“We come to thee, thou living Christ: thou ever livest to make intercession for us. Thy name is Life, thy gift is life; thou didst come that we might have life, and that we might have it more and more—wave upon wave, like a rising tide. Thou dost feed us with thy life: Because I live, ye shall live also, is thy sweet word of love and hope. We build upon it—we have no other wealth: it is enough; all things are thus made ours. Thou hast associated thyself with our little life. We cannot tell what thou wilt make of it: thou has eternity to work in; but thou wilt make us lovely with thine own pureness, and in our lifting up there shall be somewhat of thine own majesty. The way is long, hard—sometimes hot, sometimes cold; for in thy year there is both summer and winter. Thou has set them there with their varied lessons: may we receive thy province as a gift of thy love. Not our way, but thy way, would we go home; not our will, but thy will, be done. If it be a will of fire and piercing and loss and humiliation, behold, our hearts sink within us, because we are only men; but if it be otherwise, and if thus thou dost make thy grace known to us in all its fulness and power, glory and honor be unto thy name, thou living, reigning Christ. Our earth which thou hast given us, just enough to stand on and find a grave in, is so small, and thy stars are so many: thy heavens lie all unmeasured. We are sometimes overpowered, and we dread to look up; for who can bear thy glory of thy sky? But there thou art working out what we cannot see now; these are the many mansions in the Father’s house; it is enough that thou reignest, and that all things lie within the palm of thy wounded hand. We thank thee for all thy love; we thank thee for the little grave, and the large grave: we are proud of our dead. They cannot fall, they cannot sin; death hath no more dominion over them, and hell is disappointed. Oh, that we too may so live that we shall join the white-robed angels and saints far away above the clouds, and know how true it is that abounding sin is nothing compared with abounding grace! Thou hast always kept life uppermost; there has always been more life than death in thy universe, more heaven than hell, more good souls than bad ones: did thou not choose twelve men, and only one was a devil? Behold, thou wilt make all things new, and thou wilt work up the refuse of life and history into some unimagined beauty. We give one another thy tender, unchanging care. Pity us in our littleness and infirmity; thou knowest how frail we are,—a bruised reed, only like a tuft of smoking flax, the last spark almost gone,—yet thou wilt recover us, and redeem us, and strengthen us, and we shall be partakers of thy holiness and thy power. Thou knowest all hearts: abide with each. Comfort all that mourn; there is room on thy breast, thou living Christ, for us all to lay our sad hearts upon, and there is grace enough in thy love to feed and help and cheer and bless us every one. The Lord hear us when we cry; sanctify our very sorrows, make our losses the beginning of our true wealth, and work in us such a conception of time and eternity that we shall hold in contempt all that this earth would give us to seduce us from the way of God. Wash us, cleanse us in thy blood. Oh, take our sin away, and make us men—pure, wise, strong, consecrated; and so bring us to death that we shall not know it when we se it! Amen.”
If you got into a car with one who had never driven before, he would not get out of the drive way until you discovered it. When you hear a man pray, he will not have prayed long before you know if he is a man of prayer. Joseph Parker can do more for me in his prayers than he can do in his sermons. Not that I don’t enjoy his sermons. I wish I had the set “Parker’s Peoples Bible.” I have looked in used books stores but in vain. I probably couldn’t afford it if I found it. But I do have this little set of books called “Studies in Texts” published by Baker. It is a good set, if for nothing else to read his prayers. But a man who prays like that will say things in his messages we need to hear. Truth is not only obtained by study. If that were true the Pharisees would be our best example. The deacons were ordained in Acts 6 that the apostles, ministers of the Word, might “...give ourselves continually to prayer, and to the ministry of the word” (Acts 6:4). We often ask ourselves what the secret of the early church was? I think this was an important part of it. The men of God spent time with God in prayer and the ministry of the Word. It was full time.
I wonder what we would hear this morning from our pulpits if the man who spoke there had spent forty hours this week in prayer as he poured over the Word. There would not only be an explosion in the pulpit there would also be an explosion in the pew!
I am not criticizing pastors who don’t do this. I am thinking out loud about the priorities that the apostles and the Word of God placed on prayer and ministry of the Word. I believe it was Leonard Ravenhill who said, “The early Church prayed and the place was shaken, the modern Church pays and the place is taken.”
The first foreign mission program was born in a prayer meeting: “Now there were in the church that was at Antioch certain prophets and teachers; as Barnabas, and Simeon that was called Niger, and Lucius of Cyrene, and Manaen, which had been brought up with Herod the tetrarch, and Saul. As they ministered to the Lord, and fasted, the Holy Ghost said, Separate me Barnabas and Saul for the work whereunto I have called them. And when they had fasted and prayed, and laid their hands on them, they sent them away. So they, being sent forth by the Holy Ghost, departed unto Seleucia; and from thence they sailed to Cyprus” (Acts 13:1-4). I have never quite understood what “ministered to the Lord” means in this passage. I do know that those who did it were in intimate conversation with the Lord. And when God spoke to them about his will they didn’t have to say, “What did you say, Lord?” They didn’t say, “Lord, we are going to put out a fleece to test what we think we heard you say.” No they were in intimate conversation with the Lord and they knew they heard right and acted in immediate obedience to Him.
