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.