Essentials of prayerBounds, Edward M. (Edward McKendree)
Religion
Essentials of prayer
Bounds, Edward M. (Edward McKendree)
Prayer -- Christianity
The Prophet Isaiah, looking down the centuries with the vision of a
seer, thus expresses his purpose to continue in prayer and give God no
rest till Christ’s kingdom be established among men:
“For Zion’s sake will I not hold my peace, and for
Jerusalem’s sake I will not rest till the righteousness
thereof goeth forth as brightness, and the salvation
thereof as a lamp that burneth.”
Then, foretelling the final success of the Christian Church, he thus
speaks:
“And the Gentiles shall see thy righteousness, and all
kings thy glory, and thou shalt be called by a new name,
which the mouth of the Lord shall name.”
Then the Lord, Himself, by the mouth of this Evangelical prophet,
declares as follows:
“I have set watchmen upon thy walls, O Jerusalem, which
shall never hold their peace, day nor night. Ye that make
mention of the Lord, keep not silence. And give him no rest
till he establish and till he make Jerusalem a praise in
the earth.”
In the margin of our Bible, it reads, “Ye that are the Lord’s
remembrancers.” The idea is, that these praying ones are those who are
the Lord’s remembrancers, those who remind Him of what He has promised,
and who give Him no rest till God’s Church is established in the earth.
And one of the leading petitions in the Lord’s Prayer deals with this
same question of the establishing of God’s kingdom and the progress of
the Gospel in the short, pointed petition, “Thy kingdom come,” with the
added words, “Thy will be done on earth as it is done in heaven.”
The missionary movement in the Apostolic Church was born in an
atmosphere of fasting and prayer. The very movement looking to offering
the blessings of the Christian Church to the Gentiles was on the
housetop on the occasion when Peter went up there to pray, and God
showed him His Divine purpose to extend the privileges of the Gospel to
the Gentiles, and to break down the middle wall of partition between
Jew and Gentile.
But more specifically Paul and Barnabas were definitely called and set
apart to the missionary field at Antioch when the Church there had
fasted and prayed. It was then the Holy Spirit answered from heaven:
“Separate me Barnabas and Saul for the work whereunto I have called
them.”
Please note this was not the call to the ministry of Paul and Barnabas,
but more particularly their definite call to the foreign field.
Paul had been called to the ministry years before this, even at his
conversion. This was a subsequent call to a work born of special and
continued prayer in the Church at Antioch. God calls men not only to
the ministry but to be missionaries. Missionary work is God’s work.
And it is the God-called men who are to do it. These are the kind of
missionaries which have wrought well and successfully in the foreign
field in the past, and the same kind will do the work in the future, or
it will not be done.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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