“Faith, hope, and love.” These are the three theological virtues. Through these virtues a deep relation between the soul and God is maintained. The true Christian love of God rests upon the basis of faith in His atoning love, and of hope in His promises. In true prayer all three virtues are necessarily exercised. For faith is the foundation of prayer—“Whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive”. Hope is the ladder by which faith ascends to love. And love is the cord which not only binds man to God, but draws him even now to Heaven. “I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me.”
Prayer holds its fundamental place in the life of religion because it is in reality an attitude of the spirit rather than a formal exercise. It is the voice of trustful faith, which always and everywhere stays itself on God; it is the utterance of hope, seeking not the gifts of God, but His very Self; it is the expression of love which aims at complete union of heart and will with God. Thus prayer is one of the great forces tending to bring about the extension of the Divine Kingdom—that is, the sphere in which God’s will is embraced and fulfilled. It is the supreme aid to holiness because it implies the Godward direction of the entire life, the dedication of the will to the fulfilment of the Divine purpose; and
He always wins who sides with God.
One of Melanchthon’s correspondents writes of Luther’s praying: “I cannot enough admire the extraordinary cheerfulness, constancy, faith, and hope of the man in these trying and vexatious times. He constantly feeds these gracious affections by a very diligent study of the Word of God. Then not a day passes in which he does not employ in prayer at least three of his very best hours. Once I happened to hear him at prayer. Gracious God! What spirit and what faith is there in his expressions! He petitions God with as much reverence as if he were in the Divine presence, and yet with as firm a hope and confidence as he would address a father or a friend. ‘I know,’ said he, ‘Thou art our Father and our God; and therefore I am sure Thou wilt bring to naught the persecutors of Thy children. For shouldest Thou fail to do this, Thine own cause, being connected with ours, would be endangered. It is entirely Thine own concern. We, by Thy providence, have been compelled to take a part. Thou therefore wilt be our defence.’ Whilst I was listening to Luther praying in this manner, at a distance, my soul seemed on fire within me, to hear the man address God so like a friend, yet with so much gravity and reverence; and also to hear him, in the course of his prayer, insisting on the promises contained in the Psalms, as if he were sure his petitions would be granted.” [Note: E. M. Bounds, Purpose in Prayer, 37.]
1. Faith.—Faithis the inevitable and essential accompaniment of all true prayer. Prayer must be based on Divine revelation and find its warrant in the promises and assurances of God’s love and grace. This distinguishes Christian prayer from everything that goes by the name of prayer in heathen religions. Christian prayer is based on the Word of God. God encourages, commands, invites, welcomes prayer. The charter of prayer was given by our Lord at the outset of His ministry. “Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.” This charter was confirmed again and again through His earthly ministry until it found its crown in His fullest, deepest teaching on prayer on the eve of the crucifixion, when He taught His disciples the meaning of prayer: “in my name”. This warrant of prayer is accordingly met by our response of trust. Our faith accepts the assurance that prayer will be heard and answered, and pleads the fulfilment of Divine promises. Faith is thus the only possible response to the Divine revelation, and apart from our belief in God as the Hearer of prayer there could not be any real prayer or genuine blessing. “He that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him”. Herein lies the intimate and necessary connexion between the Word of God and prayer. The greater our knowledge of Scripture and the richer our experience of its preciousness, the fuller and deeper will be our prayers, until it shall become the simplest and most natural and most instructive experience of our life to live in the Divine Presence and rest on the Divine promises, and then to pour out our souls in the prayer of faith and believe to see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.
In any natural action, say that of sowing a seed, the mental attitude of the sower signifies nothing; the seed will come up whether he expects it to do so or not; but in any act between two conscious intelligent beings, the mental attitude being obviously everything, the measure of faith is the measure of prayer. Faith makes the soul God’s creditor (believer), in a literal sense it gives the soul a claim and hold upon Him. [Note: Dora Greenwell, Essays, 131.]
(1) The importance of the place which faith holds in spiritual intercourse will be perceived the moment we recognize that faith is our act of appropriating spiritual truth and grace. God’s bestowments are offered freely. We become powerful in proportion as we make them our own. Men of faith are men of capacity for receiving and using forces which are Divinely provided for all. The majority allow these to pass unappropriated. The elect minority, availing themselves of Divine potency, act for God, or rather allow Him to act through them, in extraordinary ways.
(2) This brings us to the point where we see faith as a force. Because it makes a man receptive of God it makes him conqueror over everything alien to God. The human becomes the medium of the Divine. When eternal power operates through a man he is no longer a loose particle on the surface of things, but becomes a part of the universe, so built into it that he stands with God and for God with a power not his own. He becomes as stable as the throne which God has erected within him. He is led to the stake. Fire cannot melt the forces which make him immovable. Does he encounter princes and potentates? Unblanched he stands before kings, or meets the rage of tyrants, invincible through a power which has no other explanation. Human frailty becomes an exhibition of Divine stability. “I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God.”
After concluding my last service about ten o’clock that night, a poor man asked me to go and pray with his wife, saying that she was dying. I readily agreed, and on the way to his house asked him why he had not sent for the priest, as his accent told me he was an Irishman. He had done so, he said, but the priest refused to come without a payment of eighteen pence, which the man did not possess, as the family was starving. Immediately it occurred to my mind that all the money I had in the world was a solitary half-crown, and that it was in one coin; moreover, that while the basin of water-gruel I usually took for supper was awaiting me, and there was sufficient in the house for breakfast in the morning, I certainly had nothing for dinner on the coming day.
Somehow or other there was at once a stoppage in the flow of joy in my heart. But instead of reproving myself I began to reprove the poor man, telling him that it was very wrong to have allowed matters to get into such a state as he described, and that he ought to have applied to the relieving officer. His answer was that he had done so, and was told to come at eleven o’clock the next morning, but that he feared his wife might not live through the night.
“Ah,” thought I, “if only I had two shillings and a sixpence instead of this half-crown, how gladly would I give these poor people a shilling!” But to part with the half-crown was far from my thoughts. I little dreamed that the truth of the matter simply was that I could trust God plus one and sixpence, but was not prepared to trust Him only, without any money at all in my pocket.
My conductor led me into a court, down which I followed him with some degree of nervousness. I had found myself there before, and at my last visit had been roughly handled. My tracts had been torn to pieces and such a warning given me not to come again that I felt more than a little concerned. Still, it was the path of duty, and I followed on. Up a miserable flight of stairs into a wretched room he led me; and oh, what a sight there presented itself! Four or five children stood about, their sunken cheeks and temples all telling unmistakably the story of slow starvation, and lying on a wretched pallet was a poor, exhausted mother, with a tiny infant thirty-six hours old moaning rather than crying at her side, for it too seemed spent and failing.
“Ah!” thought I, “if I had two shillings and a sixpence, instead of half a crown, how gladly should they have one and sixpence of it.” But still a wretched unbelief prevented me from obeying the impulse to relieve their distress at the cost of all I possessed.
It will scarcely seem strange that I was unable to say much to comfort these poor people. I needed comfort myself. I began to tell them, however, that they must not be cast down; that though their circumstances were very distressing there was a kind and loving Father in heaven. But something within me cried, “You hypocrite! Telling these unconverted people about a kind and loving Father in heaven, and not prepared yourself to trust Him without half a crown.”
I was nearly choked. How gladly would I have compromised with conscience, if I had had a florin and a sixpence! I would have given the florin thankfully and kept the rest. But I was not yet prepared to trust in God alone, without the sixpence.
To talk was impossible under these circumstances, yet strange to say I thought I should have no difficulty in praying. Prayer was a delightful occupation in those days. Time thus spent never seemed wearisome and I knew no lack of words. I seemed to think that all I should have to do would be to kneel down and pray, and that relief would come to them and to myself together.
“You asked me to come and pray with your wife,” I said to the man, “let us pray.” And I knelt down.
But no sooner had I opened my lips with “Our Father who art in heaven” than conscience said within, “Dare you mock God? Dare you kneel down and call Him Father with that half-crown in your pocket?”
Such a time of conflict then came upon me as I have never experienced before or since. How I got through that form of prayer I know not, and whether the words uttered were connected or disconnected I cannot tell. But I arose from my knees in great distress of mind.
The poor father turned to me and said, “You see what a terrible state we are in, sir. If you can help us, for God’s sake do!”
At that moment the word flashed into my mind, “Give to him that asketh of thee”. And in the word of a King there is power.
I put my hand into my pocket and slowly drawing out the half-crown, gave it to the man, telling him that it might seem a small matter for me to relieve them, seeing that I was comparatively well off, but that in parting with that coin I was giving him my all; what I had been trying to tell them was indeed true—God really was a Father and might be trusted. The joy all came back in full floodtide to my heart. I could say anything and feel it then, and the hindrance to blessing was gone—gone, I trust, for ever.
Not only was the poor woman’s life saved; but my life, as I fully realized, had been saved too. It might have been a wreck—would have been, probably, as a Christian life—had not grace at that time conquered, and the striving of God’s Spirit been obeyed.
I well remember how that night, as I went home to my lodgings, my heart was as light as my pocket. The dark, deserted streets resounded with a hymn of praise that I could not restrain. When I took my basin of gruel before retiring, I would not have exchanged it for a prince’s feast. I reminded the Lord as I knelt at my bedside of His own Word, “He that giveth to the poor lendeth to the Lord”; I asked Him not to let my loan be a long one, or I should have no dinner next day. And with peace within and peace without, I spent a happy, restful night. [Note: Hudson Taylor in Early Years, 133.]
2. Hope.—To draw in devotion the exact line where faith merges into trust, and trust into hope, is not so essential as it would be in the province of Christian ethics. Both faith and hope blend in one object, but “they can be distinguished when viewed in reference to the nature of man: for by the one we have a clear mental realization of the promise; by the other we apply that truth to our needs, make it our own, and stimulate the will to respond to it”. There is no element of tenderness in the Lord’s ministry on earth more touching than the effort made by Him to uphold the hope of those who sought His aid. To the palsied man, conscious of the sin which lay behind the helpless suffering, there came on the instant the gracious words, “Son, be of good cheer; thy sins are forgiven”. “If thou canst do anything, have compassion on us, and help us”—such was the almost despairing cry of the father of the demoniac boy. It was not only to sustain his faith, but to infuse hope into the prayer so timidly made, that “Jesus said unto him, If thou canst! All things are possible to him that believeth” — “the decision rests with you rather than with Me whether this thing can be done; it can be done if thou believest”—and hope nerved the final appeal, “I believe; help thou mine unbelief”. So the typical faith of Abraham had been sustained by hope. “Who,” says St. Paul, “in hope believed against hope, to the end that he might become a father of many nations, according to that which had been spoken, So shall thy seed be.” So a psalmist met his own questioning despondency by rousing himself, through an act of will, to hope:—
“Why art thou cast down, O my soul?
And why art thou disquieted within me?
Hope thou in God: for I shall yet praise him,
For the health of his countenance.”
He turns from feelings; they are variable. He turns from a review of action, because he cannot judge of it aright, and, at the best, it can afford small comfort save to the self-complacent. He goes to God. What God is in Himself, not what we may chance to find Him in this or that moment to be, that is our hope.
Be not afraid to pray—to pray is right.
Pray, if thou canst, with hope; but ever pray,
Though hope be weak, or sick with long delay;
Pray in the darkness, if there be no light.
Far is the time, remote from human sight,
When war and discord on the earth shall cease.
Yet every prayer for universal peace
Avails the blessed time to expedite.
Whate’er is good to wish, ask that of Heaven,
Though it be what thou canst not hope to see:
Pray to be perfect, though material leaven
Forbid the spirit so on earth to be;
But if for any wish thou darest not pray,
Then pray to God to cast that wish away. [Note: Hartley Coleridge.]
3. Love.—Love to God, itself due to God’s own gift of power to love Him, is the cause of that singleness of heart and aim, that simple, downright obedience, which are essential to acceptable prayer. Behind the simplicity of the 119th Psalm, of which the core and centre is that all life is from God, for God, and in God, there is love. It was love that gave its author his firmness in resolution, his keen insight into the will of God, and inspired the prayer, in form manifold, though one in intention, that his own will might correspond with the “good and acceptable and perfect will of God”.
(1) Love of God is the secret of power in prayer. The difficulties most often complained of as hindrances to prayer may be traced back to want of love. Want of love destroys our interest in prayer, so that our thoughts wander to other things. Want of love destroys our delight in prayer, so that it becomes a weariness to us, and our hearts find themselves cold and dry.
(2) The love in which our Lord laid the foundation of prayer includes love to man in love to God. If God is the Father of us, we should love one another as brethren. Where the loving, generous heart is given, there also that forgiving spirit on which our Lord thrice insisted with repeated earnestness as essential to our own forgiveness, and therefore to the acceptance of our prayer and offerings, will not be withheld.
The love that is a constraining principle in life is not ordinary commonplace affection, but a passion of love. The harder the task, the greater the love that it demands. A comparatively cold, intellectual regard cannot do the work of an ardent, glowing heart-devotion. Only when love burns within as a perpetual fire does it generate the degree of force needed to propel desires and purposes over a difficult road to their goal. Nothing is absolutely irresistible save love; and nothing else can stand the strain of a desperate and protracted contest. Lesser motives tend to give way if too severely tried, but love is equal to all contingencies. Therefore the cause that we espouse, the person we would save and bless, or the purpose we would realize, must be loved with a passionate love, must be to us as our own soul. And when the cause totters under the heavy blows of the enemy, so that to bear it up becomes an almost intolerable strain, love will be found equal to the task. When the weakness, the defects, and unworthiness of the persons or communities we pray and work for reveal themselves as far beyond our worst fears, love will not falter, but hopefully, patiently, perseveringly continue its ministry. When delays and disappointments obstruct and discouragement threatens, love will pierce beyond the veil and see the yet invisible success; it will wax stronger and stronger in faith till, by the very pressure of its yearning intensity, vision passes on to prevision—becoming, as in Browning’s “Saul,” prophetic, and wresting from the future gleams of light and hope wherewith to cheer the difficult present. [Note: L. Swetenham, Conquering Prayer, 200.]
