
are death.  Preaching is to give life; it may kill.  The
preacher holds the keys; he may lock as well as unlock.
Preaching is God's great institution for the planting and
maturing of spiritual life.  When properly executed, its
benefits are untold; when wrongly executed, no evil can
exceed its damaging results.  It is an easy matter to
destroy the flock if the shepherd be unwary or the pasture
be destroyed, easy to capture the citadel if the watchmen
be asleep or the food and water be poisoned.  Invested with
such gracious prerogatives, exposed to so great evils,
involving so many grave responsibilities, it would be a
parody on the shrewdness of the devil and a libel on his
character and reputation if he did not bring his master
influences to adulterate the preacher and the preaching.
In face of all this, the exclamatory interrogatory of Paul,
"Who is sufficient for these things?" is never out of
order.

     Paul says: "Our sufficiency is of God, who also hath
made us able ministers of the new testament; not of the
letter, but of the spirit: for the letter killeth, but the
spirit giveth life."  The true ministry is God-touched,
God-enabled, and God-made.  The Spirit of God is on the
preacher in anointing power, the fruit of the Spirit is in
his heart, the Spirit of God has vitalized the man and the
word; his preaching gives life, gives life as the spring
gives life; gives life as the resurrection gives life;
gives ardent life as the summer gives ardent life; gives
fruitful life as the autumn gives fruitful life.  The
life-giving preacher is a man of God, whose heart is ever
athirst for God, whose soul is ever following hard after
God, whose eye is single to God, and in whom by the power
of God's Spirit the flesh and the world have been crucified
and his ministry is like the generous flood of a
life-giving river.

     The preaching that kills is nonspiritual preaching.
The ability of the preaching is not from God.  Lower
sources than God have given to it energy and stimulant.
The Spirit is not evident in the preacher nor his
preaching.  Many kinds of forces may be projected and
stimulated by preaching that kills, but they are not
spiritual forces.  They may resemble spiritual forces, but
are only the shadow, the counterfeit; life they may seem to
have, but the life is magnetized.  The preaching that kills
is the letter; shapely and orderly it may be, but it is the
letter still, the dry, husky letter, the empty, bald shell.
The letter may have the germ of life in it, but it has no
breath of spring to evoke it; winter seeds they are, as
hard as the winter's soil, as icy as the winter's air, no
thawing nor germinating by them.  This letter-preaching has
the truth.  But even divine truth has no life-giving energy
alone; it must be energized by the Spirit, with all God's
forces at its back.  Truth unquickened by God's Spirit
deadens as much as, or more than, error.  It may be the
truth without admixture; but without the Spirit its shade
and touch are deadly, its truth error, its light darkness.
The letter-preaching is unctionless, neither mellowed nor
oiled by the Spirit.  There may be tears, but tears cannot
run God's machinery; tears may be but summer's breath on a
snow-covered iceberg, nothing but surface slush.  Feelings
and earnestness there may be, but it is the emotion of the
actor and the earnestness of the attorney.  The preacher
may feel from the kindling of his own sparks, be eloquent
over his own exegesis, earnest in delivering the product of
his own brain; the professor may usurp the place and
imitate the fire of the apostle; brains and nerves may
serve the place and feign the work of God's Spirit, and by
these forces the letter may glow and sparkle like an
illumined text, but the glow and sparkle will be as barren
of life as the field sown with pearls.  The death-dealing
element lies back of the words, back of the sermon, back of
the occasion, back of the manner, back of the action.  The
great hindrance is in the preacher himself.  He has not in
himself the mighty life-creating forces.  There may be no
discount on his orthodoxy, honesty, cleanness, or
earnestness; but somehow the man, the inner man, in its
secret places has never broken down and surrendered to God,
his inner life is not a great highway for the transmission
of God's message, God's power.  Somehow self and not God
rules in the holy of holies.  Somewhere, all unconscious to
himself, some spiritual nonconductor has touched his inner
being, and the divine current has been arrested.  His inner
being has never felt its thorough spiritual bankruptcy, its
utter powerlessness; he has never learned to cry out with
an ineffable cry of self-despair and self-helplessness till
God's power and God's fire comes in and fills, purifies,
empowers.  Self-esteem, self-ability in some pernicious
shape has defamed and violated the temple which should be
held sacred for God.  Life-giving preaching costs the
preacher much - death to self, crucifixion to the world,
the travail of his own soul.  Crucified preaching only can
give life.  Crucified preaching can come only from a
crucified man.


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3         THE LETTER KILLETH

     During this affliction I was brought to examine my
life in relation to eternity closer than I had done when in
the enjoyment of health.  In this examination relative to
the discharge of my duties toward my fellow creatures as a
man,  a Christian minister,  and an officer of the Church,
I stood approved by my own conscience; but in relation to
my Redeemer and Savior the result was different.  My
returns of gratitude and loving obedience bear no
proportion to my obligations for redeeming, preserving, and
supporting me through the vicissitudes of life from infancy
to old age.  The coldness of my love to Him who first loved
me and has done so much for me overwhelmed and confused me;
and to complete my unworthy character, I had not only
neglected to improve the grace given to the extent of my
duty and privilege, but for want of improvement had, while
abounding in perplexing care and labor, declined from first
zeal and love.  I was confounded, humbled myself, implored
mercy, and renewed my covenant to strive and devote myself
unreservedly to the Lord.  --Bishop McKendree

     The preaching that kills may be, and often is,
orthodox - dogmatically, inviolably orthodox.  We love
orthodoxy.  It is good.  It is the best.  It is the clean,
clear-cut teaching of God's Word, the trophies won by truth
in its conflict with error, the levees which faith has
raised against the desolating floods of honest or reckless
misbelief or unbelief;  but orthodoxy, clear and hard as
crystal, suspicious and militant, may be but the letter
well-shaped, well-named, and well-learned, the letter which
kills.  Nothing is so dead as a dead orthodoxy, too dead to
speculate, too dead to think, to study, or to pray.

     The preaching that kills may have insight and grasp of
principles, may be scholarly and critical in taste, may
have every minutiae of the derivation and grammar of the
letter, may be able to trim the letter into its perfect
pattern, and illume it as Plato and Cicero may be
illumined, may study it as a lawyer studies his text-books
to form his brief or to defend his case, and yet be like a
frost, a killing frost.  Letter-preaching may be eloquent,
enameled with poetry and rhetoric, sprinkled with prayer,
spiced with sensation, illumined by genius, and yet these
be but the massive or chaste, costly mountings, the rare
and beautiful flowers which coffin the corpse.  The
preaching which kills may be without scholarship, unmarked
by any freshness of thought or feeling, clothed in
tasteless generalities or vapid specialties, with style
irregular, slovenly, savoring neither of closet nor of
study, graced neither by thought, expression, or prayer.
Under such preaching how wide and utter the desolation!
how profound the spiritual death!

     This letter-preaching deals with the surface and
shadow of things, and not the things themselves.  It does
not penetrate the inner part.  It has no deep insight into,
no strong grasp of, the hidden life of God's Word.  It is
true to the outside, but the outside is the hull which must
be broken and penetrated for the kernel.  The letter may be
dressed so as to attract and be fashionable, but the
attraction is not toward God nor is the fashion for heaven.
The failure is in the preacher.  God has note made him.  He
has never been in the hands of God like clay in the hands
of the potter.  He has been busy about the sermon, its
thought and finish, its drawing and impressive forces; but
the deep things of God have never been sought, studied,
fathomed, experienced by him.  He has never stood before
"the throne high and lifted up," never heard the seraphim
song, never seen the vision nor felt the rush of that awful
holiness, and cried out in utter abandon and despair under
the sense of weakness and guilt, and had his life renewed,
his heart touched, purged, inflamed by the live coal from
God's altar.  His ministry may draw people to him, to the
Church, to the form and ceremony; but no true drawings to
God, no sweet, holy, divine communion induced.  The Church
has been frescoed but not edified, pleased but not
sanctified.  Life is suppressed; a chill is on the summer
air; the soil is baked.  The city of our God becomes the
city of the dead; the Church a graveyard, not an embattled
army.  Praise and prayer are stifled; worship is dead.  The
preacher and the preaching have helped sin, not holiness;
peopled hell, not heaven.

     Preaching which kills is prayerless preaching.
Without prayer the preacher creates death, and not life.
The preacher who is feeble in prayer is feeble in
life-giving forces.  The preacher who has retired prayer as
a conspicuous and largely prevailing element in his own
character has shorn his preaching of its distinctive
life-giving power.  Professional praying there is and will
be, but professional praying helps the preaching to its
deadly work.  Professional praying chills and kills both
preaching and praying.  Much of the lax devotion and lazy,
irreverent attitudes in congregational praying are
attributable to professional praying in the pulpit.  Long,
discursive, dry, and inane are the prayers in many pulpits.
Without unction or heart, they fall like a killing frost on
all the graces of worship.  Death-dealing prayers they are.
Every vestige of devotion has perished under their breath.
The deader they are the longer they grow.  A plea for short
praying, live praying, real heart praying, praying by the
Holy Spirit - direct, specific, ardent, simple, unctuous in
the pulpit - is in order.  A school to teach preachers how
to pray, as God counts praying, would be more beneficial to
true piety, true worship, and true preaching than all
theological schools.

     Stop!  Pause!  Consider!  Where are we?  What are we
doing?  Preaching to kill?  Praying to kill?  Praying to
God!  the great God, the Maker of all worlds, the Judge of
all men!  What reverence!  what simplicity!  what
sincerity!  what truth in the inward parts is demanded!
How real we must be!  How hearty!  Prayer to God the
noblest exercise, the loftiest effort of man, the most real
thing!  Shall we not discard forever accursed preaching
that kills and prayer that kills, and do the real thing,
the mightiest thing - prayerful praying, life-creating
preaching, bring the mightiest force to bear on heaven and
earth and draw on God's exhaustless and open treasure for
the need and beggary of man?


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4         TENDENCIES TO BE AVOIDED

     Let us often look at Brainerd in the woods of America
pouring out his very soul before God for the perishing
heathen without whose salvation nothing could make him
happy.  Prayer - secret, fervent, believing prayer - lies
at the root of all personal godliness.  A competent
knowledge of the language where a missionary lives, a mild
and winning temper, a heart given up to God in closet
religion - these, these are the attainments which, more
than all knowledge, or all other gifts, will fit us to
become the instruments of God in the great work of human
redemption.
                         --Carey's Brotherhood, Serampore

     There are two extreme tendencies in the ministry.  The
one is to shut itself out from intercourse with the people.
The monk, the hermit were illustrations of this; they shut
themselves out from men to be more with God.  They failed,
of course.  Our being with God is of use only as we expend
its priceless benefits on men.  This age, neither with
preacher nor with people, is much intent on God.  Our
hankering is not that way.  We shut ourselves to our study,
we become students, bookworms, Bible worms, sermon makers,
noted for literature, thought, and sermons; but the people
and God, where are they?  Out of heart, out of mind.
Preachers who are great thinkers, great students must be
the greatest of prayers, or else they will be the greatest
of backsliders, heartless professionals, rationalistic,
less than the least of preachers in God's estimate.

     The other tendency is to thoroughly popularize the
ministry.  He is no longer God's man, but a man of affairs,
of the people.  He prays not, because his mission is to the
people.  If he can move the people, create an interest, a
sensation in favor of religion, an interest in Church work
- he is satisfied.  His personal relation to God is no
factor in his work.  Prayer has little or no place in his
plans.  The disaster and ruin of such a ministry cannot be
computed by earthly arithmetic.  What the preacher is in
prayer to God, for himself, for his people, so is his power
for real good to men, so is his true fruitfulness, his true
fidelity to God, to man, for time, for eternity.

     It is impossible for the preacher to keep his spirit
in harmony with the divine nature of his high calling
without much prayer.  That the preacher by dint of duty and
laborious fidelity to the work and routine of the ministry
can keep himself in trim and fitness is a serious mistake.
Even sermon-making, incessant and taxing as an art, as a
duty, as a work, or as a pleasure, will engross and harden,
will estrange the heart, by neglect of prayer, from God.
The scientist loses God in nature.  The preacher may lose
God in his sermon.

     Prayer freshens the heart of the preacher, keeps it in
tune with God and in sympathy with the people, lifts his
ministry out of the chilly air of a profession, fructifies
routine and moves every wheel with the facility and power
of a divine unction.

     Mr. Spurgeon says: "Of course the preacher is above
all others distinguished as a man of prayer.  He prays as
an ordinary Christian, else he were a hypocrite.  He prays
more than ordinary Christians, else he were disqualified
for the office he has undertaken.  If you as ministers are
not very prayerful, you are to be pitied.  If you become
lax in sacred devotion, not only will you need to be pitied
but your people also, and the day cometh in which you shall
be ashamed and confounded.  All our libraries and studies
are mere emptiness compared with our closets.  Our seasons
of fasting and prayer at the Tabernacle have been high days
indeed; never has heaven's gate stood wider; never have our
hearts been nearer the central Glory."

     The praying which makes a prayerful ministry is not a
little praying put in as we put flavor to give it a
pleasant smack, but the praying must be in the body, and
form the blood and bones.  Prayer is no petty duty, put
into a corner; no piecemeal performance made out of the
fragments of time which have been snatched from business
and other engagements of life; but it means that the best
of our time, the heart of our time and strength must be
given.  It does not mean the closet absorbed in the study
or swallowed up in the activities of ministerial duties;
but it means the closet first, the study and activities
second, both study and activities freshened and made
efficient by the closet.  Prayer that affects one's
ministry must give tone to one's life.  The praying which
gives color and bent to character is no pleasant, hurried
pastime.  It must enter as strongly into the heart and life
as Christ's "strong crying and tears" did; must draw out
the soul into an agony of desire as Paul's did; must be an
inwrought fire and force like the "effectual, fervent
prayer" of James; must be of that quality which, when put
into the golden censer and incensed before God, works
mighty spiritual throes and revolutions.

     Prayer is not a little habit pinned on to us while we
were tied to our mother's apron strings; neither is it a
little decent quarter of a minute's grace said over an
hour's dinner, but it is most serious work of our most
serious years.  It engages more of time and appetite than
our longest dinings or richest feasts.  The prayer that
makes much of our preaching must be made much of.  The
character of our praying will determine the character of
our preaching.  Light praying will make light preaching.
Prayer makes preaching strong, gives it unction, and makes
it stick.  In every ministry weighty for good, prayer has
always been a serious business.

     The preacher must be preeminently a man of prayer.
His heart must graduate in the school of prayer.  In the
school of prayer only can the heart learn to preach.  No
learning can make up for the failure to pray.  No
earnestness, no diligence, no study, no gifts will supply
its lack.

     Talking to men for God is a great thing, but talking
to God for men is greater still.  He will never talk well
and with real success to men for God who has not learned
well how to talk to God for men.  More than this,
prayerless words in the pulpit and out of it are deadening
words.

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5         PRAYER, THE GREAT ESSENTIAL

     You know the value of prayer:  it is precious beyond
all price.  Never, never neglect it.
                         --Sir Thomas Buxton

     Prayer is the first thing, the second thing, the third
thing necessary to a minister.  Pray, then, my dear
brother; pray, pray, pray.
                         --Edward Payson

     Prayer, in the preacher's life, in the preacher's
study, in the preacher's pulpit, must be a conspicuous and
an all-impregnating force and an all-coloring ingredient.
It must play no secondary part, be no mere coating.  To him
it is given to be with his Lord "all night in prayer."  The
preacher, to train himself in self-denying prayer, is
charged to look to his Master, who, "rising up a great
while before day, went out, and departed into a solitary
place, and there prayed."  The preacher's study ought to be
a closet, a Bethel, an altar, a vision, and a ladder, that
every thought might ascend heavenward ere it went manward;
that every part of the sermon might be scented by the air
of heaven and made serious, because God was in the study.

     As the engine never moves until the fire is kindled,
so preaching, with all its machinery, perfection, and
polish, is at a dead standstill, as far as spiritual
results are concerned, till prayer has kindled and created
the steam.  The texture, fineness, and strength of the
sermon is as so much rubbish unless the mighty impulse of
prayer is in it, through it, and behind it.  The preacher
must, by prayer, put God in the sermon.  The preacher must,
by prayer, move God toward the people before he can move
the people to God by his words.  The preacher must have had
audience and ready access to God before he can have access
to the people.  An open way to God for the preacher is the
surest pledge of an open way to the people.

     It is necessary to iterate and reiterate that prayer,
as a mere habit, as a performance gone through by routine
or in a professional way, is a dead and rotten thing.  Such
praying has no connection with the praying for which we
plead.  We are stressing true praying, which engages and
sets on fire every high element of the preacher's being -
prayer which is born of vital oneness with Christ and the
fullness of the Holy Ghost, which springs from the deep,
overflowing fountains of tender compassion, deathless
solicitude for man's eternal good; a consuming zeal for the
glory of God; a thorough conviction of the preacher's
difficult and delicate work and of the imperative need of
God's mightiest help.  Praying grounded on these solemn and
profound convictions is the only true praying.  Preaching
backed by such praying is the only preaching which sows the
seeds of eternal life in human hearts and builds men up for
heaven.

     It is true that there may be popular preaching,
pleasant preaching, taking preaching, preaching of much
intellectual, literary, and brainy force, with its measure
and form of good, with little or no praying; but the
preaching which secures God's end in preaching must be born
of prayer from text to exordium, delivered with the energy
and spirit of prayer, followed and made to germinate, and
kept in vital force in the hearts of the hearers by the
preacher's prayers, long after the occasion has passed.

     We may excuse the spiritual poverty of our preaching
in many ways, but the true secret will be found in the lack
of urgent prayer for God's presence in the power of the
Holy Spirit.  There are preachers innumerable who can
deliver masterful sermons after their order; but the
effects are short-lived and do not enter as a factor at all
into the regions of the spirit where the fearful war
between God and Satan, heaven and hell, is being waged
because they are not made powerfully militant and
spiritually victorious by prayer.

     The preachers who gain mighty results for God are the
men who have prevailed in their pleadings with God ere
venturing to plead with men.  The preachers who are the
mightiest in their closets with God are the mightiest in
their pulpits with men.

     Preachers are human folks, and are exposed to and
often caught by the strong driftings of human currents.
Praying is spiritual work; and human nature does not like
taxing, spiritual work.  Human nature wants to sail to
heaven under a favoring breeze, a full, smooth sea.  Prayer
is humbling work.  It abases intellect and pride, crucifies
vainglory, and signs our spiritual bankruptcy, and all
these are hard for flesh and blood to bear.  It is easier
not to pray than to bear them.  So we come to one of the
crying evils of these times, maybe of all times - little or
no praying.  Of these two evils, perhaps little praying is
worse than no praying.  Little praying is a kind of
make-believe, a salve for the conscience, a farce and a
delusion.

     The little estimate we put on prayer is evident from
the little time we give to it.  The time given to prayer by
the average preacher scarcely counts in the sum of the
daily aggregate.  Not infrequently the preacher's only
praying is by his bedside in his nightdress, ready for bed
and soon in it, with, perchance, the addition of a few
hasty snatches of prayer ere he is dressed in the morning.
How feeble, vain, and little is such praying compared with
the time and energy devoted to praying by holy men in and
out of the Bible!  How poor and mean our petty, childish
praying is beside the habits of the true men of God in all
ages!  To men who think praying their main business and
devote time to it according to this high estimate of its
importance does God commit the keys of his kingdom, and by
them does he work his spiritual wonders in this world.
Great praying is the sign and seal of God's great leaders
and the earnest of the conquering forces with which God
will crown their labors.

     The preacher is commissioned to pray as well as to
preach.  His mission is incomplete if he does not do both
well.  The preacher may speak with all the eloquence of men
and of angels; but unless he can pray with a faith which
draws all heaven to his aid, his preaching will be "as
sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal" for permanent
God-honoring, soul-saving uses.

@06

6         A PRAYING MINISTRY SUCCESSFUL

     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
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 them was the center 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.

@07

7         MUCH TIME SHOULD BE GIVEN TO PRAYER

     The great masters and teachers in the Christian
doctrine have always found in prayer their highest source
of illumination.  Not to go beyond the limits of the
English Church, it is recorded of Bishop Andrews that he
spent five hours daily on his knees.  The greatest
practical resolves that have enriched and beautified human
life in Christian times have been arrived at in prayer.
                         --Canon Liddon


     While many private prayers, in the nature of things,
must be short; while public prayers, as a rule, ought to be
short and condensed; while there is ample room for and
value put on ejaculatory prayer - yet in our private
communions with God time is a feature essential to its
value.  Much time spent with God is the secret of all
successful praying.  Prayer which is felt as a mighty force
is the mediate or immediate product of much time spent with
God.  Our short prayers owe their point and efficiency to
the long ones that have preceded them.  The short
prevailing prayer cannot be prayed by one who has not
prevailed with God in a mightier struggle of long
continuance.  Jacob's victory of faith could not have been
gained without that all-night wrestling.  God's
acquaintance is not made by pop calls.  God does not bestow
his gifts on the casual or hasty comers and goers.  Much
with God alone is the secret of knowing him and of
influence with him. He yields to the persistency of a faith
that knows him.  He bestows his richest gifts upon those
who declare their desire for and appreciation of those
gifts by the constancy as well as earnestness of their
importunity.  Christ, who in this as well as other things
is our Example, spent many whole nights in prayer.  His
custom was to pray much.  He had his habitual place to
pray.  Many long seasons of praying make up his history and
character.  Paul prayed day and night.  It took time from
very important interests for Daniel to pray three times a
day.  David's morning, noon, and night praying were
doubtless on many occasions very protracted.  While we have
no specific account of the time these Bible saints spent in
prayer, yet the indications are that they consumed much
time in prayer, and on some occasions long seasons of
praying was their custom.

     We would not have any think that the value of their
prayers is to be measured by the clock, but our purpose is
to impress on you minds the necessity of being much alone
with God; and that if this feature has not been produced by
our faith, then our faith is of a feeble and surface type.

     The men who have most fully illustrated Christ in
their character, and have most powerfully affected the
world for him, have been men who spent so much time with
God as to make it a notable feature of their lives.
Charles Simeon devoted the hours from four till eight in
the morning to God.  Mr. Wesley spent two hours daily in
prayer.  He began at four in the morning.  Of him, one who
knew him well wrote: "He thought prayer to be more his
business than anything else, and I have seen him come out
of his closet with a serenity of face next to shining."
John Fletcher stained the walls of his room by the breath
of his prayers.  Sometimes he would pray all night; always,
frequently, and with great earnestness.  His whole life was
a life of prayer.  "I would not rise from my seat,"  he
said,  "without lifting my heart to God."  His greeting to
a friend was always: "Do I meet you praying?"  Luther said:
"If I fail to spend two hours in prayer each morning, the
devil gets the victory through the day.  I have so much
business I cannot get on without spending three hours daily
in prayer."  He had a motto:  "He that has prayed well has
studied well."

     Archbishop Leighton was so much alone with God that he
seemed to be in a perpetual meditation.  "Prayer and praise
were his business and his pleasure,"  says his biographer.
Bishop Ken was so much with God that his soul was said to
be God-enamored.  He was with God before the clock struck
three every morning.  Bishop Asbury said: "I propose to
rise at four o'clock as often as I can and spend two hours
in prayer and meditation."  Samuel Rutherford, the
fragrance of whose piety is still rich, rose at three in
the morning to meet God in prayer.  Joseph Alleine arose at
four o'clock for his business of praying till eight.  If he
heard other tradesmen plying their business before he was
up, he would exclaim:  "O how this shames me!  Doth not my
Master deserve more than theirs?!  He who has learned this
trade well draws at will, on sight, and with acceptance of
heaven's unfailing bank.

     One of the holiest and among the most gifted of Scotch
preachers says:  "I ought to spend the best hours in
communion with God.  It is my noblest and most fruitful
employment, and is not to be thrust into a corner.  The
morning hours, from six to eight, are the most
uninterrupted and should be thus employed.  After tea is my
best hour, and that should be solemnly dedicated to God.  I
ought not to give up the good old habit of prayer before
going to bed; but guard must be kept against sleep.  When I
awake in the night, I ought to rise and pray.  A little
time after breakfast might be given to intercession."  This
was the praying plan of Robert McCheyne.  The memorable
Methodist band in their praying shame us.  "From four to
five in the morning, private prayer; from five to six in
the evening, private prayer."

     John Welch, the holy and wonderful Scotch preacher,
thought the day ill spent if he did not spend eight or ten
hours in prayer.  He kept a plaid that he might wrap
himself when he arose to pray at night.  His wife would
complain when she found him lying on the ground weeping.
He would reply: "O woman, I have the souls of three
thousand to answer for, and I know not how it is with many
of them!"

@08

8         EXAMPLES OF PRAYING MEN

     The act of praying is the very highest energy of which
the human mind is capable; praying, that is, with the total
concentration of the faculties.  The great mass of worldly
men and of learned men are absolutely incapable of prayer.
                    --Samuel Taylor Coleridge


     Bishop Wilson says:  "In H. Martyn's journal the
spirit of prayer, the time he devoted to the duty, and his
fervor in it are the first things which strike me."

     Payson wore the hard-wood boards into grooves where
his knees pressed so often and so long.  His biographer
says: "His continuing instant in prayer, be his
circumstances what they might, is the most noticeable fact
in his history, and points out the duty of all who would
rival his eminency.  To his ardent and persevering prayers
must no doubt be ascribed in a great measure his
distinguished and almost uninterrupted success."

     The Marquis DeRenty, to whom Christ was most precious,
ordered his servant to call him from his devotions at the
end of half an hour.  The servant at the time saw his face
through an aperture.  It was marked with such holiness that
he hated to arouse him.  His lips were moving, but he was
perfectly silent.  He waited until three half hours had
passed; then he called to him, when he arose from his
knees, saying that the half hour was so short when he was
communing with Christ.

     Brainerd said: "I love to be alone in my cottage,
where I can spend much time in prayer.

     William Bramwell is famous in Methodist annals for
personal holiness and for his wonderful success in
preaching and for the marvelous answers to his prayers.
For hours at a time he would pray.  He almost lived on his
knees.  He went over his circuits like a flame of fire.
The fire was kindled by the time he spent in prayer.  He
often spent as much as four hours in a single season of
prayer in retirement.

     Bishop Andrewes spent the greatest part of five hours
every day in prayer and devotion.

     Sir Henry Havelock always spent the first two hours of
each day alone with God.  If the encampment was struck at 6
A.M., he would rise at four.

     Earl Cairns rose daily at six o'clock to secure an
hour and a half for the study of the Bible and for prayer,
before conducting family worship at a quarter to eight.

     Dr. Judson's success in prayer is attributable to the
fact that he gave much time to prayer.  He says on this
point:  "Arrange thy affairs, if possible, so that thou
canst leisurely devote two or three hours every day not
merely to devotional exercises but to the very act of
secret prayer and communion with God.  Endeavor seven times
a day to withdraw from business and company and lift up thy
soul to God in private retirement.  Begin the day by rising
after midnight and devoting some time amid the silence and
darkness of the night to this sacred work.  Let the hour of
opening dawn find thee at the same work.  Let the hours of
nine, twelve, three, six, and nine at night witness the
same.  Be resolute in his cause.  Make all practicable
sacrifices to maintain it.  Consider that thy time is
short, and that business and company must not be allowed to
rob thee of thy God."  Impossible, say we, fanatical
directions!  Dr. Judson impressed an empire for Christ and
laid the foundations of God's kingdom with imperishable
granite in the heart of Burmah.  He was successful, one of
the few men who mightily impressed the world for Christ.
Many men of greater gifts and genius and learning than he
have made no such impression;  their religious work is like
footsteps in the sands, but he has engraven his work on the
adamant.  The secret of its profundity and endurance is
found in the fact that he gave time to prayer.  He kept the
iron red-hot with prayer, and God's skill fashioned it with
enduring power.  No man can do a great and enduring work
for God who is not a man of prayer, and no man can be a man
of prayer who does not give much time to praying.

     Is it true that prayer is simply the compliance with
habit, dull and mechanical?  A petty performance into which
we are trained till tameness, shortness, superficiality are
its chief elements?  "Is it true that prayer is, as is
assumed, little else than the half-passive play of
sentiment which flows languidly on through the minutes or
hours of easy reverie?"  Canon Liddon continues:  "Let
those who have really prayed give the answer.  They
sometimes describe prayer with the patriarch Jacob as a
wrestling together with an Unseen Power which may last, not
unfrequently in an earnest life, late into the night hours,
or even to the break of day.  Sometimes they refer to
common intercession with St. Paul as a concerted struggle.
They have, when praying, their eyes fixed on the Great
Intercessor in Gethsemane, upon the drops of blood which
fall to the ground in that agony of resignation and
sacrifice.  Importunity is of the essence of successful
prayer.  Importunity means not dreaminess but sustained
work.  It is through prayer especially that the kingdom of
heaven suffereth violence and the violent take it by force.
It was a saying of the late Bishop Hamilton that "No man is
likely to do much good in prayer who does not begin by
looking upon it in the light of a work to be prepared for
and persevered in with all the earnestness which we bring
to bear upon subjects which are in our opinion at once most
interesting and most necessary."


@09

9         BEGIN THE DAY WITH PRAYER

     I ought to pray before seeing any one.  Often when I
sleep long, or meet with others early, it is eleven or
twelve o'clock before I begin secret prayer.  This is a
wretched system.  It is unscriptural.  Christ arose before
day and went into a solitary place.  David says:  "Early
will I seek thee";  "Thou shalt early hear my voice."
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.  Then when in secret prayer the soul is often out
of tune.  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.
                    --Robert Murray McCheyne

     The men who have done the most for God in this world
have been early on their knees.  He who fritters away the
early morning, its opportunity and freshness, in other
pursuits than seeking God will make poor headway seeking

him the rest of the day.  If God is not first in our
thoughts and efforts in the morning, he will be in the last
place the remainder of the day.

     Behind this early rising and early praying is the
ardent desire which presses us into this pursuit after God.
Morning listlessness is the index to a listless heart.  The
heart which is behindhand in seeking God in the morning has
lost its relish for God.  David's heart was ardent after
God.  He hungered and thirsted after God, and so he sought
God early, before daylight.  The bed and sleep could not
chain his soul in its eagerness after God.  Christ longed
for communion with God; and so, rising a great while before
day, he would go out into the mountain to pray.  The
disciples, when fully awake and ashamed of their
indulgence, would know where to find him.  We might go
through the list of men who have mightily impressed the
world for God, and we would find them early after God.

     A desire for God which cannot break the chains of
sleep is a weak thing and will do but little good for God
after it has indulged itself fully.  The desire for God
that keeps so far behind the devil and the world at the
beginning of the day will never catch up.

     It is not simply the getting up that puts men to the
front and makes them captain generals in God's hosts, but
it is the ardent desire which stirs and breaks all
self-indulgent chains.  But the getting up gives vent,
increase, and strength to the desire.  If they had lain in
bed and indulged themselves, the desire would have been
quenched.  The desire aroused them and put them on the
stretch for God, and this heeding and acting on the call
gave their faith its grasp on God and gave to their hearts
the sweetest and fullest revelation of God, and this
strength of faith and fullness of revelation made them
saints by eminence, and the halo of their sainthood has
come down to us, and we have entered on the enjoyment of
their conquests.  But we take our fill in enjoyment, and
not in productions.  We build their tombs and write their
epitaphs, but are careful not to follow their examples.

     We need a generation of preachers who seek God and
seek him early, who give the freshness and dew of effort to
God, and secure in return the freshness and fullness of his
power that he may be as the dew to them, full of gladness
and strength, through all the heat and labor of the day.
Our laziness after God is our crying sin.  the children of
this world are far wiser than we.  They are at it early and
late.  We do not seek God with ardor and diligence.  No man
gets God who does not follow hard after him, and no soul
follows hard after God who is not after him in early morn.

@10

10        PRAYER AND DEVOTION UNITED

          There is a manifest want of spiritual influence
on the ministry of the present day.  I feel it in my own
case and I see it in that of others.  I am afraid there is
too much of a low, managing, contriving, maneuvering temper
of mind among us.  We are laying ourselves out more than is
expedient to meet one man's taste and another man's
prejudices.  The ministry is a grand and holy affair, and
it should find in us a simple habit of spirit and a holy
but humble indifference to all consequences.  the leading
defect in Christian ministers is want of a devotional
habit.
               --Richard Cecil

     Never was there greater need for saintly men and
women; more imperative still is the call for saintly,
God-devoted preachers.  The world moves with gigantic
strides.  Satan has his hold and rule on the world, and
labors to make all its movements subserve his ends.
Religion must do its best work, present its most attractive
and perfect models.  By every means, modern sainthood must
be inspired by the loftiest ideals and by the largest
possibilities through the Spirit.  Paul lived on his knees,
that the Ephesian Church might measure the heights,
breadths, and depths of an unmeasurable saintliness, and
"be filled with all the fullness of God."  Epaphras laid
himself out with the exhaustive toil and strenuous conflict
of fervent prayer, that the Colossian Church might "stand
perfect and complete in all the will of God."  Everywhere,
everything in apostolic times was on the stretch that the
people of God might each and "all come in the unity of the
faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a
perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the
fullness of Christ."  No premium was given to dwarfs; no
encouragement to an old babyhood.  The babies were to grow;
the old, instead of feebleness and infirmities, were to
bear fruit in old age, and be fat and flourishing.  The
divinest thing in religion is holy men and holy women.

     No amount of money, genius, or culture can move things
for God.  Holiness energizing the soul, the whole man
aflame with love, with desire for more faith, more prayer,
more zeal, more consecration - this is the secret of power.
These we need and must have, and men must be the
incarnation of this God-inflamed devotedness.  God's
advance has been stayed, his cause crippled, his name
dishonored for their lack.  Genius (though the loftiest and
most gifted), education (though the most learned and
refined), position, dignity, place, honored names, high
ecclesiastics cannot move this chariot of our God.  It is a
fiery one, and fiery forces only can move it.  The genius
of a Milton fails.  The imperial strength of a Leo fails.
Brainerd's spirit can move it.  Brainerd's spirit was on
fire for God, on fire for souls.  Nothing earthly, worldly,
selfish came in to abate in the least the intensity of this
all-impelling and all-consuming force and flame.

     Prayer is the creator as well as the channel of
devotion.  The spirit of devotion is the spirit of prayer.
Prayer and devotion are united as soul and body are united,
as life and the heart are united.  There is no real prayer
without devotion, no devotion without prayer.  The preacher
must be surrendered to God in the holiest devotion.  He is
not a professional man, his ministry is not a profession;
it is a divine institution, a divine devotion.  He is
devoted to God.  His aim, aspirations, ambition are for God
and to God, and to such prayer is as essential as food is
to life.

     The preacher, above everything else, must be devoted
to God.  The preacher's relations to God are the insignia
and credentials of his ministry.  These must be clear,
conclusive, unmistakable.  No common, surface type of piety
must be his.  If he does not excel in grace, he does not
excel at all.  If he does not preach by life, character,
conduct, he does not preach at all.  If his piety be light,
his preaching may be as soft and as sweet as music, as
gifted as Apollo, yet its weight will be a feather's
weight, visionary, fleeting as the morning cloud or the
early dew.  Devotion to God - there is no substitute for
this in the preacher's character and conduct.  Devotion to
a Church, to opinions, to an organization, to orthodoxy -
these are paltry, misleading, and vain when they become the
source of inspiration, the animus of a call.  God must be
the mainspring of the preacher's effort, the fountain and
crown of all his toil.  The name and honor of Jesus Christ,
the advance of his cause, must be all in all.  The preacher
must have no inspiration but the name of Jesus Christ, no
ambition but to have him glorified, no toil but for him.
Then prayer will be a source of his illuminations, the
means of perpetual advance, the gauge of his success.  The
perpetual aim, the only ambition, the preacher can cherish
is to have God with him.

     Never did the cause of God need perfect illustrations
of the possibilities of prayer more than in this age.  No

age, no person, will be ensamples of the gospel power
except the ages or persons of deep and earnest prayer.  A
prayerless age will have but scant models of divine power.
Prayerless hearts will never rise to these Alpine heights.
The age may be a better age than the past, but there is an
infinite distance between the betterment of an age by the
force of an advancing civilization and its betterment by
the increase of holiness and Christlikeness by the energy
of prayer.  The Jews were much better when Christ came than
in the ages before.  It was the golden age of their
Pharisaic religion.  Their golden religious age crucified
Christ.  Never more praying, never less praying;  never
more sacrifices, never less sacrifice;  never less
idolatry, never more idolatry;  never more of temple
worship, never less of God worship; never more of lip
service, never less of heart service (God worshiped by lips
whose hearts and hands crucified God's Son!);  never more
of church-goers, never less of saints.

     It is prayer-force which makes saints.  Holy
characters are formed by the power of real praying.  The
more of true saints, the more of praying; the more of
praying, the more of true saints.

@11

11        AN EXAMPLE OF DEVOTION

     I urge upon you communion with Christ, a growing
communion.  There are curtains to be drawn aside in Christ
that we never saw, and new foldings of love in him.  I
despair that I shall ever win to the far end of that love,
there are so many plies it.  Therefore dig deep, and sweat
and labor and take pains for him, and set by as much time
in the day for him as you can.  He will be won in the
labor.
                    --Samuel Rutherford


     God has now, and has had, many of these devoted,
prayerful preachers - men in whose lives prayer has been a
mighty, controlling, conspicuous force.  The world has felt
their power, God has felt and honored their power, God's
cause has moved mightily and swiftly by their prayers;
holiness has shone out in their characters with a divine
effulgence.

     God found one of the men he was looking for in David
Brainerd, whose work and name have gone into history.  He
was no ordinary man, but was capable of shining in any
company, the peer of the wise and gifted ones, eminently
suited to fill the most attractive pulpits and to labor
among the most refined and the cultured, who were so
anxious to secure him for their pastor.  President Edwards
bears testimony that he was "a young man of distinguished
talents, had extraordinary knowledge of men and things, had
rare conversational powers, excelled in his knowledge of
theology, and was truly, for one so young, an extraordinary
divine, and especially in all matters relating to
experimental religion.  I never knew his equal of his age
and standing for clear and accurate notions of the nature
and essence of true religion.  His manner in prayer was
almost inimitable, such as I have very rarely known
equalled.  His learning was very considerable, and he had
extraordinary gifts for the pulpit."

     No sublimer story has been recorded in earthly annals
than that of David Brainerd;  no miracle attests with
diviner force the truth of Christianity than the life and
work of such a man.  Alone in the savage wilds of America,
struggling day and night with a mortal disease, unschooled
in the care of souls, having access to the Indians for a
large portion of time only through the bungling medium of a
pagan interpreter, with the Word of God in his heart and in
his hand, his soul fired with the divine flame, a place and
time to pour out his soul to God in prayer, he fully
established the worship of God and secured all its gracious
results.  The Indians were changed with a great change from
the lowest besotments of an ignorant and debased heathenism
to pure, devout, intelligent Christians; all vice reformed,
the external duties of Christianity at once embraced and
acted on; family prayer set up; the Sabbath instituted and
religiously observed; the internal graces of religion
exhibited with growing sweetness and strength.  The
solution of these results is found in David Brainerd
himself, not in the conditions or accidents but in the man
Brainerd.  He was God's man, for God first and last and all
the time.  God could flow unhindered through him.  The
omnipotence of grace was neither arrested nor straightened
by the conditions of his heart; the whole channel was
broadened and cleaned out for God's fullest and most
powerful passage, so that God with all his mighty forces
could come down on the hopeless, savage wilderness, and
transform it into his blooming and fruitful garden; for
nothing is too hard for God to do if he can get the right
kind of a man to do it with.

     Brainerd lived the life of holiness and prayer.  His
diary is full and monotonous with the record of his seasons
of fasting, meditation, and retirement.  The time he spent
in private prayer amounted to many hours daily.  "When I
return home," he said, "and give myself to meditation,
prayer, and fasting, my soul longs for mortification,
self-denial, humility, and divorcement from all things of
the world."  "I have nothing to do," he said, "with earth,
but only to labor in it honestly for God.  I do not desire
to live one minute for anything which earth can afford."
After this high order did he pray:  "Feeling somewhat of
the sweetness of communion with God and the constraining
force of his love, and how admirably it captivates the soul
and makes all the desires and affections to center in God,
I set apart this day for secret fasting and prayer, to
entreat God to direct and bless me with regard to the great
work which I have in view of preaching the gospel, and that
the Lord would return to me and show me the light of his
countenance.  I had little life and power in the forenoon.
Near the middle of the afternoon God enabled me to wrestle
ardently in intercession for my absent friends, but just at
the night the Lord visited me marvelously in prayer.  I
think my soul was never in such agony before.  I felt no
restraint, for the treasures of divine grace were opened to
me.  I wrestled for absent friends, for the ingathering of
souls, for multitudes of poor souls, and for many that I
thought were the children of God, personally, in many
distant places.  I was in such agony from sun half an hour
high till near dark that I was all over wet with sweat, but
yet it seemed to me I had done nothing.  O, my dear Savior
did sweat blood for poor souls!  I longed for more
compassion toward them.  I felt still in a sweet frame,
under a sense of divine love and grace, and went to bed in
such a frame, with my heart set on God."  It was prayer
which gave to his life and ministry their marvelous power.

     The men of mighty prayer are men of spiritual might.
Prayers never die.  Brainerd's whole life was a life of
prayer.  By day and by night he prayed.  Before preaching
and after preaching he prayed.  On his bed of straw he
prayed.  Retiring to the dense and lonely forests, he
prayed.  Hour by hour, day after day, early morn and late
at night, he was praying and fasting, pouring out his soul,
interceding, communing with God.  He was with God mightily
in prayer, and God was with him mightily, and by it he
being dead yet speaketh and worketh, and will speak and
work till the end comes, and among the glorious ones of
that glorious day he will be with the first.

     Jonathan Edwards says of him: "His life shows the
right way to success in the works of the ministry.  He
sought it as the soldier seeks victory in a siege or
battle; or as a man that runs a race for a great prize.
Animated with love to Christ and souls, how did he labor?
Always fervently.  Not only in word and doctrine, in public
and in private, but in prayers by day and night, wrestling
with God in secret and travailing in birth with unutterable
groans and agonies, until Christ was formed in the hearts
of the people to whom he was sent.  Like a true son of
Jacob, he persevered in wrestling through all the darkness
of the night, until the breaking of the day!"

@12

12        HEART PREPARATION NECESSARY

     For nothing reaches the heart but what is from the
heart, or pierces the conscience but what comes from a
living conscience.
                    --William Penn

     In the morning was more engaged in preparing the head
than the heart.  This has been frequently my error, and I
have always felt the evil of it, especially in prayer.
Reform it, then, O Lord!  Enlarge my heart, and I shall
preach.
                    --Robert Murray McCheyne

     A sermon that has more head infused into it than heart
will not come home with efficacy to the hearers.
                    --Richard Cecil


     Prayer, with its manifold and many-sided forces, helps
the mouth to utter the truth in its fullness and freedom.
The preacher is to be prayed for, the preacher is made by
prayer.  The preacher's mouth is to be prayed for; his
mouth is to be opened and filled by prayer.  A holy mouth
is made by praying, by much praying; a brave mouth is made
by praying, by much praying.  The Church and the world, God
and heaven, owe much to Paul's mouth; Paul's mouth owed its
power to prayer.

     How manifold, illimitable, valuable, and helpful
prayer is to the preacher in so many ways, at so many
points, in every way!  One great value is, it helps his
heart.

     Praying makes the preacher a heart preacher.  Prayer
puts the preacher's heart into the preacher's sermon;
prayer puts the preacher's sermon into the preacher's
heart.

     The heart makes the preacher.  Men of great hearts are
great preachers.  Men of bad hearts may do a measure of
good, but this is rare.  The hireling and the stranger may
help the sheep at some points, but it is the good shepherd
with the good shepherd's heart who will bless the sheep and
answer the full measure of the shepherd's place.

     We have emphasized sermon-preparation until we have
lost sight of the important thing to be prepared - the
heart.  A prepared heart is much better than a prepared
sermon.  A prepared heart will make a prepared sermon.

     Volumes have been written laying down the mechanics
and taste of sermon-making, until we have become possessed
with the idea that this scaffolding is the building.  The
young preacher has been taught to lay out all his strength
on the form, taste, and beauty of his sermon as a
mechanical and intellectual product.  We have thereby
cultivated a vicious taste among the people and raised the
clamor for talent instead of grace, eloquence instead of
piety, rhetoric instead of revelation, reputation and
brilliancy instead of holiness.  By it we have lost the
true idea of preaching, lost preaching power, lost pungent
conviction for sin, lost rich experience and elevated
Christian character, lost the authority over consciences
and lives which always results from genuine preaching.

     It would not do to say that preachers study too much.
Some of them do not study at all;  others do not study
enough.  Numbers do not study the right way to show
themselves workmen approved of God.  But our great lack is
not in head culture, but in heart culture; not lack of
knowledge but lack of holiness is our sad and telling
defect - not that we know too much, but that we do not
meditate on God and his word and watch and fast and pray
enough.  The heart is the great hindrance to our preaching.
Words pregnant with divine truth find in our hearts
nonconductors; arrested, they fall shorn and powerless.

     Can ambition, that lusts after praise and place,
preach the gospel of Him who made himself of no reputation
and took on Him the form of a servant?  Can the proud, the
vain, the egotistical preach the gospel of him who was meek
and lowly?  Can the bad-tempered, passionate, selfish,
hard, worldly man preach the system which teems with
long-suffering, self-denial, tenderness, which imperatively
demands separation from enmity and crucifixion to the
world?  Can the hireling official, heartless, perfunctory,
preach the gospel which demands the shepherd to give his
life for the sheep?  Can the covetous man, who counts
salary and money, preach the gospel till he has gleaned his
heart and can say in the spirit of Christ and Paul in the
words of Wesley: "I count it dung and dross; I trample it
under my feet; I (yet not I, but the grace of God in me)
esteem it just as the more of the streets, I desire it not,
I seek it not"?  God's revelation does not need the light
of human genius, the polish and strength of human culture,
the brilliancy of human thought, the force of human brains
to adorn or enforce it; but it does demand the simplicity,
the docility, humility, and faith of a child's heart.

     It was this surrender and subordination of intellect
and genius to the divine and spiritual forces which made
Paul peerless among the apostles.  It was this which gave
Wesley his power and radicated his labors in the history of
humanity.  This gave to Loyola the strength to arrest the
retreating forces of Catholicism.

     Our great need is heart-preparation.  Luther held it
as an axiom: "He who has prayed well has studied well."  We
do not say that men are not to think and use their
intellects; but he will use his intellect best who
cultivates his heart most.  We do not say that preachers
should not be students; but we do say that their great
study should be the Bible, and he studies the Bible best
who has kept his heart with diligence.  We do not say that
the preacher should not know men, but he will be the
greater adept in human nature who has fathomed the depths
and intricacies of his own heart.  We do say that while the
channel of preaching is in the mind, its fountain is the
heart; you may broaden and deepen the channel, but if you
do not look well to the purity and depth of the fountain,
you will have a dry or polluted channel.  We do say that
almost any man of common intelligence has sense enough to
preach the gospel, but very few have grace enough to do so.
We do say that he who has struggled with his own heart and
conquered it; who has taught it humility, faith, love,
truth, mercy, sympathy, courage; who can pour the rich
treasures of the heart thus trained, through a manly
intellect, all surcharged with the power of the gospel on
the consciences of his hearers - such a one will be the
truest, most successful preacher in the esteem of his Lord.

@13

13        GRACE FROM THE HEART RATHER THAN THE HEAD

     Study not to be a fine preacher.  Jerichos are blown
down with rams' horns.  Look simply unto Jesus for
preaching food; and what is wanted will be given, and what
is given will be blessed, whether it be a barley grain or a
wheaten loaf, a crust or a crumb.  Your mouth will be a
flowing stream or a fountain sealed, according as your
heart is.  Avoid all controversy in preaching, talking, or
writing; preach nothing down but the devil, and nothing up
but Jesus Christ.
                    --Berridge


     The heart is the savior of the world.  Heads do not
save.  Genius, brains, brilliancy, strength, natural gifts
do not save.  The gospel flows through hearts.  All the
mightiest forces are heart forces.  All the sweetest and
loveliest graces are heart graces.  Great hearts make great
characters; great hearts make divine characters.  God is
love.  There is nothing greater than love, nothing greater
than God.  Hearts make heaven; heaven is love.  There is
nothing higher, nothing sweeter, than heaven.  It is the
heart and not the head which makes God's great preachers.
The heart counts much every way in religion.  The heart
must speak from the pulpit.  The heart must hear in the
pew.  In fact, we serve God with our hearts.  Head homage
does not pass current in heaven.

     We believe that one of the serious and most popular
errors of the modern pulpit is the putting of more thought
than prayer, of more head than of heart in its sermons.
Big hearts make big preachers; good hearts make good
preachers.  A theological school to enlarge and cultivate
the heart is the golden desideratum of the gospel.  The
pastor binds his people to him and rules his people by his
heart.  They may admire his gifts, they may be proud of his
ability, they may be affected for the time by his sermons;
but the stronghold of his power is his heart.  His scepter
is love.  The throne of his power is his heart.

     The good shepherd gives his life for the sheep.  Heads
never make martyrs.  It is the heart which surrenders the
life to love and fidelity.  It takes great courage to be a
faithful pastor, but the heart alone can supply this
courage.  Gifts and genius may be brave, but it is the
gifts and genius of the heart and not of the head.

     It is easier to fill the head than it is to prepare
the heart.  It is easier to make a brain sermon than a
heart sermon.  It was heart that drew the Son of God from
heaven.  It is heart that will draw men to heaven.  Men of
heart is what the world needs to sympathize with its woe,
to kiss away its sorrows, to compassionate its misery, and
to alleviate its pain.  Christ was eminently the man of
sorrows, because he was preeminently the man of heart.

     "Give me thy heart," is God's requisition of men.
"Give me thy heart!" is man's demand of man.

     A professional ministry is a heartless ministry.  When
salary plays a great part in the ministry, the heart plays
little part.  We may make preaching our business, and not
put our hearts in the business.  He who puts self to the
front in his preaching puts heart to the rear.  He who does
not sow with his heart in his study will never reap a
harvest for God.  The closet is the heart's study.  We will
learn more about how to preach and what to preach there
than we can learn in our libraries.  "Jesus wept" is the
shortest and biggest verse in the Bible.  It is he who goes
forth WEEPING (not preaching great sermons), bearing
precious seed, who shall come again rejoicing, bringing his
sheaves with him.

     Praying gives sense, brings wisdom, broadens and
strengthens the mind.  The closet is a perfect
school-teacher and school-house for the preacher.  Thought
is not only brightened and clarified in prayer, but thought
is born in prayer.  We can learn more in an hour praying,
when praying indeed, than from many hours in the study.
Books are in the closet which can be found and read nowhere
else.  Revelations are made in the closet which are made
nowhere else.

@14

14        UNCTION A NECESSITY


     One bright benison which private prayer brings down
upon the ministry is an indescribable and inimitable
something - an unction from the Holy One ... If the
anointing which we bear come not from the Lord of hosts, we
are deceivers, since only in prayer can we obtain it.  Let
us continue instant, constant, fervent in supplication.
Let your fleece lie on the thrashing floor of supplication
till it is wet with the dew of heaven.
                    --Charles Haddon Spurgeon


     Alexander Knox, a Christian philosopher of the days of
Wesley, not an adherent but a strong personal friend of
Wesley, and with much spiritual sympathy with the Wesleyan
movement, writes: "It is strange and lamentable, but I
verily believe the fact to be that except among Methodists
and Methodistical clergymen, there is not much interesting
preaching in England.  The clergy, too generally, have
absolutely lost the art.  There is, I conceive, in the
great laws of the moral world a kind of secret
understanding like the affinities in chemistry, between
rightly promulgated religious truth and the deepest
feelings of the human mind.  Where the one is duly
exhibited, the other will respond.  Did not our hearts burn
within us? - but to this devout feeling is indispensable in
the speaker.  Now, I am obliged to state from my own
observation that this ONCTION, as the French not unfitly
term it, is beyond all comparison more likely to be found
in England in a Methodist conventicle than in a parish
Church.  This, and this alone, seems really to be that
which fills the Methodist houses and thins the Churches.
I am, I verily think, no enthusiast; I am a most sincere
and cordial churchman, a humble disciple of the School of
Hale and Boyle, of Burnet and Leighton.  Now I must aver
that when I was in this country, two years ago, I did not
hear a single preacher who taught me like my own great
masters but such as are deemed Methodistical.  And I now
despair of getting an atom of heart-instruction from any
other quarter.  The Methodist preachers (however I may not
always approve of all their expressions) do most assuredly
diffuse this true religion and undefiled.  I felt real
pleasure last Sunday.  I can bear witness that the preacher
did at once speak the words of truth and soberness.  There
was no eloquence - the honest man never dreamed of such a
thing - but there was far better: a cordial communication
of vitalized truth.  I say vitalized because what he
declared to others it was impossible not to feel he lived
on himself."

     This unction is the art of preaching.  The preacher
who never had this unction never had the art of preaching.
The preacher who has lost this unction has lost the art of
preaching.  Whatever other arts he may have and retain -
the art of sermon-making, the art of eloquence, the art of
great, clear thinking, the art of pleasing an audience - he
has lost the divine art of preaching.  This unction makes
God's truth powerful and interesting, draws and attracts,
edifies, convicts, saves.

     This unction vitalizes God's revealed truth, makes it
living and life-giving.  Even God's truth spoken without
this unction is light, dead, and deadening.  Though
abounding in truth, though weighty with thought, though
sparkling with rhetoric, though pointed by logic, though
powerful by earnestness, without this divine unction it
issues in death and not in life.  Mr. Spurgeon says: "I
wonder how long we might beat our brains before we could
plainly put into word what is meant by preaching with
unction.  Yet he who preaches knows its presence, and he
who hears soon detects its absence.  Samaria, in famine,
typifies a discourse without it.  Jerusalem, with her feast
of fat things, full of marrow, may represent a sermon
enriched with it.  Every one knows what the freshness of
the morning is when orient pearls abound on every blade of
grass, but who can describe it, much less produce it of
itself?  Such is the mystery of spiritual anointing.  We
know, but we cannot tell to others what it is.  It is as
easy as it is foolish, to counterfeit it.  Unction is a
thing which you cannot manufacture, and its counterfeits
are worse than worthless.  Yet it is, in itself, priceless,
and beyond measure needful if you would edify believers and
bring sinners to Christ."


@15

15        UNCTION,
     THE MARK OF TRUE GOSPEL PREACHING

     Speak for eternity.  Above all things, cultivate your
own spirit.  A word spoken by you when your conscience is
clear and your heart full of God's Spirit is worth ten
thousand words spoken in unbelief and sin.  Remember that
God, and not man, must have the glory.  If the veil of the
world's machinery were lifted off, how much we would find
is done in answer to the prayers of God's children.
                    --Robert Murray McCheyne


     Unction is that indefinable, indescribable something
which an old, renowned Scotch preacher describes thus:
"There is sometimes somewhat in preaching that cannot be
ascribed either to matter or expression, and cannot be
described what it is, or from whence it cometh, but with a
sweet violence it pierceth into the heart and affections
and comes immediately from the Lord; but if there be any
way to obtain such a thing, it is by the heavenly
disposition of the speaker."

     We call it unction.  It is this unction which makes
the word of God "quick and powerful, and sharper than any
two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of
soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and a
discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart."  It is
this unction which gives the words of the preacher such
point, sharpness, and power, and which creates such
friction and stir in many a dead congregation.  The same
truths have been told in the strictness of the letter,
smooth as human oil could make them; but no signs of life,
not a pulse throb; all as peaceful as the grave and as
dead.  The same preacher in the meanwhile receives a
baptism of this unction, the divine inflatus is on him, the
letter of the Word has been embellished and fired by this
mysterious power, and the throbbings of life begin - life
which receives or life which resists.  The unction pervades
and convicts the conscience and breaks the heart.

     This divine unction is the feature which separates and
distinguishes true gospel preaching from all other methods
of presenting the truth, and which creates a wide spiritual
chasm between the preacher who has it and the one who has
it not.  It backs and impregns revealed truth with all the
energy of God.  Unction is simply putting God in his own
word and on his own preacher.  By mighty and great
prayerfulness and by continual prayerfulness, it is all
potential and personal to the preacher; it inspires and
clarifies his intellect, gives insight and grasp and
projecting power; it gives to the preacher heart power,
which is greater than head power; and tenderness, purity,
force flow from the heart by it.  Enlargement, freedom,
fullness of thought, directness and simplicity of utterance
are the fruits of this unction.

     Often earnestness is mistaken for this unction.  He
who has the divine unction will be earnest in the very
spiritual nature of things, but there may be a vast deal of
earnestness without the least mixture of unction.

     Earnestness and unction look alike from some points of
view.  Earnestness may be readily and without detection
substituted or mistaken for unction.  It requires a
spiritual eye and a spiritual taste to discriminate.

     Earnestness may be sincere, serious, ardent, and
persevering.  It goes at a thing with good will, pursues it
with perseverance, and urges it with ardor; puts force in
it.  But all these forces do not rise higher than the mere
human.  The MAN is in it - the whole man, with all that he
has of will and heart, of brain and genius, of planning and
working and talking.  He has set himself to some purpose
which has mastered him, and he pursues to master it.  There
may be none of God in it.  There may be little of God in
it, because there is so much of the man in it.  He may
present pleas in advocacy of his earnest purpose which
please or touch and move or overwhelm with conviction of
their importance; and in all this earnestness may move
along earthly ways, being propelled by human forces only,
its altar made by earthly hands and its fire kindled by
earthly flames.  It is said of a rather famous preacher of
gifts, whose construction of Scripture was to his fancy or
purpose, that he "grew very eloquent over his own
exegesis."  So men grow exceeding earnest over their own
plans or movements.  Earnestness may be selfishness
simulated.

     What of unction?  It is the indefinable in preaching
which makes it preaching.  It is that which distinguishes
and separates preaching from all mere human addresses.  It
is the divine in preaching.  It makes the preaching sharp
to those who need sharpness.  It distills as the dew to
those who need to be refreshed.  It is well described as:
               "a two-edged sword
          Of heavenly temper keen,
     And double were the wounds it made
          Where'er it glanced between.
     'Twas death to sin; 'twas life
          To all who mourned for sin.
     It kindled and it silenced strife,
          Made war and peace within."

     This unction comes to the preacher not in the study
but in the closet.  It is heaven's distillation in answer
to prayer.  It is the sweetest exhalation of the Holy
Spirit.  It impregnates, suffuses, softens, percolates,
cuts, and soothes.  It carries the Word like dynamite, like
salt, like sugar; makes the Word a soother, an arraigner, a
revealer, a searcher; makes the hearer a culprit or a
saint, makes him weep like a child and live like a giant;
opens his heart and his purse as gently, yet as strongly as
the spring opens the leaves.  This unction is not the gift
of genius.  It is not found in the halls of learning.  No
eloquence can woo it.  No industry can win it.  No
prelatical hands can confer it.  It is the gift of God -
the signet set to his own messengers.  It is heaven's
knighthood given to the chosen true and brave ones who have
sought this anointed honor through many an hour of tearful,
wrestling prayer.

     Earnestness is good and impressive; genius is gifted
and great.  Thought kindles and inspires, but it takes a
diviner endowment, a more powerful energy than earnestness
or genius or thought to break the chains of sin, to win
estranged and depraved hearts to God, to repair the
breaches and restore the Church to her old ways of purity
and power.  Nothing but this holy unction can do this.


@16

16        MUCH PRAYER THE PRICE OF UNCTION

     All the minister's efforts will be vanity or worse
than vanity if he have not unction.  Unction must come down
from heaven and spread a savor and feeling and relish over
his ministry; and among the other means of qualifying
himself for his office, the Bible must hold the first
place, and the last also must be given to the Word of God
and prayer.
                         --Richard Cecil


     In the Christian system unction is the anointing of
the Holy Ghost, separating unto God's work and qualifying
for it.  This unction is the one divine enablement by which
the preacher accomplishes the peculiar and saving ends of
preaching.  Without this unction there are no true
spiritual results accomplished; the results and forces in
preaching do not rise above the results of unsanctified
speech.  Without unction the former is as potent as the
pulpit.

     This divine unction on the preacher generates through
the Word of God the spiritual results that flow from the
gospel; and without this unction, these results are not
secured.  Many pleasant impressions may be made, but these
all fall far below the ends of gospel preaching.  This
unction may be simulated.  There are many things that look
like it, there are many results that resemble its effects;
but they are foreign to its results and to its nature.  The
fervor or softness excited by a pathetic or emotional
sermon may look like the movements of the divine unction,
but they have no pungent, penetrating, heart-breaking
force.  No heart-healing balm is there in these surface,
sympathetic, emotional movements; they are not radical,
neither sin-searching nor sin-curing.

     This divine unction is the one distinguishing feature
that separates true gospel preaching from all other methods
of presenting truth.  It backs and interpenetrates the
revealed truth with all the force of God.  It illumines the
Word and broadens and enrichens the intellect and empowers
it to grasp and apprehend the Word.  It qualifies the
preacher's heart, and brings it to that condition of
tenderness, of purity, of force and light that are
necessary to secure the highest results.  This unction
gives to the preacher liberty and enlargement of thought
and soul - a freedom, fullness, and directness of utterance
that can be secured by no other process.

     Without this unction on the preacher the gospel has no
more power to propagate itself than any other system of
truth.  This is the seal of its divinity.  Unction in the
preacher puts God in the gospel.  Without the unction, God
is absent, and the gospel is left to the low and
unsatisfactory forces that the ingenuity, interest, or
talents of men can devise to enforce and project its
doctrines.

     It is in this element that the pulpit oftener fails
than in any other element.  Just at this all-important
point it lapses.  Learning it may have, brilliancy and
eloquence may delight and charm, sensation or less
offensive methods may bring the populace in crowds, mental
power may impress and enforce truth with all its resources;
but without this unction, each and all these will be but as
the fretful assault of the waters on a Gibraltar.  Spray
and foam may cover and spangle; but the rocks are there
still, unimpressed and unimpressible.  The human heart can
no more be swept of its hardness and sin by these human
forces than these rocks can be swept away by the ocean's
ceaseless flow.

     This unction is the consecration force, and its
presence the continuous test of that consecration.  It is
this divine anointing on the preacher that secures his
consecration to God and his work.  Other forces and motives
may call him to the work, but this only is consecration.  A
separation to God's work by the power of the Holy Spirit is
the only consecration recognized by God as legitimate.

     The unction, the divine unction, this heavenly
anointing, is what the pulpit needs and must have.  This
divine and heavenly oil put on it by the imposition of
God's hand must soften and lubricate the whole man - heart,
head, spirit - until it separates him with a mighty
separation from all earthly, secular, worldly, selfish
motives and aims, separating him to everything that is pure
and Godlike.

     It is the presence of this unction on the preacher
that creates the stir and friction in many a congregation.
The same truths have been told in the strictness of the
letter, but no ruffle has been seen, no pain or pulsation
felt.  All is quiet as a graveyard.  Another preacher
comes, and this mysterious influence is on him; the letter
of the Word has been fired by the Spirit, the throes of a
mighty movement are felt, it is the unction that pervades
and stirs the conscience and breaks the heart.  Unctionless
preaching makes everything hard, dry, acrid, dead.

     This unction is not a memory or an era of the past
only; it is a present, realized, conscious fact.  It
belongs to the experience of the man as well as to his
preaching.  It is that which transforms him into the image
of his divine Master, as well as that by which he declares
the truths of Christ with power.  It is so much the power
in the ministry as to make all else seem feeble and vain
without it, and by its presence to atone for the absence of
all other and feebler forces.

     This unction is not an inalienable gift.  It is a
conditional gift, and its presence is perpetuated and
increased by the same process by which it was at first
secured; by unceasing prayer to God, by impassioned desires
after God, by estimating it, by seeking it with tireless
ardor, by deeming all else loss and failure without it.

     How and whence comes this unction?  Direct from God in
answer to prayer.  Praying hearts only are the hearts
filled with this holy oil; praying lips only are anointed
with this divine unction.

     Prayer, much prayer, is the price of preaching
unction; prayer, much prayer, is the one, sole condition of
keeping this unction.  Without unceasing prayer the unction
never comes to the preacher.  Without perseverance in
prayer, the unction, like the manna overkept, breeds worms.


@17

17        PRAYER MARKS SPIRITUAL LEADERSHIP

     Give me one hundred preachers who fear nothing but sin
and desire nothing but God, and I care not a straw whether
they be clergymen or laymen; such alone will shake the
gates of hell and set up the kingdom of heaven on earth.
God does nothing but in answer to prayer.
                         --John Wesley


     The apostles knew the necessity and worth of prayer to
their ministry.  They knew that their high commission as
apostles, instead of relieving them from the necessity of
prayer, committed them to it by a more urgent need; so that
they were exceedingly jealous else some other important
work should exhaust their time and prevent their praying as
they ought; so they appointed laymen to look after the
delicate and engrossing duties of ministering to the poor,
that they (the apostles) might, unhindered, "give
themselves continually to prayer and to the ministry of the
word."  Prayer is put first, and their relation to prayer
is but most strongly - "give themselves to it," making a
business of it, surrendering themselves to praying, putting
fervor, urgency, perseverance, and time in it.

     How holy, apostolic men devoted themselves to this
divine work of prayer!  "Night and day praying
exceedingly," says Paul.  "We will give ourselves
continually to prayer" is the consensus of apostolic
devotement.  How these New Testament preachers laid
themselves out in prayer for God's people!  How they put
God in full force into their Churches by their praying!
These holy apostles did not vainly fancy that they had met
their high and solemn duties by delivering faithfully God's
word, but their preaching was made to stick and tell by the
ardor and insistence of their praying.  Apostolic praying
was as taxing, toilsome, and imperative as apostolic
preaching.  They prayed mightily day and night to bring
their people to the highest regions of faith and holiness.
They prayed mightier still to hold them to this high
spiritual altitude.  The preacher who has never learned in
the school of Christ the high and divine art of
intercession for his people will never learn the art of
preaching, though homiletics be poured into him by the ton,
and though he be the most gifted genius in sermon-making
and sermon-delivery.

     The prayers of apostolic, saintly leaders do much in
making saints of those who are not apostles.  If the Church
leaders in after years had been as particular and fervent
in praying for their people as the apostles were, the sad,
dark times of worldliness and apostasy had not marred the
history and eclipsed the glory and arrested the advance of
the Church.  Apostolic praying makes apostolic saints and
keeps apostolic times of purity and power in the Church.

     What loftiness of soul, what purity and elevation of
motive, what unselfishness, what self-sacrifice, what
exhaustive toil, what ardor of spirit, what divine tact are
requisite to be an intercessor for men!

     The preacher is to lay himself out in prayer for his
people; not that they might be saved, simply, but that they
be mightily saved.  The apostles laid themselves out in
prayer that their saints might be perfect; not that they
should have a little relish for the things of God, but that
they "might be filled with all the fullness of God."  Paul
did not rely on his apostolic preaching to secure this end,
but "for this cause he bowed his knees to the Father of our
Lord Jesus Christ."  Paul's praying carried Paul's converts
farther along the highway of sainthood than Paul's
preaching did.  Epaphras did as much or more by prayer for
the colossian saints than by his preaching.  He labored
fervently always in prayer for them that "they might stand
perfect and complete in all the will of God."

     Preachers are preeminently God's leaders.  They are
primarily responsible for the condition of the Church.
They shape its character, give tone and direction to its
life.

     Much every way depends on these leaders.  They shape
the times and the institutions.  The Church is divine, the
treasure it incases is heavenly, but it bears the imprint
of the human.  The treasure is in earthen vessels, and it
smacks of the vessel.  The Church of God makes, or is made
by, its leaders.  Whether it makes them or is made by them,
it will be what its leaders are; spiritual if they are so,
secular if they are, conglomerate if its leaders are.
Israel's kings gave character to Israel's piety.  A Church
rarely revolts against or rises above the religion of its
leaders.  Strongly spiritual leaders; men of holy might, at
the lead, are tokens of God's favor; disaster and weakness
follow the wake of feeble or worldly leaders.  Israel had
fallen low when God gave children to be their princes and
babes to rule over them.  No happy state is predicted by
the prophets when children oppress God's Israel and women
rule over them.  Times of spiritual leadership are times of
great spiritual prosperity to the Church.

     Prayer is one of the eminent characteristics of strong
spiritual leadership.  Men of mighty prayer are men of
might and mold things.  Their power with God has the
conquering tread.

     How can a man preach who does not get his message
fresh from God in the closet?  How can he preach without
having his faith quickened, his vision cleared, and his
heart warmed by his closeting with God?  Alas, for the
pulpit lips which are untouched by this closet flame.  Dry
and unctionless they will ever be, and truths divine will
never come with power from such lips.  As far as the real
interests of religion are concerned, a pulpit without a
closet will always be a barren thing.

     A preacher may preach in an official, entertaining, or
learned way without prayer, but between this kind of
preaching and sowing God's precious seed with holy hands
and prayerful, weeping hearts there is an immeasurable
distance.

     A prayerless ministry is the undertaker for all God's
truth and for God's Church.  He may have the most costly
casket and the most beautiful flowers, but it is a funeral
notwithstanding the charmful array.  A prayerless Christian
will never learn God's truth; a prayerless ministry will
never be able to teach God's truth.  Ages of millenial
glory have been lost by a prayerless Church.  The coming of
our Lord has been postponed indefinitely by a prayerless
Church.  Hell has enlarged herself and filled her dire
caves in the presence of the dead service of a prayerless
Church.

     The best, the greatest offering is an offering of
prayer.  If the preachers of the twentieth century will
learn well the lesson of prayer, and use fully the power of
prayer, the millenium will come to its noon ere the century
closes.  "Pray without ceasing" is the trumpet call to the
preachers of the twentieth century.  If the twentieth
century will get their texts, their thoughts, their words,
their sermons in their closets, the next century will find
a new heaven and a new earth.  The old sin-stained and
sin-eclipsed heaven and earth will pass away under the
power of a praying ministry.


@18

18        PREACHERS NEED THE PRAYERS OF THE PEOPLE

     If some Christians that have been complaining of their
ministers had said and acted less before men and had
applied themselves with all their might to cry to God for
their ministers - had, as it were, risen and stormed heaven
with their humble, fervent, and incessant prayers for them
- they would have been much more in the way of success.
                         --Jonathan Edwards


     Somehow the practice of praying in particular for the
preacher has fallen into disuse or become discounted.
Occasionally have we heard the practice arraigned as a
disparagement of the ministry, being a public declaration
by those who do it of the inefficiency of the ministry.  It
offends the pride of learning and self-sufficiency,
perhaps, and these ought to be offended and rebuked in a
ministry that is so derelict as to allow them to exist.

     Prayer, to the preacher, is not simply the duty of his
profession, a privilege, but it is a necessity.  Air is not
more necessary to the lungs that prayer is to the preacher.
It is absolutely necessary for the preacher to pray.  It is
an absolute necessity that the preacher be prayed for.
These two propositions are wedded into a union which ought
never to know any divorce:  THE PREACHER MUST PRAY;  THE
PREACHER MUST BE PRAYED FOR.  It will take all the praying
he can do, and all the praying he can get done, to meet the
fearful responsibilities and gain the largest, truest
success in his great work.  The true preacher, next to the
cultivation of the spirit and fact of prayer in himself, in
their intensest form, covets with a great covetousness the
prayers of God's people.

     The holier a man is, the more does he estimate
prayer; the clearer does he see that God gives himself to
the praying ones, and that the measure of God's revelation
to the soul is the measure of the soul's longing,
importunate prayer for God.  Salvation never finds its way
to a prayerless heart.  The Holy Spirit never abides in a
prayerless spirit.  Preaching never edifies a prayerless
soul.  Christ knows nothing of prayerless Christians. The
gospel cannot be projected by a prayerless preacher.
Gifts, talents, education, eloquence, God's call, cannot
abate the demand of prayer, but only intensify the necessity
for the preacher to pray and to be prayed for.  The more
the preacher's eyes are opened to the nature,
responsibility, and difficulties in his work, the more will
he see, and if he be a true preacher the more will he feel,
the necessity of prayer; not only the increasing demand to
pray himself, but to call on others to help him by their
prayers.

     Paul is an illustration of this.  If any man could
project the gospel by dint of personal force, by brain
power, by culture, by personal grace, by God's apostolic
commission, God's extraordinary call, that man was Paul.
That the preacher must be a man given to prayer, Paul is an
eminent example.  That the true apostolic preacher must
have the prayers of other good people to give to his
ministry its full quota of success Paul is a preeminent
example.  He asks, he covets, he pleads in an impassioned
way for the help of all God's saints.  He knew that in the
spiritual realm, as elsewhere, in union there is strength;
that the concentration and aggregation of faith, desire,
and prayer increased the volume of spiritual force until it
became overwhelming and irresistible in its power.  Units
of prayer combined, like drops of water, make an ocean
which defies resistance.  So Paul, with his clear and full
apprehension of spiritual dynamics, determined to make his
ministry as impressive, as eternal, as irresistible as the
ocean, by gathering all the scattered units of prayer and
precipitating them on his ministry.  May not the solution
of Paul's preeminence in labors and results, and impress on
the Church and the world, be found in this fact that he was
able to center on himself and his ministry more of prayer
than others?  To his brethren at Rome he wrote: "Now I
beseech you, brethren, for the Lord Jesus Christ's sake,
and for the love of the Spirit, that ye strive together
with me in prayers to God for me."  To the Ephesians he
says: "Praying always with all prayer and supplication in
the Spirit, and watching thereunto with all perseverance
and supplication for all saints; and for me, that utterance
may be given unto me, that I may open my mouth boldly, to
make known the mystery of the gospel."  to the Colossians
he emphasizes:  "Withal praying also for us, that God would
open unto us a door of utterance, to speak the mystery of
Christ, for which I am also in bonds: that I may make it
manifest as I ought to speak."  To the Thessalonians he
says sharply, strongly:  "Brethren, pray for us."  Paul
calls on the Corinthian Church to help him: "Ye also
helping together by prayer for us."  This was to be part of
their work.  They were to lay to the helping hand of
prayer.  He in an additional and closing charge to the
Thessalonian Church about the importance and necessity of
their prayers says: "Finally, brethren, pray for us, that
the word of the Lord may have free course, and be
glorified, even as it is with you: and that we may be
delivered from unreasonable and wicked men."  He impresses
the Philippians that all his trials and opposition can be
made subservient to the spread of the gospel by the
efficiency of their prayers for him.  Philemon was to
prepare a lodging for him, for through Philemon's prayer
Paul was to be his guest.

     Paul's attitude on this question illustrates his
humility and his deep insight into the spiritual forces
which project the gospel.  More than this, it teaches a
lesson for all times, that if Paul was so dependent on the
prayers of God's saints to give his ministry success, how
much greater the necessity that the prayers of God's saints
be centered on the ministry of today!

     Paul did not feel that this urgent plea for prayer was
to lower his dignity, lessen his influence, or depreciate
his piety.  What if it did?  let dignity go, let influence
be destroyed, let his reputation be marred - he must have
their prayers.  Called, commissioned, chief of the Apostles
as he was, all his equipment was imperfect without the
prayers of his people.  He wrote letters everywhere, urging
them to pray for him.  Do you pray for your preacher?  Do
you pray for him in secret?  Public prayers are of little
worth unless they are founded on or followed up by private
praying.  the praying ones are to the preacher as Aaron and
Hur were to Moses.  They hold up his hands and decide the
issue that is so fiercely raging around them.

     The plea and purpose of the apostles were to put the
Church to praying.  They did not ignore the grace of
cheerful giving.  They were not ignorant of the place which
religious activity and work occupied in the spiritual life;
but not one nor all of these, in apostolic estimate or
urgency, could at all compare in necessity and importance
with prayer.  The most sacred and urgent pleas were used,
the most fervid exhortations, the most comprehensive and
arousing words were uttered to enforce the all-important
obligation and necessity of prayer.

     "Put the saints everywhere to praying" is the burden
of the apostolic effort and the keynote of apostolic
success.  Jesus Christ had striven to do this in the days
of his personal ministry.  As he was moved by infinite
compassion at the ripened fields of earth perishing for
lack of laborers - and pausing in his own praying - he
tries to awaken the stupid sensibilities of his disciples
to the duty of prayer as he charges them "Pray ye the Lord
of the harvest that he will send forth laborers into his
harvest."  "And he spake a parable unto them to this end,
that men ought always to pray and not to faint."


@19

19        DELIBERATION NECESSARY TO LARGEST
               RESULTS FROM PRAYER


     This perpetual hurry of business and company ruins me
in soul if not in body.  More solitude and earlier hours!
I suspect I have been allotting habitually too little time
to religious exercises, as private devotion and religious
meditation, Scripture-reading, etc.  Hence I am lean and
cold and hard.  I had better allot two hours or an hour and
a half daily.  I have been keeping too late hours, and
hence have had but a hurried half hour in a morning to
myself.  Surely the experience of all good men confirms the
proposition that without a due measure of private devotions
the soul will grow lean.  But all may be done through
prayer - almighty prayer, I am ready to say - and why not?
For that it is almighty is only through the gracious
ordination of the God of love and truth.  O then, pray,
pray, pray!
                    --William Wilberforce


     Our devotions are not measured by the clock, but time
is of their essence.  The ability to wait and stay and
press belongs essentially to our intercourse with God.
Hurry, everywhere unseeming and damaging, is so to an
alarming extent in the great business of communion with
God.  Short devotions are the bane of deep piety.
Calmness, grasp, strength, are never the companions of
hurry.  Short devotions deplete spiritual vigor, arrest
spiritual progress, sap spiritual foundations, blight the
root and bloom of spiritual life.  They are the prolific
source of backsliding, the sure indication of a superficial
piety; they deceive, blight, rot the seed, and impoverish
the soil.

     It is true that Bible prayers in word and print are
short, but the praying men of the Bible were with God
through many a sweet and holy wrestling hour.  They won by
few words but long waiting.  The prayers Moses records may
be short, but Moses prayed to God with fastings and mighty
cryings forty days and nights.

     The statement of Elijah's praying may be condensed to
a few brief paragraphs, but doubtless Elijah, who when
"praying he prayed," spent many hours of fiery struggle and
lofty intercourse with God before he could, with assured
boldness, say to Ahab, "There shall not be dew nor rain
these years, but according to my word."  The verbal brief
of Paul's prayers is short, but Paul "prayed night and day
exceedingly."  The "Lord's Prayer" is a divine epitome for
infant lips, but the man Christ Jesus prayed many an
all-night ere his work was done; and his all-night and
long-sustained devotions gave to his work its finish and
perfection, and to his character the fullness and glory of
its divinity.

     Spiritual work is taxing work, and men are loath to do
it.  Praying, true praying, costs an outlay of serious
attention and of time, which flesh and blood do not relish.
Few persons are made of such strong fiber that they will
make a costly outlay when surface work will pass as well in
the market.  We can habituate ourselves to our beggarly
praying until it looks well to us, at least it keeps up a
decent form and quiets conscience - the deadliest of
opiates!  We can slight our praying, and not realize the
peril till the foundations are gone.  Hurried devotions
make weak faith, feeble convictions, questionable piety.
To be little with God is to be little for God.  To cut
short the praying makes the whole religious character
short, scrimp, niggardly, and slovenly.

     It takes good time for the full flow of God into the
spirit.  Short devotions cut the pipe of God's full flow.
It takes time in the secret places to get the full
revelation of God.  Little time and hurry mar the picture.

     Henry Martyn laments that "want of private devotional
reading and shortness of prayer through incessant
sermon-making had produced much strangeness between God and
his soul."  He judged that he had dedicated too much time
to PUBLIC ministrations and too little to PRIVATE communion
with God.  He was much impressed to set apart times for
fasting and to devote times for solemn prayer.  Resulting
from this he records: "Was assisted this morning to pray
for two hours."  Said William Wilberforce, the peer of
kings: "I must secure more time for private devotions.  I
have been living far too public for me.  The shortening of
private devotions starves the soul; it grows lean and
faint.  I have been keeping too late hours."  Of a failure
in Parliament he says:  "Let me record my grief and shame,
and all, probably, from private devotions having been
contracted, and so God let me stumble."  More solitude and
earlier hours was his remedy.

     More time and early hours for prayer would act like
magic to revive and invigorate many a decayed spiritual
life.  More time and early hours for prayer would be
manifest in holy living.  A holy life would not be so rare
or so difficult a thing if our devotions were not so short
and hurried.  A Christly temper in its sweet and
passionless fragrance would not be so alien and hopeless a
heritage if our closet stay were lengthened and
intensified.  We live shabbily because we pray meanly.
Plenty of time to feast in our closets will bring marrow
and fatness to our lives.  Our ability to stay with God in
our closet measures our ability to stay with God out of the
closet.  Hasty closet visits are deceptive, defaulting.  We
are not only deluded by them, but we are losers by them in
many ways and in many rich legacies.  Tarrying in the
closet instructs and wins.  We are taught by it, and the
greatest victories are often the results of great waiting -
waiting till words and plans are exhausted, and silent and
patient waiting gains the crown.  Jesus Christ asks with an
affronted emphasis, "Shall not God avenge his own elect
which cry day and night unto him?"

     To pray is the greatest thing we can do:  and to do it
well there must be calmness, time, and deliberation;
otherwise it is degraded into the littlest and meanest of
things.  True praying has the largest results for good; and
poor praying, the least.  We cannot do too much of real
praying; we cannot do too little of the sham.  We must
learn anew the worth of prayer, enter anew the school of
prayer.  There is nothing which it takes more time to
learn.  And if we would learn the wondrous art, we must not
give a fragment here and there - "A little talk with
Jesus," as the tiny saintlets sing - but we must demand and
hold with iron grasp the best hours of the day for God and
prayer, or there will be no praying worth the name.

     This, however, is not a day of prayer.  Few men there
are who pray.  Prayer is defamed by preacher and priest.
In these days of hurry and bustle, of electricity and
steam, men will not take time to pray.  Preachers there are
who "say prayers' as a part of their programme, on regular
or state occasions; but who "stirs himself up to take hold
upon God?"  Who prays as Jacob prayed - till he is crowned
as a prevailing, princely intercessor?  Who prays as Elijah
prayed - till all the locked-up forces of nature were
unsealed and a famine-stricken land bloomed as the garden
of God?  Who prayed as Jesus Christ prayed as out upon the
mountain he "continued all night in prayer to God?"  The
apostles "gave themselves to prayer" - the most difficult
thing to get men or even the preachers to do.  Laymen there
are who will give their money - some of them in rich
abundance - but they will not "give themselves" to prayer,
without which their money is but a curse.  There are plenty
of preachers who will preach and deliver great and eloquent
addresses on the need of revival and the spread of the
kingdom of God, but not many there are who will do that
without which all preaching and organizing are worse than
vain - pray. It is out of date, almost a lost art, and the
greatest benefactor this age could have is the man who will
bring the preachers and the Church back to prayer.


@20

20        A PRAYING PULPIT BEGETS A PRAYING PEW

     I judge that my prayer is more than the devil himself;
if it were otherwise, Luther would have fared differently
long before this.  Yet men will not see and acknowledge the
great wonders or miracles God works in my behalf.  If I
should neglect prayer but a single day, I should lose a
great deal of the fire of faith.
                    --Martin Luther


     Only glimpses of the great importance of prayer could
the apostles get before Pentecost.  But the Spirit coming
and filling on Pentecost elevated prayer to its vital and
all-commanding position in the gospel of Christ.  The call
now of prayer to every saint is the Spirit's loudest and
most exigent call.  Sainthood's piety is made, refined,
perfected, by prayer.  The gospel moves with slow and timid
pace when the saints are not at their prayers early and
late and long.

     Where are the Christly leaders who can teach the
modern saints how to pray and put them at it?  Do we know
we are raising up a prayerless set of saints?  Where are
the apostolic leaders who can put God's people to praying?
Let them come to the front and do the work, and it will be
the greatest work which can be done.  An increase of
educational facilities and a great increase of money force
will be the direst curse to religion if they are not
sanctified by more and better praying than we are doing.
More praying will not come as a matter of course.  The
campaign for the twentieth or thirtieth century fund will
not help our praying but hinder if we are not careful.
Nothing but a specific effort from a praying leadership
will avail.  The chief ones must lead in the apostolic
effort to radicate the vital importance and FACT of prayer
in the heart and life of the Church.  None but praying
leaders can have praying followers.  Praying apostles will
beget praying saints.  A praying pulpit will beget praying
pews.  We do greatly need somebody who can set the saints
to this business of praying.  We are not a generation of
praying saints.  Nonpraying saints are a beggarly gang of
saints who have neither the ardor nor the beauty nor the
power of saints.  Who will restore this breach?  The
greatest will be of reformers and apostles, who can set the
Church to praying.

     We put it as our most sober judgment 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 their
prayers, faith, lives, and ministry will be of such a
radical and aggressive form as to work spiritual
revolutions which will form eras in individual and Church
life.

     We do not mean men who get up sensational stirs by
novel devices, nor those who attract by a pleasing
entertainment; but men who can stir things, and work
revolutions by the preaching of God's Word and by the power
of the Holy Ghost, revolutions which change the whole
current of things.

     Natural ability and educational advantages do not
figure as factors in this matter; but capacity for faith,
the ability to pray, the power of thorough consecration,
the ability of self-littleness, 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 - men
who 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.

     God can work wonders if he can get a suitable man.
Men can work wonders if they can get God to lead them.  The
full endowment of the spirit that turned the world upside
down would be eminently useful in these latter days.  Men
who can stir things mightily for God, whose spiritual
revolutions change the whole aspect of things, are the
universal need of the Church.

     The Church has never been without these men; they
adorn its history; they are the standing miracles of the
divinity of the Church; their example and history are an
unfailing inspiration and blessing.  An increase in their
number and power should be our prayer.

     That which has been done in spiritual matters can be
done again, and be better done.  This was Christ's view.
He said, "Verily, verily, I say unto you, he that believeth
on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater
works than these shall he do; because I go unto my Father."
The past has not exhausted the possibilities nor the
demands for doing great things for God.  The Church that is
dependent on its past history for its miracles of power and
grace is a fallen Church.

     God wants elect men - men out of whom self and the
world have gone by a severe crucifixion, by a bankruptcy
which has so totally ruined self and the world that there
is neither hope nor desire of recovery; men who by this
insolvency and crucifixion have turned toward God perfect
hearts.

     Let us pray ardently that God's promise to prayer may
be more than realized.

[End of etext PWRPRY01.TXT:  E. M. Bounds' POWER THROUGH PRAYER]
--< FILE_ID.DIZ >--
POWER THROUGH PRAYER by E.M.Bounds, a
challenging "classic" etext on the
devotional life, slanted for Christian
workers, but useful for all believers.

