Essentials of prayerBounds, Edward M. (Edward McKendree)
Religion
Essentials of prayer
Bounds, Edward M. (Edward McKendree)
Prayer -- Christianity
The key of all missionary success is prayer. That key is in the hands
of the home churches. The trophies won by our Lord in heathen lands
will be won by praying missionaries, not by professional workers in
foreign lands. More especially will this success be won by saintly
praying in the churches at home. The home church on her knees fasting
and praying, is the great base of spiritual supplies, the sinews of
war, and the pledge of victory in this dire and final conflict.
Financial resources are not the real sinews of war in this fight.
Machinery in itself carries no power to break down heathen walls, open
effectual doors and win heathen hearts to Christ. Prayer alone can do
the deed.
Aaron and Hur did not more surely give victory to Israel through
Moses, than a praying church through Jesus Christ will give victory on
every battlefield in heathen lands. It is as true in foreign fields
as it is in home lands. The praying church wins the contest. The home
church has done but a paltry thing when she has furnished the money to
establish missions and support her missionaries. Money is important,
but money without prayer is powerless in the face of the darkness, the
wretchedness and the sin in unchristianised lands. Prayerless giving
breeds barrenness and death. Poor praying at home is the solution of
poor results in the foreign field. Prayerless giving is the secret of
all crises in the missionary movements of the day, and is the occasion
of the accumulation of debts in missionary boards.
It is all right to urge men to give of their means to the missionary
cause. But it is much more important to urge them to give their prayers
to the movement. Foreign missions need, today, more the power of prayer
than the power of money. Prayer can make even poverty in the missionary
cause move on amidst difficulties and hindrances. Much money without
prayer is helpless and powerless in the face of the utter darkness and
sin and wretchedness on the foreign field.
This is peculiarly a missionary age. Protestant Christianity is stirred
as it never was before in the line of aggression in pagan lands. The
missionary movement has taken on proportions that awaken hope, kindle
enthusiasm, and which demand the attention, if not the interest, of
the coldest and the most lifeless. Nearly every Church has caught the
contagion, and the sails of their proposed missionary movements are
spread wide to catch the favouring breezes. Herein is the danger just
now, that the missionary movement will go ahead of the missionary
spirit. This has always been the peril of the Church, losing the
substance in the shade, losing the spirit in the outward shell, and
contenting itself in the mere parade of the movement, putting the force
of effort in the movement and not in the spirit.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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