00.3 Preface
Preface THE occasion which has prompted the dedication of this book permits me to inscribe upon it the honoured name of Dr. Andrew A. Bonar, and to recall the fervent devotion which characterized those who were most intimately associated with him in the service of Christ. The diary of Dr. Bonar, already a Christian classic, is probably the best treatise on private prayer which we possess. Originally meant to mark the memorabilia of his life, it became, almost exclusively, an instrument for recording and testing his prayers. On Thursday, 4th December, 1856, Mr. Bonar was inducted into the pastoral charge of Finnieston Church, Glasgow. On the evening of that day he signified anew his sense of the value of prayer: “The Lord filled me with desire, and made me feel that I must be as much with Him alone as with souls in public.” A few months later he wrote, “For nearly ten days past have been much hindered in prayer, and feel my strength weakened thereby. I must at once return, through the Lord’s strength, not to less than three hours a day spent in prayer and meditation upon the Word.” On the first anniversary this entry occurs: “To-morrow I propose to spend most of the day in prayer in the church. Lord, help me.” Later, we find him setting apart one whole day in each month for prayer and fasting. But his devotion overflowed all prepared channels. Sentences such as these carry with them their own instruction: “Felt in the evening most bitter grief over the apathy of the district. They are perishing! They are perishing! And yet they will not consider. I lay awake thinking over it, and crying to the Lord in broken groans.”
Again, he observes, “I should count the days, not by what I have of newinstances of usefulness, but by the times I have been enabled to pray in faith, and to take hold upon God.” At another time he remarks that “Prayer should make room for itself ”; again, that it should “interweave” itself into all work for Christ; again, that in “the incessant occupations, the bustle of even right things, Satan may find his opportunity to hinder prayer.” He quotes Flavel: “The devil is aware that one hour of close fellowship, of hearty converse with God in prayer, is able to pull down what he hath been contriving and building many a year”; and he adds from his own experience, “Satan, like the lapwing, drew me away from the real object (prayer and fellowship with God) by suggesting every now and then something about some other part of my work…and so the best hours of yesterday were in great measure lost, so far as ‘prayer and transfiguration’ might have been.” His holidays were especially opportunities of “trading with the talent of prayer.” “I see,” he writes, “that the Master teaches the necessity of such times of continued waiting on God as a stay in the country presents.” In sailing to America to attend the Northfield Conference, and in returning, he was “enabled to pray some hours every day in the ship.” Of his frequent visits to Mull, he writes, “The best thing I have found in this quiet island has been seasons of prayer. And as he reviewed his ministry from time to time, amid many regrets his deepest sorrow was on account of the unexhausted possibilities of prayer: “My heart smites me still for being unlike Epaphras, who ‘laboured fervently in prayers.’ ” “One terrible failure confronted me everywhere, viz.: ‘Ye have asked nothing in my name.’ ” “Want of prayer in the right measure and manner.” “Had some almost overwhelming sense of sins of omission in the days past. If I had only prayed more.” “Oh, that I had prayed a hundred-fold more.”
Perhaps the most intimate of Dr. Bonar’s ministerial associates was Robert Murray McCheyne. His prayerfulness has almost become a proverb. Dr. James Hamilton writes of him: “He gave himself to prayer. Like his blessed Master he often rose up a great while before it was day, and spend the time in singing psalms and hymns and the devotional reading of that Word which dwelt so richly in him. His walks and rides and journeys were sanctified by prayer.… There was nothing which he liked so much as to go out into a solitary place, and pray; and the ruined chapel of Invergowrie, and many other sequestered spots around Dundee, were the much-loved resorts where he had often enjoyed sweet communion with God. Seldom have we known one so specific and yet reverential in his prayers, nor one whose confessions of sin united such self-loathing with such filial love. And now that “Moses my servant is dead,” perhaps the heaviest loss to his brethren, his people, and the land, is the loss of his intercessions.”
Only a few months before his death, Mr. McCheyne drew up some considerations touching “Reformation in Secret Prayer.” “I ought,” he says, “to spend the best hours of the day in communion with God. It is my noblest and most fruitful employment, and is not to be thrust into any corner.” This paper on personal reformation is evidently left unfinished. “And now,” adds his biographer, “he knows even as he is known.”
Dr. Moody Stuart was a friend greatly beloved. Of him his biographer writes: “Dr. Moody Stuart was preeminently a man of prayer.… He prayed without ceasing.… He prayed always with all prayer and supplication in the Spirit, watching thereunto with all perseverance. He felt that nothing was too small for him to bring to his God in prayer, and that nothing was too great for him to ask in Jesus’ name.… Prayer was to him a second nature.” His own testimony was, “I cannot say that a day passes without beholding the beauty of the Lord, and being revived by his grace. For the most part the Lord is with me the greater part of the day, and is daily giving me some new insight into the depth and freeness of his love, together with the conviction of sin and contrition of spirit, in which there is much peace and rest.” The rules which he offered to others, and in accordance with which he guided his own prayer-life, were: (a) Pray till you pray; (b) Pray till you are conscious of being heard; (c) Pray till you receive an answer.
Dr. A. N. Somerville was another “true yoke-fellow.” In the work of his own congregation, it was his custom “to go into the church alone, and go over the pews, and, reading the names of the sitters in them commit them to God in prayer.” When the missionary hunger seized and held his heart, he used to spread open before him an atlas, and pray for men of every nation and kindred and people and tongue. And from the chair of the General Assembly of his Church he exhorted her members to address themselves to more fervent and believing intercession: “The greatest, the most successful servants that Christ ever had divided their functions into departments – ‘We will give ourselves continually to prayer and to the ministry of the Word.’ What would be thought of dividing the twelve hours of our day by giving six hours to prayer for the Gospel and six to the ministry of the Word? Had all Christ’s servants acted thus, could anyone estimate how mighty the results on the world would be to-day?” Of William C. Burns, another fellow-soldier, it is said, “His whole life was literally a life of prayer, and his whole ministry a series of battles fought at the mercy-seat.” Very early in his ministerial course he gave it as his judgment that “The great, fundamental error, as far as I can see, in the economy of the Christian life, which many, and alas! I for one commit, is that of having too few and too short periods of solemn retirement with our gracious Father and his adorable Son, Jesus Christ.” From this opinion he never swerved. He spent days and sometimes nights “before the Lord,” and sighed, “Oh, for a day every week to spend entirely in the secret of his presence.” For weeks before the Kilsyth awakening, as his brother informs us, “he was full of prayer; he seemed to care for nothing but to pray. In the daytime, alone, or with others, it was his chief delight, and in the night watches he might be heard praying aloud.” And the Lord whom he sought came to his temple suddenly.
One might speak of John Milne of Perth, Patrick Miller of Dundee, Daniel Cormick of Kirriemuir, Dr. Bonar’s brothers, Dr. James Hamilton of London, Joseph Wilson of Abernyte, and the rest, their “friends and companions.” Let it suffice to mention only one other, William Hewitson of Dirleton. Dr. Andrew Bonar says of him, “One thing often struck me in Mr. Hewitson. He seemed to have no intervals in communion with God – no gaps. I used to feel, when with him, that it was being with one who was a vine watered every moment.” And so it was that he was able to say in truth, “I am better acquainted with Jesus than with any friend I have on earth.”
Books on secret prayer are without number; but it seems to me that there is still room for one in which an appeal may be taken, steadily, and from every point, to life – to the experience of God’s saints. In these pages no attempt has been made to explain the mysteries of intercourse with God and commerce with heaven. What is here offered is a simple enumeration of some things which the Lord’s remembrancers have found to be helpful in the practice of prayer. The great Bengel explained that if he desired the most perfect intimacy with real Christians on one account rather than another, it was “for the sake of learning how they manage in secret to keep up their communion with God.”
Lord, teach us to pray.
D.M.M.