Secret of the Master’s Indwelling (12) ... Source of 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

The Secret of the Master's Indwelling is about digging our roots deep into God’s soil that bears fruit abundantly and gives us strength Supernaturally. Andrew Murray shows what we must do and be to become stalwarts of Faith.

Secret of the Master’s Indwelling, Chapter 12, Source of Power in Prayer:

“Powerful prayer! The confession of ignorance! When we are called upon we can pray, but it gets far too easy, and I am afraid we think we are praying often when there is little real prayer. We must begin by feeling, “I cannot pray.” When a man breaks down and cannot pray, and there is a fire burning in his heart, and a burden resting upon him, there is something drawing him to God. “I know not what to pray,”—oh, blessed ignorance!

And again he tells us that we ourselves often do not know what the Spirit is doing within us, but there is one, God, who searches the hearts. Words often reveal my thought and my wishes, but not what is deep in my heart, and God comes and searches my heart, and deep down, hidden, what I cannot see and what was to me an unutterable longing, God finds.

Paul says, “No man knows the things of God but the Spirit of God.” Pray new prayers, rise higher into the riches of God. You must begin to feel your ignorance. When I see a man who cannot pray glibly and smoothly and readily, I say that is a mark of the Holy Spirit. When he begins in his prayers to say, “Oh, God, I want more, I want to be led deeper in. I have prayed  to feel the burden of the lost in a new way,” it is an indication of the presence of the Holy Spirit. I tell you, beloved, if you will take time and let God lay the burden of those of the world heavier upon you until you begin to feel, “I have never prayed,”

The Holy Spirit could pray a hundred fold more in us if we were only conscious of our ignorance, because we would then feel our dependence upon Him. May God teach us our ignorance in prayer and our impotence, and may God bring us to say, “Lord, we cannot pray; we do not know what prayer is.”  But oh, it is only a little beginning compared to what the Holy Spirit of God teaches.

There is the first thought: our ignorance. “We know not what we should pray for as we ought;” but “the Spirit itself makes intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered.”

“I cannot limit the holy one of Israel by my thoughts; I give myself up in the faith that the Holy Spirit can be praying for me with groanings, with longings, that cannot be expressed.” Apply that to your prayers.

There are different phases of prayer. There is worship, when a man just bows down to adore the great God. We do not take time to worship. We need to worship in secret, just to get ourselves face to face with the everlasting God, that He may overshadow us and cover us and fill us with His love and His glory. It is the Holy Spirit that can work in us such a yearning that we will give up our pleasures and even part of our business, that we may the oftener meet our God.

The next phase of prayer is fellowship. In prayer there is not only the worship of a king, but fellowship as of a child with God. Christians take far too little time in fellowship. They think prayer is just coming with their petitions. If Christ is to make me what I am to be, I must tarry in fellowship with God.

The blacksmith puts his rod of iron into the fire. If he leaves it there but a short time it does not become red hot. If he takes time and leaves the rod ten or fifteen minutes in the fire the whole iron will become red hot with the heat that is in the fire. So if we are to get the fire of God’s holiness and love and power we must take more time with God in fellowship.

Another, and a most important phase of prayer is intercession. If the Spirit could find men and women who would give up their lives to cry to God, the Spirit would most surely come.

Then comes the last thought, that God Himself comes to look with complacency upon the attitude of His child. Christ the almighty high priest pleading day and night. His whole person is one intercession, and there goes up from Him without ceasing the pleading to the Father, “Bless thy church.”  Let us open and enlarge our hearts and say to God, “Oh that I might be a priest, to enter God’s presence continually and to take hold of God and to bring down a blessing to my perishing fellowmen!” God longs to find the intercession of Jesus reflected in the hearts of His children, and where He finds it, it is a delight.
Think of the thousands of nominal Christians—Christians in name, but robbing God! (by not praying for those around them) and can we be happy?

God has spoken to us to ask us if we realize what we are.  Let us go to God and may He by the Holy Spirit fill our hearts with unutterable sorrow at the state of the our Christian commitment, and may God give us grace to mourn before Him. And when we begin to confess our sins in our fellowships, we will begin to feel our own sins as never before.”

Power in prayer comes when we come to God in meekness and in our weakness, and plead for the betterment of our fellow man.

The complete chapter on the Source of Power in Prayer:
http://www.ccel.org/ccel/murray/indwelling.xv.html
The Christian Classics Ethereal Library and many great classic works on Christian Growth, by the best of the Saints of Old who’s works have been passed down through the ages.