It’s Pentecostal Sunday today, and
churches in Taiwan are holding a day of national revival prayer! Indeed, prayer is
the engine of God’s works… "Power through prayer" is a book I
coincidentally saw on display in the Morling library yesterday! There is even a
free online edition available!
The Divine Channel of Power:
Study universal holiness of life. Your whole usefulness
depends on this, for your sermons last only an hour or two; your life preaches
all week. If Satan can make you a covetous minister, a lover of praise, of
pleasure, of good eating, he has ruined your ministry. Give yourself to prayer,
and get your texts, your thoughts, your words from God. Luther spent his best
three hours in prayer. Robert Murray McCheyne.
We are continually striving to create
new methods, plans, and organisations to advance the church. We are ever
working to provide and stimulate growth and efficiency for the gospel. This
trend of the day has a tendency to lose sight of the man. Or else he is lost in
the workings of the plan or organisation. God's plan is to make much of the man,
far more of him than of anything else. Men are God's method. P9
When God declares that "the eyes
of the Lord run to and fro throughout the whole earth, to show himself strong
in the behalf of them whose heart is perfect toward him (2 Chronicles 16:9), He
declares the necessity of men. He acknowledges His dependence on them as a
channel through which He can exert His power on the world. This vital, urgent
truth is one that this age of machinery is apt to forget. The forgetting of it
is as detrimental to the Word of God as removing the sun from its sphere would
be. Darkness, confusion, and death would ensue. P10
What the church needs today is not
more or better machinery, not new organisations or more novel methods. She
needs men whom the Holy Spirit can use - men of prayer, men mighty in prayer.
The Holy Spirit does not flow through methods, but through men. He does not
come on machinery, but on men. He does not anoint plans, but men - men of
prayer. P11
The pulpit of this day is weak in
praying. The pride of learning is in opposition to the dependent humility of
prayer. In the pulpit, prayer is all too often only official - a performance
for the routine of service. In the modern pulpit, prayer is not the mighty
force it was in Paul's life or ministry. Every preacher who does not make
prayer a mighty factor in his own life and ministry is weak as a factor in
God's work and is powerless to advance God's cause in this world. P16
Bounds, E. M. Power through Prayer. Whitaker House: New Kengsington, 1982.
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