Prayer

I don't know how many times I must have read these lines, but it pricks me every time. It makes my eyes go moist and makes me look for a place to pray. When in office it makes me long for the prayer closet. I wish it does the same thing for you.

Excerpts from the book 'Why Revival Tarries' by Leonard Ravenhill...

The Cinderella of the church of today is the prayer meeting. This handmaid of the Lord is unloved and unwooed because she is not dripping with the pearls of intellectualism, nor glamourous with the silks of philosophy; neither is she enchanting with the tiara of psychology. She wears the homespuns of sincerity and humility and so is not afraid to kneel! No man is greater than his prayer life. The pastor who is not praying is playing; the people who are not praying are straying. The pulpit can be a shopwindow to display one's talents; the prayer closet allows no showing off. When a man who has crept along for years in conventional Christianity suddenly zooms into spiritual alertness, becomes aggressive int he battle of the Lord, and has a quenchless zeal for the lost, there is a reason for it. (But we are so subnormal these days that the normal New Testament experience seems abnormal.) The secret of this "jet-propelled fellow" we have just mentioned is that somewhere he has had Jacob-like wrestling with God and has come out stripped, but also "strengthened by the Holy Ghost!"

The secret of praying is praying in secret. A sinning man will stop praying, and a praying man will stop sinning. We are beggared and bankrupt, but not broken, nor even bent.

Prayer is profoundly simple and simply profound. 'Prayer is the simplest form of speech that infant lips can try', and yet so sublime that it outranges all speech and exhausts mans vocabulary. A Niagara of burning words does not mean that God is either impressed or moved. One of the most profound of Old Testament intercessors had no language - 'Her lips moved, BUT HER VOICE WAS NOT HEARD. No linguist here ! There are groanings that cannot be uttered.

Are we so substandard in New Testament Christianity that we know not the historical faith of our fathers (with its implications and operations), but only the hysterical faith of our fellows ?

Prayer is to the believer what capital is to the business man.

Can any deny that in the modern church setup the main cause of anxiety is money? Yet that which tries the modern churches the most, troubled the New Testament Church the least. Our accent is on paying, theirs was on praying. When we have paid, the place is taken; when they had prayed, the place was shaken !

In the matter of New Testament, Spirit-inspired, hell-shaking, world-breaking prayer, never has so much been left by so many to so few.

For this kind of prayer there is no substitute. We do it - or die !