Oct
20
Written by:
Bob Flynn
10/20/2009 7:00 AM
"But obedience in the matter of prayer is costly and takes commitment. On Monday night as our week of prayer began, a mere thirty-four adults showed up out of a regular church attendance of twenty-three hundred. By Thursday, only seventeen adults were praying. I was totally discouraged." Stephen Arterburn, Every Man's Battle
Perhaps some would find a book on the temptations men face and their fight for purity a strange place to find the aforementioned comment on prayer. However, I find it most timely indeed.
"The well-nigh universal tendency, now, is to magnify man and dishonor and degrade God. On every hand it will be found that, when spiritual things are under discussion, the human side and element is pressed and stressed, and the Divine side, if not altogether ignored, is relegated to the background. This holds true of much of the modern teaching about prayer. In the great majority of the books written and the sermons preached upon prayer, the human element fills the scene almost entirely: it is the conditions which we must meet, the promises we must 'claim', the things we must do, in order to get our requests granted; and God's claims, God's rights, God's glory are disregarded." A. W. Pink
"Recently, we scheduled a week of nightly all-church prayer meetings to begin the new year. Now hardly anyone would argue with the strategic value of prayer or question the fact that we're commanded as believers to be faithful at it. But obedience in the matter of prayer is costly and takes commitment. On Monday night as our week of prayer began, a mere thirty-four adults showed up out of a regular church attendance of twenty-three hundred. By Thursday, only seventeen adults were praying. I was totally discouraged. Yet one week later, on Worker Recognition Sunday, one thousand people were there to be recognized for their service in the church." Stephen Arterburn, Every Man's Battle
Perhaps some would find a book on the temptations men face and their fight for purity a strange place to find the aforementioned comment on prayer. However, I find it most timely indeed. The truth is that all battles, temporal or spiritual, are won or lost in the prayer closet. There is no substitute for the duty of prayer. There is no place of greater opportunity within the body of Christ than interceding for the saints. For in the midst of prayer the Holy Spirit intercedes for me and somewhere in the process changes the prayers offered that ask God to give me what I want into prayers that ask God to help me want what He gives.
It is the great deceiver himself that works at his craft leading us to think that we are something when we are nothing. We think that we are waxing great in our spiritual prowess while our hearts are dark with sin. And if we say we have no sin, we call God a liar. But when we pray we allow all the power of the universe to be focused upon the subject of our prayers because we are wrapped in the cleansing flood of the Holy Spirit.
If the church is not truly a house of prayer then it is an empty whitewashed sepulcher. We can wrap it in music that sounds divine and experience all manner of religious affections but the reality of the hardness of our heart scalds the melody till it warps flat. The Holy Spirit weeps unheard while we offer up the song, "It all about you, Jesus."
Copyright ©2009 Robert Flynn