Chapter 11

XI

The preceding chapter closed with the statement that prayer can do anything that God can do. It is a tremendous statement to make, but it is a statement borne out by history and experience. If we are abiding in Christ—and if we abide in Him we are living in obedience to His holy will—and approach God in His name, then there lie open before us the infinite resources of the Divine treasure-house.

The man who truly prays gets from God many things denied to the prayerless man. The aim of all real praying is to get the thing prayed for, as the child’s cry for bread has for its end the getting of bread. This view removes prayer clean out of the sphere of religious performances. Prayer is not acting a part or going through religious motions. Prayer is neither official nor formal nor ceremonial, but direct, hearty, intense. Prayer is not religious work which must be gone through, and avails because well done. Prayer is the helpless and needy child crying to the compassion of the Father’s heart and the bounty and power of a Father’s hand. The answer is as sure to come as the Father’s heart can be touched and the Father’s hand moved.

The object of asking is to receive. The aim of seeking is to find. The purpose of knocking is to arouse attention and get in, and this is Christ’s iterated and re-iterated asseveration that the prayer without doubt will be answered, its end without doubt secured. Not by some round-about way, but by getting the very thing asked for.

The value of prayer does not lie in the number of prayers, or the length of prayers, but its value is found in the great truth that we are privileged by our relations to God to unburden our desires and make our requests known to God, and He will relieve by granting our petitions. The child asks because the parent is in the habit of granting the child’s requests. As the children of God we need something and we need it badly, and we go to God for it. Neither the Bible nor the child of God knows anything of that half-infidel declaration, that we are to answer our own prayers. God answers prayer. The true Christian does not pray to stir himself up, but his prayer is the stirring up of himself to take hold of God. The heart of faith knows nothing of that specious scepticism which stays the steps of prayer and chills its ardour by whispering that prayer does not affect God.

D. L. Moody used to tell a story of a little child whose father and mother had died, and who was taken into another family. The first night she asked whether she could pray as she used to do. They said: “Oh, yes!” So she knelt down and prayed as her mother had taught her; and when that was ended, she added a little prayer of her own: “O God, make these people as kind to me as father and mother were.” Then she paused and looked up, as if expecting the answer, and then added: “Of course you will.” How sweetly simple was that little one’s faith! She expected God to answer and “do,” and “of course” she got her request, and that is the spirit in which God invites us to approach Him.

In contrast to that incident is the story told of the quaint Yorkshire class leader, Daniel Quorm, who was visiting a friend. One forenoon he came to the friend and said, “I am sorry you have met with such a great disappointment.”

“Why, no,” said the man, “I have not met with any disappointment.”

“Yes,” said Daniel, “you were expecting something remarkable to-day.”

“What do you mean?” said the friend.

“Why you prayed that you might be kept sweet and gentle all day long. And, by the way things have been going, I see you have been greatly disappointed.”

“Oh,” said the man, “I thought you meant something particular.”

Prayer is mighty in its operations, and God never disappoints those who put their trust and confidence in Him. They may have to wait long for the answer, and they may not live to see it, but the prayer of faith never misses its object.

“A friend of mine in Cincinnati had preached his sermon and sank back in his chair, when he felt impelled to make another appeal,” says Dr. J. Wilbur Chapman. “A boy at the back of the church lifted his hand. My friend left the pulpit and went down to him, and said, ‘Tell me about yourself.’ The boy said, ‘I live in New York. I am a prodigal. I have disgraced my father’s name and broken my mother’s heart. I ran away and told them I would never come back until I became a Christian or they brought me home dead.’ That night there went from Cincinnati a letter telling his father and mother that their boy had turned to God.

“Seven days later, in a black-bordered envelope, a reply came which read: ‘My dear boy, when I got the news that you had received Jesus Christ the sky was overcast; your father was dead.’ Then the letter went on to tell how the father had prayed for his prodigal boy with his last breath, and concluded, ‘You are a Christian to-night because your old father would not let you go.’”

A fourteen-year-old boy was given a task by his father. It so happened that a group of boys came along just then and wiled the boy away with them, and so the work went undone. But the father came home that evening and said, “Frank, did you do the work that I gave you?” “Yes, sir,” said Frank. He told an untruth, and his father knew it, but said nothing. It troubled the boy, but he went to bed as usual. Next morning his mother said to him, “Your father did not sleep all last night.”

“Why didn’t he sleep?” asked Frank.

His mother said, “He spent the whole night praying for you.”

This sent the arrow into his heart. He was deeply convicted of his sin, and knew no rest until he had got right with God. Long afterward, when the boy became Bishop Warne, he said that his decision for Christ came from his father’s prayer that night. He saw his father keeping his lonely and sorrowful vigil praying for his boy, and it broke his heart. Said he, “I can never be sufficiently grateful to him for that prayer.”

An evangelist, much used of God, has put on record that he commenced a series of meetings in a little church of about twenty members who were very cold and dead, and much divided. A little prayer-meeting was kept up by two or three women. “I preached, and closed at eight o’clock,” he says. “There was no one to speak or pray. The next evening one man spoke.

“The next morning I rode six miles to a minister’s study, and kneeled in prayer. I went back, and said to the little church:

“‘If you can make out enough to board me, I will stay until God opens the windows of heaven. God has promised to bless these means, and I believe He will.’

“Within ten days there were so many anxious souls that I met one hundred and fifty of them at a time in an inquiry meeting, while Christians were praying in another house of worship. Several hundred, I think, were converted. It is safe to believe God.”

A mother asked the late John B. Gough to visit her son to win him to Christ. Gough found the young man’s mind full of sceptical notions, and impervious to argument. Finally, the young man was asked to pray, just once, for light. He replied: “I do not know anything perfect to whom or to which I could pray.” “How about your mother’s love?” said the orator. “Isn’t that perfect? Hasn’t she always stood by you, and been ready to take you in, and care for you, when even your father had really kicked you out?” The young man chocked with emotion, and said, “Y-e-s, sir; that is so.” “Then pray to Love—it will help you. Will you promise?” He promised. That night the young man prayed in the privacy of his room. He kneeled down, closed his eyes, and struggling a moment uttered the words: “O Love.” Instantly as by a flash of lightning, the old Bible text came to him: “God is love,” and he said, brokenly, “O God!” Then another flash of Divine truth, and a voice said, “God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son,”—and there, instantly, he exclaimed, “O Christ, Thou incarnation of Divinest love, show me light and truth.” It was all over. He was in the light of the most perfect peace. He ran downstairs, adds the narrator of this incident, and told his mother that he was saved. That young man is to-day an eloquent minister of Jesus Christ.

A water famine was threatened in Hakodate, Japan. Miss Dickerson, of the Methodist Episcopal Girls’ School, saw the water supply growing less daily, and in one of the fall months appealed to the Board in New York for help. There was no money on hand, and nothing was done. Miss Dickerson inquired the cost of putting down an artesian well, but found the expense too great to be undertaken. On the evening of December 31st, when the water was almost exhausted, the teachers and the older pupils met to pray for water, though they had no idea how their prayer was to be answered. A couple of days later a letter was received in the New York office which ran something like this: “Philadelphia, January 1st. It is six o’clock in the morning of New Year’s Day. All the other members of the family are asleep, but I was awakened with a strange impression that some one, somewhere, is in need of money which the Lord wants me to supply.” Enclosed was a cheque for an amount which just covered the cost of the artesian well and the piping of the water into the school buildings.

“I have seen God’s hand stretched out to heal among the heathen in as mighty wonder-working power as in apostolic times,” once said a well-known minister to the writer. “I was preaching to two thousand famine orphan girls, at Kedgaum, India, at Ramabai’s Mukti (salvation) Mission. A swarm of serpents as venomous and deadly as the reptile that smote Paul, suddenly raided the walled grounds, ‘sent of Satan,’ Ramabai said, and several of her most beautiful and faithful Christian girls were smitten by them, two of them bitten twice. I saw four of the very flower of her flock in convulsions at once, unconscious and apparently in the agonies of death.

“Ramabai believes the Bible with an implicit and obedient faith. There were three of us missionaries there. She said: ‘We will do just what the Bible says, I want you to minister for their healing according to James v. 14-18.’ She led the way into the dormitory where her girls were lying in spasms, and we laid our hands upon their heads and prayed, and anointed them with oil in the name of the Lord. Each of them was healed as soon as anointed and sat up and sang with faces shining. That miracle and marvel among the heathen mightily confirmed the word of the Lord, and was a profound and overpowering proclamation of God.”

Some years ago, the record of a wonderful work of grace in connection with one of the stations of the China Inland Mission attracted a good deal of attention. Both the number and spiritual character of the converts had been far greater than at other stations where the consecration of the missionaries had been just as great as at the more fruitful place.

This rich harvest of souls remained a mystery until Hudson Taylor on a visit to England discovered the secret. At the close of one of his addresses a gentleman came forward to make his acquaintance. In the conversation which followed, Mr. Taylor was surprised at the accurate knowledge the man possessed concerning this inland China station. “But how is it,” Mr. Taylor asked, “that you are so conversant with the conditions of that work?” “Oh!” he replied, “the missionary there and I are old college-mates; for years we have regularly corresponded; he has sent me names of enquirers and converts, and these I have daily taken to God in prayer.”

At last the secret was found! A praying man at home, praying definitely, praying daily, for specific cases among the heathen. That is the real intercessory missionary.

Hudson Taylor himself, as all the world knows, was a man who knew how to pray and whose praying was blessed with fruitful answers. In the story of his life, told by Dr. and Mrs. Howard Taylor, we find page after page aglow with answered prayer. On his way out to China for the first time, in 1853, when he was only twenty-one years of age, he had a definite answer to prayer that was a great encouragement to his faith. “They had just come through the Dampier Strait, but were not yet out of sight of the islands. Usually a breeze would spring up after sunset and last until about dawn. The utmost use was made of it, but during the day they lay still with flapping sails, often drifting back and losing a good deal of the advantage gained at night.” The story continues in Hudson Taylor’s own words: