06.10. Brothers, Let Us Pray
Prayer is the coupling of primary and secondary causes.
It is the splicing of our limp wire to the lightning bolt of heaven.
✦ ✦ ✦ A pastor who feels competent in himself to produce eternal fruit knows neither God nor himself. A pastor who does not know the rhythm of desperation and deliverance must have his sights only on what man can achieve.
✦ ✦ ✦ When we depend upon organizations, we get what organizations can do; when we depend upon education, we get what education can do; when we depend upon man, we get what man can do; but when we depend upon prayer, we get what God can do.
A. C. Dixon
10 Brothers, Let Us Pray
Prayer is the coupling of primary and secondary causes. It is the splicing of our limp wire to the lightning bolt of heaven. How astonishing it is that God wills to do His work through people. It is doubly astonishing that He ordains to fulfill His plans by being asked to do so by us. God loves to bless His people. But even more He loves to do it in answer to prayer. For example, God knew that His purpose was to increase the men of Israel. But He said, “This also I will let the house of Israel ask me to do for them: to increase their people like a flock” (Ezekiel 36:37). He wills to convey to us our blessings through the coupling of prayer.
God knew He would preserve Abimelech’s life if the king would return Sarah to Abraham. But He said to him: “Return the man’s wife, for he is a prophet, so that he will pray for you, and you shall live” (Genesis 20:7). God desired to save Abimelech, but He wanted to do it through Abraham’s prayer. And who would say that God does not love the world or that He is hesitant to gather His harvest? Yet Jesus said, “Pray . . . the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest” (Matthew 9:38). Why must the owner of the farm be implored by his farmhands to send out more laborers? Because there is one thing God loves to do more than bless the world. He loves to bless the world in answer to prayer.
I was amazed once to hear a seminary graduate say how adequate he felt for the ministry after his years of schooling. This was supposed to be a compliment to the school. The reason this amazed me is that the greatest theologian and missionary and pastor who ever lived cried out, “Who is sufficient for these things?” (2 Corinthians 2:16). Not because he was a bungler but because the awful calling of emitting the fragrance of eternal life for some and eternal death for others was a weight he could scarcely bear. A pastor who feels competent in himself to produce eternal fruit—which is the only kind that matters—knows neither God nor himself. A pastor who does not know the rhythm of desperation and deliverance must have his sights only on what man can achieve. But brothers, the proper goals of the life of a pastor are unques-tionably beyond our reach. The changes we long for in the hearts of our people can happen only by a sovereign work of grace.
Salvation is a gift of God (Ephesians 2:8). Love is a gift of God (1 Thessalonians 3:12). Faith is a gift of God (1 Timothy 1:14). Wisdom is a gift of God (Ephesians 1:17). Joy is a gift of God (Romans 15:13). Yet as pastors we must labor to “save some” (1 Corinthians 9:22). We must stir up the people to love (Hebrews 10:24). We must advance their faith (Php 1:25). We must impart wisdom (1 Corinthians 2:7). We must work for their joy (2 Corinthians 1:24).
We are called to labor for that which is God’s alone to give. The essence of the Christian ministry is that its success is not within our reach.
God’s purpose is that we get the joy of service but that He gets the glory. “Whoever serves, [let him do so] as one who serves by the strength that God supplies—in order that in everything God may be glorified ” (1 Peter 4:11). “Neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth” (1 Corinthians 3:7). God does all His gracious work in such a way “that no human being might boast in the presence of God” (1 Corinthians 1:29), which means He usually does it in answer to prayer. A cry for help from the heart of a childlike pastor is sweet praise in the ears of God. Nothing exalts Him more than the collapse of self-reliance that issues in passionate prayer for help. “Call upon me in the day of trouble; I will deliver you, and you shall glorify me” (Psalms 50:15). Prayer is the translation into a thousand different words of a single sentence: “Apart from me [Christ] you can do nothing” (John 15:5).
Oh, how we need to wake up to how much “nothing” we spend our time doing. Apart from prayer, all our scurrying about, all our talking, all our study amounts to “nothing.” For most of us the voice of self-reliance is ten times louder than the bell that tolls for the hours of prayer. The voice cries out: “You must open the mail, you must make that call, you must write this sermon, you must prepare for the board meeting, you must go to the hospital.” But the bell tolls softly: “Without Me you can do nothing.”
Both our flesh and our culture scream against spending an hour on our knees beside a desk piled with papers. It is un-American to be so impractical as to devote oneself to prayer and meditation two hours a day. And sometimes I fear that our seminaries conform to this deadly pragmatism that stresses management and maneuvering as ways to get things done with a token mention of prayer and reliance on the Holy Spirit.
A. C. Dixon said, When we depend upon organizations, we get what orga-nizations can do; when we depend upon education, we get what education can do; when we depend upon man, we get what man can do; but when we depend upon prayer, we get what God can do.1
I do not become excited when denominations or churches react to their lack of growth by merely adding a new program. I know that the reason so few conversions are happening through my church is not because we lack a program or staff. It is because we do not love the lost and yearn for their salvation the way we should. And the reason we do not love them as we ought is because such love is a miracle that overcomes our selfish bent. It cannot be managed or maneuvered into existence. It is an astonishing miracle.
Examine yourself: Does it lie within your power right now to weep over the spiritual destruction of the people on your street? Such tears come only through a profound work of God. If we want this work of God in our lives and in our churches, there will be agonizing prayer: “God, break my heart!” I choose the word agonize carefully. It is the word Paul used in Romans 15:30, “Now I appeal to you, broth-ers, by our Lord Jesus Christ and by the love of the Spirit, to strive together [sunagōnizasthai] with me in your prayers to God on my behalf.” With such “agonizing together” God may grant tears. And without those tears we may shuffle members from church to church, but few people will pass from darkness to light.
Take one of your days off and go away by yourself and pray about how you should pray. Say to yourself right now, “God help me to do something radical in regard to prayer!” Refuse to believe that the daily hours Luther and Wesley and Brainerd and Judson spent in prayer are idealistic dreams of another era.
William Wilberforce, who fought unrelentingly in Parliament for the abolition of the slave trade in England, took his own spiritual tem-perature by consulting “the experience of all good men” and lamented: 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 reli-gious 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 the 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 loving truth. On then, pray, pray, pray!2 Are our packed calendars and handheld computers really fulfill-ing our own hunger for life in Christ, let alone the hunger of our people and the world? Are not our people really yearning to be around a man who has been around God? Is it not the lingering aroma of prayer that gives a sense of eternity to all our work?
Read about men of prayer, and you will get hungry to pray. Dozens of stories about praying saints have stirred me up to renewed prayer. I close with one from Charles Spurgeon, who wrote: That was a grand action by Jerome, one of the Roman fathers. He laid aside all pressing engagements and went to fulfill the call God gave him, viz., to translate the Holy Scriptures. His congregations were larger than many preach-ers of today, but he said to his people, “Now it is necessary that the Scriptures be translated; you must find another min-ister: I am bound for the wilderness and shall not return until my task is finished.” Away he went and labored and prayed until he produced the Latin Vulgate, which will last as long as the world stands. So we must say to our friends, “I must go away and have time for prayer and solitude.” And though we did not write Latin Vulgates, yet our work will be immortal: Glory to God.3
Notes 1.Quoted in G. Michael Cocoris, Evangelism: A Biblical Approach Chicago, IL: Moody Press, 1984), 108.
2.Quoted in E. M. Bounds, Power through Prayer (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1972), 116.
3.Charles Spurgeon, “The Christian Minister’s Private Prayer,” The Sword and Trowel, November 1868, 165.