Power Through Prayer

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 in 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. We will be one 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 shown 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 stand 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 equaled. His learning was very considerable, and he had extraordinary gifts for the pulpit. No sublime 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, bore 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 man to do it with. Brainerd lived the life of holiness in 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 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 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 open 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. Oh 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. Riding through the interminable solitudes of the forest he prayed. On his bed of straw he prayed. Retiring to the dense and lonely forest 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 Almighty 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 two 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 a 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. 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 McShane A sermon that has more head infused into it than heart will not borne home with efficiency 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 the 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 non-conductors. 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 mire 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 fearless among the apostles. It was this which gave Wesley his power and eradicated 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 a channel of preaching is 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. Grace from the heart rather than the head. Studying not to be a fine preacher, Jerichos are blown down with ram's 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. 14. 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. 15. 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 creatures. Good hearts make good creatures. A theological school to enlarge and cultivate the heart is the golden visiteratum 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. Man of heart is what the world needs to sympathize with its woe, to kiss away at sorrows, to compassionate its mercy, 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 a 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 the perfect school teacher and schoolhouse 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 of praying when praying in deed than for 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. Unction a Necessity One bright venison which private prayer brings down upon the ministry is an indescribable, inevitable thing, 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 Hayden Spurgeon 15. Alexander Knox Alexander Knox, a Christian philosopher of the days of Wesley, not an inherent 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 feeling 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 unction, as the French not unfitly term it, is beyond all comparison more likely to be found in England in a Methodist conventical than in a parish church. This and this alone seems really to be that which fills the Methodist houses and thins of 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 Burnett and Layton. 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 assurably 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 and 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 words 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. Everyone 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 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 McShane 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 in affections and comes immediately from the word. 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 throbbing 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 preachers. 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 perfecting 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 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 goodwill, 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 and brain and 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 and 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 exigencies. So men grow exceeding earnest over their own plans or movements. Earnestness may be selfishness simulated. What a function! 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 the two-edged sword of heavenly temper keen, and double were the wounds it made wherever it glanced between. T'was death to silt, t'was life to all who mourned for sin. It kindled in its silent strife, made war and peace within. This function comes to the preacher not in the study but in the closet. It is heaven's distillation and 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 arranger, a reveler, a searcher. Makes the 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 function 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 freelatical 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 hour of cheerful 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 chain 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. Much prayer the price of unction. All a 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 or 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 is 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 divine unction, but they have no pungent, perpetrating, 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 enriches 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 polka oftener fails than in any other element. Just as 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 be impressed and enforce truth with all its resources. But without this unction, each and all will be but as the fretful assault of the waters on a Gibraltar. Spray and foam may cover and spangle, but the rocks are still there, unimpressed and unimpressible. The human heart can no more be swept by its hardness and sinned by these human forces than these rocks can be swept away by the ocean's ceaseless flow. This unction is the consecration force, in 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. The separation through 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 congregations. 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 error 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. 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 put 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 tongue, 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 might 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 his 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 encases 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 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 truth 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 millennial 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 prayer. If the preachers of the twentieth century will learn well the lesson of prayer and use fully the power of prayer, the millennium 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. PREACHERS NEED THE PRAYERS OF THE PEOPLE If some Christians that had 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 we have 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 than 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 open 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 can 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 thereto 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, With all 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 bounds, 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 prayers 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 ignorant of the place which religious activity and work occupied on 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 fervent 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 has 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 man ought always to pray and not to faint. 19. DELIBERATION NECESSARY. TWO LARGEST RESULTS FROM PRAYER. This perpetual hurry of business and company ruins me in soul if not in body. More solitude in 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 rest an 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 crimes 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, truly 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 passes 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 Martin 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 devotion 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 decade 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 morrow 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. Tearing 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 program 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. 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 for us will be the direct 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 20th or 30th 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 eradicate the vital importance and the 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 saint to this business of praying. We are not a generation of praying saints. Non-praying 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 he 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 novelty vices, 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 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.