Monday, August 27, 2012

Purpose in Prayer (8) ... remedy for all evils


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

In prayer we have the greatest privilege of God's Presence and interacting with God with His purpose than any other activity in our lives. E. M. Bounds in his book, the Purpose in Prayer, we learn how this is so important. Here are excerpts from chapter 8, Prayer the Remedy for all Evils.

"That the men had quit praying in Paul’s time we cannot certainly affirm. They have, in the main, quit praying now. They are too busy to pray. Time and strength and every faculty are laid under tribute to money, to business, to the affairs of the world. Few men lay themselves out in great praying. The great business of praying is a hurried, petty, starved, beggarly business with most men.

"St. Paul calls a halt, and lays a levy on men for prayer. Put the men to praying is Paul’s unfailing remedy for great evils in Church, in State, in politics, in business, in home. Put the men to praying, then politics will be cleansed, business will be thriftier, the Church will be holier, the home will be sweeter.

"Prayer is the mightiest agent to advance God’s work. Praying hearts and hands only can do God’s work. Prayer succeeds when all else fails. Prayer has won great victories, and rescued, with notable triumph, God’s saints when every other hope was gone. Men who know how to pray are the greatest boon God can give to earth—they are the richest gift earth can offer heaven. Men who know how to use this weapon of prayer are God’s best          soldiers. His mightiest leaders.

"The world is coming into the Church at many points and in many ways. It oozes in; it pours in; it comes in with brazen front or soft, insinuating disguise; it comes in at the top and comes in at the bottom; and percolates through many a hidden way.

"For praying men and holy men we are looking—men whose presence in the Church will make it like a censer of holiest incense flaming up to God. With God the man counts for everything. Rites, forms, organisations are of small moment; unless they are backed by the holiness of the man they are offensive in His sight. “Incense is an abomination unto Me; the new moons and sabbaths, the calling of assemblies I cannot away with; it is iniquity, even the solemn meeting.”

"Why does God speak so strongly against His own ordinances? Personal purity had failed. The impure man tainted all the sacred institutions of God and defiled them. God regards the man in so important a way as to put a kind of discount on all else. Men have built Him glorious temples and have striven and exhausted themselves to please God by all manner of gifts; but in lofty strains He has rebuked these proud worshippers and rejected their princely gifts.

"In the case of William Wilberforce. High in social position, a member of Parliament, he records: “My chief reasons for a day of secret prayer are, (1) That the state of public affairs is very critical and calls for earnest deprecation of the Divine displeasure. (2) My station in life is a very difficult one, wherein I am at a loss to know how to act. Direction, therefore, should be specially sought. (3)  I would humbly hope, too, that what I am now doing is a proof that God has not withdrawn His Holy Spirit from me. I am covered with mercies.”
“I find,” he wrote, “that books alienate my heart from God as much as anything. I have been framing a plan of study for myself, but let me remember but one thing is needful, that if my heart cannot be kept in a spiritual state without so much prayer, meditation, Scripture reading, etc., as are incompatible with study, I must seek first the righteousness of God.”

"To his son he wrote: “Let me conjure you not to be seduced into neglecting, curtailing or hurrying over your morning prayers. Of all things, guard against neglecting God in the closet. There is nothing more fatal to the life and power of religion. More solitude and earlier hours—prayer three times a day at least. How much better might I serve if I cultivated a closer communication with God.”

"Wilberforce knew the secret of a holy life. Is that not where most of us fail? We are so busy with other things, so immersed even in doing good and in carrying on the Lord’s work, that we neglect the quiet seasons of prayer with God, and before we are aware of it our soul is lean and impoverished.

For more on the remedy for all evils:
http://www.ccel.org/ccel/bounds/purpose.VIII.html
The Christian Classics Ethereal Library features many books by the Christians who walked

Tuesday, August 21, 2012

Purpose in Prayer (7) ... Intimacy 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

In prayer we have the greatest privilege of God's Presence and interacting with God with His purpose than any other activity in our lives. E. M. Bounds in his book, the Purpose in Prayer, we learn how this is so important. Here are excerpts from chapter 7, Intimacy with God.

"Intimacy requires development. We can never know God as it is our privilege to know Him, by brief and fragmentary and unconsidered repetitions of intercessions that are requests for personal favours and nothing more. That is not the way in which we can come into communication with heaven’s King. “The goal of prayer is the ear of God,” a goal that can only be reached by patient and continued and continuous waiting upon Him, pouring out our heart to Him and permitting Him to speak to us.

"Always does not mean that we are to neglect the ordinary duties of life; what it means is that the soul which has come into intimate contact with God in the silence of the prayer-chamber is never out of conscious touch with the Father, that the heart is always going out to Him in loving communion, and that the moment the mind is released from the task upon which it is engaged it returns as naturally to God as the bird does to its nest.

"What a beautiful conception of prayer we get if we regard it in this light, if we view it as a constant fellowship, an unbroken audience with the King.

"George Muller also combined Bible study with prayer in the quiet morning hours. I began, therefore, to meditate on the New Testament early in the morning. The first thing I did, after having asked in a few words for the Lord’s blessing upon his precious Word, was to begin to meditate on the Word of God, searching as it were, into every verse to get blessing out of it; not for public ministry, preaching, but for the sake of obtaining food for my own soul.

"But we do not pray always. That is the trouble with so many of us. We need to pray much more than we do and much longer than we do.

"If you do not pray, God will probably lay you aside from your ministry, as He did me, to teach you to pray.

“I ought not to omit any of the parts of prayer—confession, adoration, thanksgiving, petition and intercession.

“Natural ability and educational advantages do not figure as factors in this matter; but a capacity for faith, the ability to pray, the power of a thorough consecration, the ability of self-littleness, an absolute losing of one’s self in God’s glory and an ever present and insatiable yearning and seeking after all the fulness of God.

"I ought to pray before seeing anyone. Often when I sleep long, or meet with others early, and then have family prayer and breakfast and forenoon callers, it is eleven or twelve o’clock before I begin secret prayer. This is a wretched system; it is unscriptural. Christ rose before day and went into a solitary place. David says, “Early will I seek Thee; Thou shalt early hear my voice.”

"But in general it is best to have at least one hour alone with God before engaging in anything else. I ought to spend the best hours of the day in communion with God. When I awake in the night, I ought to rise and pray as David and John Welch.”

The Gospel cannot live, fight, conquer without prayer—prayer unceasing, instant and ardent. Men who can set the Church ablaze for God, not in a noisy, showy way, but with an intense and quiet heat that melts and moves every thing for God.”

"And, to return to the vital point, secret praying is the test, the gauge, becomes also the measure of the devotion. The self-denial, the sacrifices which we make for our prayer-chambers, the frequency of our visits to that hallowed place, the lingering to stay, the loathness to leave, are values which we put on communion alone with God, the price we pay for the Spirit’s trysting hours of heavenly love.


For more on intimacy with God,
http://www.ccel.org/ccel/bounds/purpose.VII.html
The Christian Classics Ethereal Library features many books by the Christians who walked in the very power of the Holy Spirit throughout the ages.

Sunday, August 19, 2012

Purpose in Prayer (6) ... Characteristics of Real 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

In prayer we have the greatest privilege of God's Presence and interacting with God with His purpose than any other activity in our lives. E. M. Bounds in his book, the Purpose in Prayer, we learn how this is so important. Here are excerpts from chapter 6, Characteristics of Real Prayer.

"Christ puts importunity as a distinguishing characteristic of true praying. We must not only pray, but we must pray with great urgency, with intentness and with repetition. We must not only pray, but we must pray again and again. We must not get tired of praying. We must be thoroughly in earnest, deeply concerned about the things for which we ask, for Jesus Christ made it very plain that the secret of prayer and its success lie in its urgency. We must press our prayers upon God.

“Men ought to pray with full heartiness, and press the matter with vigorous energy and brave hearts.

“The widow, weak and helpless, is helplessness personified; bereft of every hope and influence which could move an unjust judge, she yet wins her case solely by her tireless and offensive importunity.We can do nothing without prayer. All things can be done by importunate prayer.

“Without continuance the prayer may go unanswered. Importunity is made up of the ability to hold on, to press on, to wait with unrelaxed and unrelaxable grasp, restless desire and restful patience. Importunate prayer is not an incident, but the main thing, not a performance but a passion, not a need but a necessity.

"Prayer in its highest form and grandest success assumes the attitude of a wrestler with God. It is the contest, trial and victory of faith; a victory not secured from an enemy, but from Him who tries our faith that He may enlarge it: that tests our strength to make us stronger.

“Our whole being must be in our praying; like John Knox, we must say and feel, “Give me Scotland, or I die.” Our experience and revelations of God are born of our costly sacrifice, our costly conflicts, our costly praying. The wrestling, all night praying, of Jacob made an era never to be forgotten in Jacob’s life, brought God to the rescue, changed Esau’s attitude and conduct, changed Jacob’s character, saved and affected his life and entered into the habits of a nation.

“Importunity, it may be repeated, is a condition of prayer. We are to press the matter, not with vain repetitions, but with urgent repetitions. We repeat, not to count the times, but to gain the prayer. We cannot quit praying because heart and soul are in it. We pray “with all perseverance.” We hang to our prayers because by them we live.

“There is not the least doubt that much of our praying fails for lack of persistency. It is without the fire and strength of perseverance. Persistence is of the essence of true praying.

“Our prayers are weak because they are not impassioned by an unfailing and resistless will.
"God loves the importunate pleader, and sends him answers that would never have been granted but for the persistency that refuses to let go until the petition craved for is granted.

For more on characteristics of Real Prayer,
http://www.ccel.org/ccel/bounds/purpose.VI.html

The Christian Classics Ethereal Library features many books by the Christians who walked in the very power of the Holy Spirit throughout the ages.
 

Friday, August 17, 2012

Purpose in Prayer (5) ... no substitute for 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

In prayer we have the greatest privilege of God's Presence and interacting with God with His purpose than any other activity in our lives. E. M. Bounds in his book, the Purpose in Prayer, we learn how this is so important. Here are excerpts from chapter 5, No Substitute for Prayer.

We do fear that we are doing more of other things than prayer. This is not a praying age; it is an age of great activity, of great movements, but one in which the tendency is very strong to stress the seen and the material and to neglect and discount the unseen and the spiritual. Prayer is the greatest of all forces, because it honors God and brings Him into active aid.

There can be no substitute, no rival for prayer; it stands alone as the great spiritual force, and this force must be imminent and acting. It cannot be dispensed with during one generation, nor held in abeyance for the advance of any great movement—it must be continuous and particular, always, everywhere, and in everything.

Many persons believe in the efficacy of prayer, but not many pray. Prayer is the easiest and hardest of all things; the simplest and the sublimest; the weakest and the most powerful; its results lie outside the range of human possibilities—they are limited only by the omnipotence of God.

Prayer is our most formidable weapon, but the one in which we are the least skilled, the most averse to its use.

It is a life trade. The hindrances of prayer are the hindrances in a holy life. The conditions of praying are the conditions of righteousness, holiness and salvation.

In spite of the benefits and blessings which flow from communion with God, the sad confession must be made that we are not praying much. In the town and city churches the prayer meeting in name is not a prayer meeting in fact. A sermon or a lecture is the main feature. Prayer is the nominal attachment.

Prayer and a holy life are one. They mutually act and react. Neither can survive alone. The absence of the one is the absence of the other. A holy life does not live in the closet, but it cannot live without the closet. If, by any chance, a prayer chamber should be established without a holy life, it would be a chamber without the presence of God in it.

Sainthood’s piety is made, refined, perfected, by prayer. The Gospel moves with slow and timid pace when the saints are not at their prayers early and late and long. None but praying leaders can have praying followers. Praying apostles will beget praying saints.

We do greatly need somebody who can set the saints to this business of praying. We are a generation of non-praying saints. Non-praying saints are a beggarly gang of saints, who have neither the ardour nor the beauty, nor the power of saints. Who will restore this branch? The greatest will he be of reformers and apostles, who can set the Church to praying.

Prayer honours God; it dishonours self. It is man’s plea of weakness, ignorance, want. A plea which heaven cannot disregard. God delights to have us pray.

For more on no substitute for prayer,
http://www.ccel.org/ccel/bounds/purpose.V.html
The Christian Classics Ethereal Library features many books by the Christians who walked in the very power of the Holy Spirit throughout the ages.

Thursday, August 16, 2012

Purpose in Prayer (4) ... Incidents of Mighty Power


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

In prayer we have the greatest privilege of God's Presence and interacting with God with His purpose than any other activity in our lives. E. M. Bounds in his book, the Purpose in Prayer, we learn how this is so important. Here are excerpts from chapter 4, Incidents of Mighty Prayer.

"In every circumstance of life, prayer is the most natural out-pouring of the soul, the unhindered turning to God for communion and direction. Whether in sorrow or in joy, in defeat or in victory, in health or in weakness, in calamity or in success, the heart leaps to meet with God just as a child runs to his mother’s arms, ever sure that with her is the sympathy that meets every need.

"Martin Luther...Then not a day passes in which he does not employ in prayer at least three of his very best hours. He petitions God with as much reverence as if he was in the divine presence.

“I tell the Lord my troubles and difficulties, and wait for Him to give me the answers to them,” says one man of God. “And it is wonderful how a matter that looked very dark will in prayer become clear as crystal by the help of God’s Spirit. I think Christians fail so often to get answers to their prayers because they do not wait long enough on God."

"To have God thus near is to enter the holy of holies—to breathe the fragrance of the heavenly air, to walk in Eden’s delightful gardens. Nothing but prayer can bring God and man into this happy communion.

"Professor James, in his famous work, “Varieties of Religious Experience,” tells of a man of forty-nine who said: “God is more real to me than any thought or thing or person. I feel His presence positively, and the more as I live in closer harmony with His laws as written in my body and mind. I feel Him in the sunshine or rain; and all mingled with a delicious restfulness most nearly describes my feelings. I talk to Him as to a companion in prayer and praise, and our communion is delightful. He answers me again and again, often in words so clearly spoken that it seems my outer ear must have carried the tone, but generally in strong mental impressions. Usually a text of Scripture, unfolding some new view of Him and His love for me, and care for my safety ... That He is mine and I am His never leaves me; it is an abiding joy. Without it life would be a blank, a desert, a shoreless, trackless waste.”

For more on incidents of mighty prayer,
http://www.ccel.org/ccel/bounds/purpose.IV.html
The Christian Classics Ethereal Library features many books by the Christians who walked in the very power of the Holy Spirit throughout the ages.

Sunday, August 12, 2012

Purpose in Prayer (3) ... More and Better Praying the Secret to Success

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

In prayer we have the greatest privilege of God's Presence and interacting with God with His purpose than any other activity in our lives. E. M. Bounds in his book, the Purpose of Prayer, we learn how this is so important. Here are excerpts from chapter 3, "More and Better Praying the Secret of Success."

"Ever are the prayers of holy men streaming up to God as fragrant as the richest incense. And God in many ways is speaking to us, declaring his wealth and our impoverishment. “I am the Maker of all things; the wealth and glory are Mine.
Command ye Me.” The dispensations of God depend on man’s ability to pray. 

"Its office is to pray. Its prayer life is the highest life, the most odorous, the most conspicuous. The Book of Revelation says nothing about prayer as a great duty, a hallowed service, but much about prayer in its aggregated force and energies. It is the prayer force ever living and ever praying; it is all saints’ prayers going out as a mighty, living energy.


"Prayer is the one prime, eternal condition by which the Father is pledged to put the Son in possession of the world. Christ prays through His people.
 

"We do more of everything else than of praying. As poor as our giving is, our contributions of money exceed our offerings of prayer. We emphasize other things more than we do the necessity of prayer.


"The driving power, the conquering force in God’s cause is God Himself. “Call upon Me and I will answer you and show you great and mighty things which you do not know," is God’s challenge to prayer. Prayer puts God in full force into God’s work. “Ask of Me things to come, concerning My sons, and concerning the work of My hands command ye Me”—God’s
carte blanche to prayer.

"Our paucity in results, the cause of all leanness, is solved by the Apostle James—“Ye have not, because ye ask not. Ye ask and receive not, because ye ask amiss, that ye may spend it on your pleasures.”


For more on more and better prayer,

http://www.ccel.org/ccel/bounds/purpose.III.html
The Christian Classics Ethereal Library features many books by the Christians who walked in the very power of the Holy Spirit throughout the ages.

Saturday, August 11, 2012

Purpose in Prayer (2) ... Possibilities of Prayer


by Dale Shumaker
Spirit Savvy Network
www.spiritsavvy.net

It's about: Finding your mission, Empowering your life through prayer Becoming a Missionary in the Marketplace Leading others to be Missionaries in the Marketplace


In prayer we have the greatest privilege of God's Presence and interacting with God with His purpose than any other activity in our lives. E. M. Bounds in his book, the Purpose of Prayer, we learn how this is so important. Here are excerpts from chapter 2, "Possibilities and Necessities of Prayer."


"These men knew how to pray and how to prevail in prayer. Their faith in prayer was no passing attitude that changed with the wind or with their own feelings and circumstances; it was a fact that God heard and answered, that His ear was ever open to the cry of His children, and that the power to do what was asked of Him was commensurate with His willingness. And thus these men, strong in faith and in prayer, “subdued kingdoms, wrought righteousness, obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions, quenched the power of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, from weakness were made strong, waxed mighty in war, turned to flight the armies of the aliens.”

"Everything then, as now, was possible to the men and women who knew how to pray. Prayer, indeed, opened a limitless storehouse, and God’s hand withheld nothing. Prayer introduced those who practiced it into a world of privilege, and brought the strength and wealth of heaven down to the aid of finite man. What rich and wonderful power was theirs who had learned the secret of victorious approach to God! With Moses it saved a nation; with Ezra it saved a church.
And yet, strange as it seems when we contemplate the wonders of which God’s people had been witness, there came a slackness in prayer.

"It takes effort and toil and care to prepare the incense. Prayer is no laggard’s work. When all the rich, spiced graces from the body of prayer have by labour and beating been blended and refined and intermixed, the fire is needed to unloose the incense and make its fragrance rise to the throne of God. The fire that consumes creates the spirit and life of the incense.


"Without fire prayer has no spirit; it is, like dead spices, for corruption and worms.“The greatest and the best talent that God gives to any man or woman in this world is the talent of prayer,” writes Principal Alexander Whyte. “And the best usury that any man or woman brings back to God when He comes to reckon with them at the end of this world is a life of prayer.

"And those servants best put their Lord’s money “to the exchangers” who rise early and sit late, as long as they are in this world, ever finding out and ever following after better and better methods of prayer, and ever forming more secret, more steadfast, and more spiritually fruitful habits of prayer, till they literally “pray without ceasing,” and till they continually strike out into new enterprises in prayer, and new achievements, and new enrichments.” It is only when the whole heart is gripped with the passion of prayer that the life-giving fire descends, for none but the earnest man gets access to the ear of God.


For all of chapter 2 of the Purpose of Prayer, go to

http://www.ccel.org/ccel/bounds/purpose.II.html
The Christian Classics Ethereal Library features many books by the Christians who walked in the very power of the Holy Spirit throughout the ages.

Thursday, August 09, 2012

Purpose in Prayer, prayers never end



What is prayer and how do we live in the Power of God's Spirit?
Prayer is making that connection. It's a real connection.

Jesus is Us will start sharing insights to prayer in conjunction with the Spirit Savvy Network.

Spirit Savvy Network
www.spiritsavvy.net


Prayers never end.

In prayer we have the greatest privilege of God's Presence and interacting with God with His purpose than any other activity in our lives. 

From E. M. Bounds in his book, the
Purpose of Prayer, we learn how this is so important. In the first chapter, Bounds makes it clear that our prayers never end. It has been pointed out by many that prayers add up. So the longer we prayer, more power is stored up for an answer that will rock the world. Here are excerpts from chapter 1. 

"The more praying there is in the world the better the world will be, the mightier the forces against evil everywhere. Prayer, in one phase of its operation, is a disinfectant and a preventive. It purifies the air; it destroys the contagion of evil. Prayer is no fitful, short-lived thing. It is no voice crying unheard and unheeded in the silence.

"It is a voice which goes into God’s ear, and it lives as long as God’s ear is open to holy pleas, as long as God’s heart is alive to holy things.


"God shapes the world by prayer. Prayers are deathless. The lips that uttered them may be closed in death, the heart that felt them may have ceased to beat, but the prayers live before God, and God’s heart is set on them and prayers outlive the lives of those who uttered them; outlive a generation, outlive an age, outlive a world.

For all of chapter 1 of the Purpose of Prayer, go to

http://www.ccel.org/ccel/bounds/purpose.I_1.html
The Christian Classics Ethereal Library features many books by the Christians who walked in the very power of the Holy Spirit throughout the ages.

Friday, August 03, 2012

Spirit Savvy Network ... insights to praying power


Spirit Savvy Network

What is prayer and how do we live in the Power of God's Spirit.
Prayer is making that connection. It's a real connection. 

Jesus is Us will start sharing insights to prayer in conjunction with
the Spirit Savvy Network.