By Arthur T. Pierson, D.D.
All the greatest needs, both of the Church and of the world, may be included in one: the need of a higher standard of godliness; and the all-embracing secret of a truly godly life is close and constant contact with the unseen God; that contact is learned and practised, as nowhere else, in the secret place of supplication and intercession.
Our Lord’s first lesson in the school of prayer was, and still is: “ENTER INTO THY CLOSET” (Matt. 6:6). The “closet” is the closed place, where we are shut in alone with God, where the human spirit waits upon an unseen Presence, learns to recognize Him who is a Spirit, and cultivates His acquaintance, fellowship, and friendship.
Everything else, therefore, depends upon prayer.
To the praying soul there becomes possible the faith which is the grasp of the human spirit upon the realities and verities of the unseen world.
To the praying soul there becomes possible and natural the obedience which is the daily walk of the disciple with the unseen God.
To the praying soul there becomes possible the patience, which is the habit of waiting for results yet unseen and hopes yet unrealized.
To the praying soul there becomes possible the love that, like a celestial flood, drowns out evil tempers and hateful dispositions, and introduces us to a new world of gentle and generous frames.
To the praying soul there becomes possible and increasingly real the holiness which is personal conformity to an unseen Divine image and ideal, and the innermost secret of a heavenly bliss.
Those who yearn for revivals naturally lay much stress on preaching. But what is preaching without praying! Sermons are but pulpit performances, learned essays, rhetorical orations, popular lectures, or it may be political harangues, until God gives, in answer to earnest prayer, the preparation of the heart, and the answer of the tongue. It is only he who prays that can truly preach. Many a sermon that has shown no intellectual genius and has violated all homiletic rules and standards has had dynamic spiritual force. Somehow it has moved men, melted them, moulded them. The man whose lips are touched by God’s living coal from off the altar may even stammer, but his hearers soon find out that he is on fire with one consuming passion to save souls.
We need saints in the pew as well as in the pulpit, and saintship everywhere is fed and nourished on prayer. The man of business who prays, learns to abide in his calling with God; his secular affairs and transactions become sacred by being brought into the searchlight of God’s presence. His own business becomes his Father’s business. He does not trample on God’s commands in order to make money, nor does he drive his trade and traffic through the sacred limits of the Lord’s day, or defraud his customers, “breaking God’s law for a dividend.”
Praying souls become prevailing saints. Those who get farthest on in the school of prayer and learn most of its hidden secrets often develop a sort of prescience which comes nearest to the prophetic spirit, the Holy Spirit showing them “things to come.” They seem, like Savonarola, to know something of the purpose of God, to anticipate His plans, and to forecast the history of their own times. The great supplicators have been also the seers.
There is no higher virtue in a church than that it should be a praying church, for it is prayer that makes eternal realities both prominent and dominant. A church and a pastor may have any one of the current, popular types of “religious” life, and souls may not be saved; but, as the late Dr. Skinner, of New York, used to say: “If the peculiar type of piety is that which is inspired by a sense of the powers of the world to come, sinners will be saved and saints edified.” Even the world that now is will feel the power of such piety.
Praying feeds missions at home and abroad. It promotes giving. Parsimony is stifled in the atmosphere of God’s presence. Gifts are multiplied and magnified when the giver is consecrated. When disciples begin to pray for souls they begin to yearn over them and to be willing to make sacrifices for their salvation. The key that can unlock the treasury of God’s promises has marvelous power also to unlock the treasures of hoarded wealth, and makes even the abundance of deep poverty to abound into the riches of liberality till the widow’s mites drop into the Lord’s hands even more frequently than the millions of merchant princes. No man can breathe freely in the atmosphere of prayer while he stifles benevolent impulses. The giving of money prepares for the giving of self, and thus prayer makes missionary workers as well as missionary givers and supporters.
Few, even amongst the most devout, have ever fully felt how far workers in “the mine of heathendom” depend on those who “hold the ropes.” James Gilmour, whose rare and radiant spirit so impressed the rude Mongolians, said that, unprayed for, he would feel like a diver in the river bottom with no air to breathe, or like a fireman on a blazing building with no water in his empty hose.
Prayer is not to be thought the less of because we are so often driven to the throne of grace as a last resort. It is part of the philosophy of prayer that it shall reveal its full efficacy only when and where all beside fails us. Here, as in all else, it is only at the end of self with all its inventions. that we find the beginning of God with all His interpositions.
A praying heart is the one thing that the devil cannot easily counterfeit. It is easy enough to imitate praying lips, so that hypocrites and Pharisees feign devoutness. But only God can open in the heart’s depths those springs of supplication that often find no channel in language, but flow out in groanings which cannot be uttered.
It is not worthwhile to waste much time in defending or advocating prayer. Experiment makes argument needless. This is not so much a science to be mastered by study as an art to be learned by practice. Like the Bible, prayer is self-evidencing. It is a mysterious union of Divine and human elements not easy of explanation; but to him who prays and puts God to the test along the lines of His own precepts and promises, God proves how real a force prayer is in His moral universe. The best way to prop up prayer is to practice it.
The pivot of piety, therefore, is prayer. A pivot is of double use, it acts as a fastener and as a center; it holds other parts in place, and it is the axis of revolution. Prayer likewise, keeps one steadfast in faith and helps to all holy activity. Hence, as surely as God is lifting His people to a higher level of spirituality, and moving them to a more unselfish and self-denying service, there will be new emphasis laid by them upon supplication, and especially upon intercession.
The revival of the praying-spirit is not only first in order of development, but it is first in order of importance, for without it there is no advance. Generally, if not uniformly prayer is both starting-point and goal to every movement in which are the elements of permanent progress. Whenever the Church’s sluggishness is aroused and the world’s wickedness arrested, somebody has been praying. If the secret history of all true spiritual advance could be written and read, there would be found some intercessors who, like Job, Samuel, Daniel, Elijah, Paul and James; like Jonathan Edwards, William Carey, George Muller, and Hudson Taylor, have been led to shut themselves in the secret place with God, and have labored fervently in prayer. And as the starting-point is thus found in supplication and intercession, so the final outcome must be that God’s people shall have learned to pray; otherwise there will be rapid reaction and disastrous relapse from the better conditions secured.