Sunday, December 30, 2012

With Christ in the School of Prayer (23) ... Obedience the Path to Power in Prayer

by Dale Shumaker
Spirit Savvy Network
www.spiritsavvy.net

Finding your mission, Empowering your life through prayer,
Becoming a Missionary in the Marketplace
Leading others to be Missionaries in the Marketplace

An all-time Christian Classic on prayer which is a foundational study on prayer that anyone interested in Prayer should read. So, I decided to summarize it chapter by chapter. With Christ in the School of Prayer is a classroom on the Power of Prayer in your Life.

With Christ in the School of Prayer by Andrew Murray,
Chapter 23, Obedience the Path to Power in Prayer:

Entire dedication to the fulfillment of our calling is the condition of effectual prayer, is the key to the unlimited blessings of Christ’s wonderful prayer-promises.

Surrender to His perfect and blessed will, a life of service and obedience, is the beauty and the charm of heaven.  Service and obedience, these were the thoughts that were uppermost in the mind of the Son, when He dwelt upon earth.  Service and obedience, these must become with us the chief objects of desire and aim, more so than rest or light, or joy or strength:  in them we shall find the path to all the higher blessedness that awaits us.

Could words put it more clearly that obedience is the way to the indwelling of the Spirit, to His revealing the Son within us, and to His again preparing us to be the abode, the home of the Father?  The indwelling of the Three-One God is the heritage of them that obey.  Obedience and faith are but two aspects of one act,—surrender to God and His will.  As faith strengthens for obedience, it is in turn strengthened by it:  faith is made perfect by works.

O how often we have sought to be able to pray the effectual prayer for much grace to bear fruit, and have wondered that the answer did not come.  It was because we were reversing the Master’s order.  We wanted to have the comfort and the joy and the strength first, that we might do the work easily and without any feeling of difficulty or self-sacrifice.  And He wanted us in faith, whether the work was hard or easy, in the obedience of faith. Obedience is the only path that leads to the glory of God.  

Not obedience
instead of faith, nor obedience to supply the shortcomings of faith; no, but faith’s obedience gives access to all the blessings our God has for us. 
The baptism of the Spirit (John xiv. 16),
the manifestation of the Son (xiv. 21),
the indwelling of the Father (xiv. 23),
the abiding in Christ’s love (xv. 10),
the privilege of His holy friendship (xv. 14),
and the power of all-prevailing prayer (xv. 16),
all wait for the obedient.

It is the man who, in obedience to the Christ of God, is proving that he is doing what his Lord wills, for whom the Father will do whatsoever he will:  ‘Whatsoever we ask we receive, because we keep His commandments, and do the things that are pleasing in His sight.’

And His commandments are to do what He asks us to do. … obedience.

Obedience to God is our highest privilege, because it gives access to oneness with Himself in that which is His highest glory—His all perfect will

More on the Obedience the Path to Power in Prayer:
http://www.ccel.org/ccel/murray/prayer.XXIII.html
The Christian Classics Ethereal Library has many classic works on prayer and living a Spirit-filled life.

Saturday, December 29, 2012

With Christ in the School of Prayer (22) ... The Word and Prayer

by Dale Shumaker
Spirit Savvy Network
www.spiritsavvy.net

Finding your mission, Empowering your life through prayer,
Becoming a Missionary in the Marketplace
Leading others to be Missionaries in the Marketplace

An all-time Christian Classic on prayer which is a foundational study on prayer that anyone interested in Prayer should read. So, I decided to summarize it chapter by chapter. With Christ in the School of Prayer is a classroom on the Power of Prayer in your Life.

With Christ in the School of Prayer by Andrew Murray,
Chapter 22, The Word and Prayer:

Before prayer, it is God’s word that prepares me for it by revealing what the Father has bid me ask.  In prayer, it is God’s word strengthens me by giving my faith its warrant and its plea.  And after prayer, it is God’s word that brings me the answer when I have prayed, for in it the Spirit gives me to hear the Father’s voice.  Prayer is not monologue but dialogue; God’s voice in response to mine in its most essential part.  Listening to God’s voice is the secret of the assurance that He will listen to mine.

It is this connection between His word and our prayer that Jesus points to when He says, ‘If ye abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatsoever ye will, and it shall be done unto you.’

Instead of ‘Ye in me and I in you,’ He says, ‘Ye in me and my words in you.’  His words abiding are the equivalent of Himself abiding.

This hearing the voice of God is something more than the thoughtful study of the Word.  There may be a study and knowledge of the Word, in which there is but little real fellowship with the living God.  But there is also a reading of the Word, in the very presence of the Father, and under the leading of the Spirit, in which the Word comes to us in living power from God Himself; it is to us the very voice of the Father, a real personal fellowship with Himself.  It is the living voice of God that enters the heart, that brings blessing and strength, and awakens the response of a living faith that reaches the heart of God again.

‘If ye abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatsoever ye will, it shall be done unto you.’  We see what this means.  In the words the Saviour gives Himself.  We must have the words in us, taken up into our will and life, reproduced in our disposition and conduct.  We must have them abiding in us:  our whole life one continued exposition of the words that are within, and filling us.  It is as the words of Christ enter our very heart, become our life and influence it, that our words will enter His heart and influence Him.

‘If my words abide in you;’ the condition is simple and clear.  In His words His will is revealed.  As the words abide in me, His will rules me; my will becomes the empty vessel which His will fills, the willing instrument which His will wields; He fills my inner being.  In the exercise of obedience and faith my will becomes ever stronger, and is brought into deeper inner harmony with Him.  He can fully trust it to will nothing but what He wills; He is not afraid to give the promise, ‘If my words abide in you, ask whatsoever ye will, it shall be done unto you.’  To all who believe it, and act upon it, He will make it literally true.

Nothing can make strong men but the word coming to us from God’s mouth:  by that we must live.  It is the word of Christ, loved, lived in, abiding in us, becoming through obedience and action part of our being, that makes us one with Christ, that fits us spiritually for touching, for taking hold of God.  ‘If ye abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatsoever ye will, and it shall be done unto you.’

More on the Word and Prayer at
http://www.ccel.org/ccel/murray/prayer.XXII.html
The Christian Classics Ethereal Library has many classic works on prayer and living a Spirit-filled life.


Sunday, December 23, 2012

With Christ in the School of Prayer (21) ... The All-Inclusive Condition

by Dale Shumaker
Spirit Savvy Network
www.spiritsavvy.net

Finding your mission, Empowering your life through prayer,
Becoming a Missionary in the Marketplace
Leading others to be Missionaries in the Marketplace

An all-time Christian Classic on prayer which is a foundational study on prayer that anyone interested in Prayer should read. So, I decided to summarize it chapter by chapter. With Christ in the School of Prayer is a classroom on the Power of Prayer in your Life.

With Christ in the School of Prayer by Andrew Murray,
Chapter 21, The All-Inclusive Condition:

“God is in Christ, and can only be reached by being in Him; to be IN HIM is the way to have our prayer heard; fully and wholly ABIDING IN HIM, we have the right to ask whatsoever we will, and the promise that it shall be done unto us.

They put into the promise the qualifying clause our Saviour did not put there—if it be God’s will; and so maintain both God’s integrity and their own.

If ye abide in me.’ 
As a Christian grows in grace and in the knowledge of the Lord Jesus, he is often surprised to find how the words of God grow too, in the new and deeper meaning with which they come to him.


It is the Master’s precious ‘Abide in me.’  As the union of the branch with the vine is one of growth, never-ceasing growth and increase,

so our abiding in Christ is a life process in which the Divine life takes ever fuller and more complete possession of us
.


In the growing life of abiding in Christ, the first stage is that of faith.

It is not long before he sees something more is needed.  Obedience and faith must go together.  Not as if to the faith he has the obedience added, but faith must be made manifest in obedience.  Faith is obedience at home and looking to the Master:  obedience is faith going out to do His will.

It is so.  Faith and obedience are but the pathway of blessing.  Before giving us the parable of the vine and the branches, Jesus had very distinctly told what the full blessing is to which faith and obedience are to lead. They exist in each other, so we are in Christ and Christ in us, in union not only of will and love, but of life and nature too.

And then as we abide, and grow evermore into the full abiding, let us exercise our right, the will to enter into all God’s will.  Obeying what that will commands, let us claim what it promises.  Let us yield to the teaching of the Holy Spirit, to show each of us, according to his growth and measure, what the will of God is which we may claim in prayer.

It’s important to remember:
God’s fellowship ought to be more to us than the gift we ask; God’s wisdom only knows what is best; God may bestow something better than what He withholds.

A life marked by daily answer to prayer is the proof of our spiritual maturity; that we have indeed attained to the true abiding in Christ; that our will is truly at one with God’s will; that our faith has grown strong to see and take what God has prepared for us.

When prayer is what it should be, or rather when we are what we should be, abiding in Christ, the answer must be expected.”

More on the All-Inclusive Condition
http://www.ccel.org/ccel/murray/prayer.XXI.html
The Christian Classics Ethereal Library has many classic works on prayer and living a Spirit-filled life.

Saturday, December 22, 2012

With Christ in the School of Prayer (20) ... The Chief End of Prayer

by Dale Shumaker
Spirit Savvy Network
www.spiritsavvy.net

Finding your mission, Empowering your life through prayer,
Becoming a Missionary in the Marketplace
Leading others to be Missionaries in the Marketplace

An all-time Christian Classic on prayer which is a foundational study on prayer that anyone interested in Prayer should read. So, I decided to summarize it chapter by chapter. With Christ in the School of Prayer is a classroom on the Power of Prayer in your Life.

With Christ in the School of Prayer by Andrew Murray,
Chapter 20,  “The Chief End of Prayer:”

The essential element in our petitions in prayer: 
the glory of the Father
must be the aim and end,
the very soul and life of our prayer.


Father! Glorify Thy son, that Thy Son may glorify Thee.  ‘I have glorified Thee on earth; glorify me with Thyself.’

It’s twofold :  He has glorified Him on earth; He will still glorify Him in heaven.   What He asks is only to enable Him to glorify the Father more.

There is nothing of which the Beloved Son has said more distinctly that it will glorify the Father than this, His doing what we ask; He will not, therefore, let any opportunity slip of securing this object.  Let us make His aim ours:  let the glory of the Father be the link between our asking and His doing:  such prayer must prevail to Glory God.

Is it so with us too?  Or are not, in large measure, self-interest and self-will the strongest motives urging us to pray?  Or, if we cannot see that this is the case, have we not to acknowledge that the distinct, conscious longing for the glory of the Father is not what animates our prayers?  And yet it must be so.

The separation between the spirit of daily life and the spirit of the hour of prayer was too wide.  We can really pray to His glory too.
 ‘
DO all to the glory of God,’ and,
Ask all to the glory of God,’
—these twin commands are inseparable:  obedience to the former is the secret of grace for the latter.   A life to the glory of God is the condition of the prayers that Jesus can answer, ‘that the Father may be glorified.’


Creation exists to show forth His glory; all that is not for His glory is sin, and darkness, and death:  it is only in the glorifying of God that the creatures can find glory.

The discovery, and the confession, and the denial, of self, as usurping the place of God, of self-seeking and self-trusting, is essential, and yet is what we cannot accomplish in our own strength.  It is Jesus Himself  coming in, who can cast out all self-glorifying, and give us instead His own God-glorifying life and Spirit.  It is Jesus, who longs to glorify the Father in hearing our prayers, who will teach us to live and to pray to the glory of God.

No wonder that there are so many unanswered prayers:  here we have the secret.  God would not be glorified when that glory was not our object.  He that would pray the prayer of faith, 
to live literally so that the Father in all things may be glorified in him. 
This must be his aim: 
without this there cannot be the prayer of faith.


With increasing liberty we ask it only for your glory
We have seen that prayer has no higher beauty or blessedness than this,
that it glorifies the Father


It brings us into perfect unison with the Beloved Son in the wonderful partnership
He proposes:  ‘
You ask, and I do,
that the Father may be glorified in the Son.’
"

More on the Chief End of Prayer:
http://www.ccel.org/ccel/murray/prayer.XX.html
The Christian Classics Ethereal Library has many classic works on prayer and living a Spirit-filled life.

Sunday, December 16, 2012

With Christ in the School of Prayer (19) ... Power for Praying and Working

by Dale Shumaker
Spirit Savvy Network
www.spiritsavvy.net

Finding your mission, Empowering your life through prayer,
Becoming a Missionary in the Marketplace
Leading others to be Missionaries in the Marketplace

An all-time Christian Classic on prayer which is a foundational study on prayer that anyone interested in Prayer should read. So, I decided to summarize it chapter by chapter. With Christ in the School of Prayer is a classroom on the Power of Prayer in your Life.

With Christ in the School of Prayer by Andrew Murray,
Chapter 19, Power for Praying and Working:

Be childlike, pray believingly, and trust the Father that He will give you all good gifts.  Here He points to something higher.

He that would do the works of Jesus must pray in His Name.  He that would pray in His Name must work in His Name.

The disciples were now His body:  all His work from the throne in heaven here on earth must and could be done through them.

Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also, and he shall do greater works.’ With His ascension He was to receive the power to communicate the Holy Spirit so fully to His own; the union, the oneness between Himself on the throne and them on earth, was to be so intensely and divinely perfect, that He meant it as the literal truth:  ‘Greater works than these shall he do, because I go to the Father.’

While Jesus, during three years of personal labour on earth, gathered little more than five hundred disciples, and the most of them so feeble that they were but little credit to His cause, it was given to men like Peter and Paul to manifestly do greater things than He had done.

For the doing of the greater works, two things were needed:  His going to the Father to receive all power, our prayer in His Name to receive all power from Him again. Prayer in the Name of Jesus is the way to share in the mighty power which Jesus has received of the Father for His people, and it is in this power alone that he that believeth can do the greater works.  To every complaint as to weakness or unfitness, as to difficulties or want of success, Jesus gives this one answer:  ‘He that believeth on me shall do greater works, because I go to the Father, and whatsoever ye shall ask in my Name, that will I do.’  We must understand that the first and chief thing for everyone who would do the work of Jesus, is to believe, and so to get linked to Him, the Almighty One, and then to pray the prayer of faith in His Name.

Now the second lesson:  He who would pray must work. It is the disciple who gives himself wholly to live for Jesus’ work and kingdom, for His will and honour, to whom the power will come to appropriate the promise.

But to him who seeks to pray the effectual prayer of faith, because he needs it for the work of the Master, to him it will be given to learn it; because he has made himself the servant of his Lord’s interests.  Prayer not only teaches and strengthens to work:  work teaches and strengthens to pray.

Whosoever hath, to him shall be given; or, He that is faithful in a little, is faithful also in much.
As you give yourself entirely to God for His work, you will feel that nothing less than these great promises are what you need, that nothing less is what you may most confidently expect.

Give yourself, and live, to pray and you will learn to do the works He did, and greater works.  With disciples full of faith in Himself, and bold in prayer to ask great things, Christ can conquer the world.

More on Power for Praying and Working
http://www.ccel.org/ccel/murray/prayer.XIX.html
The Christian Classics Ethereal Library has many classic works on prayer and living a Spirit-filled life.


Saturday, December 15, 2012

With Christ in the School of Prayer (18) ... In Harmony with the Destiny of Man

by Dale Shumaker
Spirit Savvy Network
www.spiritsavvy.net

Finding your mission, Empowering your life through prayer,
Becoming a Missionary in the Marketplace
Leading others to be Missionaries in the Marketplace

An all-time Christian Classic on prayer which is a foundational study on prayer that anyone interested in Prayer should read. So, I decided to summarize it chapter by chapter. With Christ in the School of Prayer is a classroom on the Power of Prayer in your Life.

With Christ in the School of Prayer by Andrew Murray,
Chapter 18, In Harmony with the Destiny of Man

The image he bears decides his destiny.  Bearing God’s image, he belongs to God:  prayer to God is what he was created for.  Prayer is part of the wondrous likeness he bears to His Divine original; of the deep mystery of the fellowship of love in which the Three-One has His blessedness, prayer is the earthly image and likeness.

We must turn back to God’s own record of man’s creation to discover there what God’s purpose was, and what the capacities with which man was endowed for the fulfilment of that purpose.

It was to fill, to subdue, to have dominion over the earth and all in it.  All the three expressions show us that man was meant, as God’s representative, to hold rule here on earth.

It was the will of God that all that was to be done on earth should be done through him:  the history of the earth was to be entirely in his hands.

As God’s representative man was to have ruled; all was to have been done under his will and rule; on his advice and at his request heaven was to have bestowed its blessing on earth.

In Abraham we see how prayer is not only, or even chiefly, the means of obtaining blessing for ourselves, but is the exercise of his royal prerogative to influence the destinies of men, and the will of God which rules them.

There was an inner agreement and harmony between God and man, and incipient God-likeness, which gave man a real fitness for being the mediator between God and His world, for he was to be prophet, priest, and king, to interpret God’s will, to represent nature’s needs, to receive and dispense God’s bounty.

Prayer is not merely the cry of the suppliant for mercy; it is the highest form of putting forth of his will by man, knowing himself to be of Divine origin, created for and capable of being, in king-like liberty, man is the executor of God’s plan.

It is for those who abide in Him, who have forsaken self to take up their abode in Him with His life of obedience and self-sacrifice, who have lost their life and found it in Him, who are now entirely given up to the interests of the Father and His kingdom.  

Such have indeed the power, each in their own circle, to obtain and dispense the powers of heaven here on earth.


Believers of the living God!  Your calling is higher and holier than you know..  As kings, and priests unto God, would God rule the world; your prayers bestow and withhold the blessing of heaven.”

More on the Prayer In Harmony with the Destiny of Man
http://www.ccel.org/ccel/murray/prayer.XVIII.html
The Christian Classics Ethereal Library has many classic works on prayer and living a Spirit-filled life.


Sunday, December 09, 2012

With Christ in the School of Prayer (17) ... Prayer in Harmony with God

by Dale Shumaker
Spirit Savvy Network
www.spiritsavvy.net

Finding your mission, Empowering your life through prayer,
Becoming a Missionary in the Marketplace
Leading others to be Missionaries in the Marketplace

An all-time Christian Classic on prayer which is a foundational study on prayer that anyone interested in Prayer should read. So, I decided to summarize it chapter by chapter. With Christ in the School of Prayer is a classroom on the Power of Prayer in your Life.

With Christ in the School of Prayer by Andrew Murray,
Chapter 17, Prayer in Harmony with God:

Childlike simplicity accepts the truth without difficulty, and often cares little to give itself or others any reason for its faith but this:  God has said.  But it is the will of God that we should love and serve Him, not only with all the heart but also with all the mind.

So, how God can grant to prayer such mighty power?  How can the action of prayer be harmonized with the will and the decrees of God?  How can God’s sovereignty and our will, God’s liberty and ours, be reconciled?—these and other like questions are fit subjects for Christian meditation and inquiry.

There must be on the part of the Son an asking and receiving.  In the holy fellowship of the Divine Persons. The Father gave the Son the place and the power to act upon Him.

The Father-heart holds itself open and free to listen to every prayer that rises through the Son, and that God does indeed allow Himself to be decided by prayer to do what He otherwise would not have done.

The Lord Jesus is the first-begotten, the Head and Heir of all things:  all things were created through Him and unto Him, and all things consist in Him.  In the counsels of the Father, had always a voice; in the decrees of the eternal purpose there was always room left for the liberty of the Son as Mediator and Intercessor, and so for the petitions of all who draw nigh to the Father in the Son.

Let us not forget that there is not with God as with man, a past by which He is irrevocably bound. God does not live in time with its past and future; the distinctions of time have no reference to Him who inhabits Eternity.

This perfect harmony and union of Divine Sovereignty and human liberty is to us an unfathomable mystery, because God as THE ETERNAL ONE transcends all our thoughts.  

But let it be our comfort and strength to be assured that in the eternal fellowship of the Father and the Son,

the power of prayer has its origin and certainty,
and that through our union with the Son, our prayer can have its influence in the inner life of the Blessed Trinity.

More on the Prayer in Harmony with God at
http://www.ccel.org/ccel/murray/prayer.XVII.html
The Christian Classics Ethereal Library has many classic works on prayer and living a Spirit-filled life.