Essentials of prayerBounds, Edward M. (Edward McKendree)
Religion
Essentials of prayer
Bounds, Edward M. (Edward McKendree)
Prayer -- Christianity
Missionaries, like ministers, are born of praying people. A praying
church begets labourers in the harvest-field of the world. The
scarcity of missionaries argues a non-praying church. It is all right
to send trained men to the foreign field, but first of all they must
be God-sent. The sending is the fruit of prayer. As praying men are
the occasion of sending them, so in turn the workers must be praying
men. And the prime mission of these praying missionaries is to convert
prayerless heathen men into praying men. Prayer is the proof of their
calling, their Divine credentials, and their work.
He who is not a praying man at home needs the one fitness to become a
mission worker abroad. He who has not the spirit which moves him toward
sinners at home, will hardly have a spirit of compassion for sinners
abroad. Missionaries are not made of men who are failures at home. He
who will be a man of prayer abroad must, before anything else, be a man
of prayer in his home church. If he be not engaged in turning sinners
away from their prayerless ways at home, he will hardly succeed in
turning away the heathen from their prayerless ways. In other words, it
takes the same spiritual qualifications for being a home worker as it
does for being a foreign worker.
God in His own way, in answer to the prayers of His Church, calls men
into His harvest-fields. Sad will be the day when Missionary Boards and
Churches overlook that fundamental fact, and send out their own chosen
men independent of God.
Is the harvest great? Are the labourers few? Then “pray ye the Lord of
the harvest to send forth labourers into his harvest.” Oh, that a great
wave of prayer would sweep over the Church asking God to send out a
great army of labourers into the needy harvest fields of the earth! No
danger of the Lord of the harvest sending out too many labourers and
crowding the fields. He who calls will most certainly provide the means
for supporting those whom He calls and sends forth.
The one great need in the modern missionary movement is intercessors.
They were scarce in the days of Isaiah. This was his complaint:
“And he saw that there was no man, and wondered that
there was no intercessor.”
So today there is great need of intercessors, first, for the needy
harvest-fields of earth, born of a Christly compassion for the
thousands without the Gospel; and then intercessors for labourers to be
sent forth by God into the needy fields of earth.
Transcriber’s Note:
Words may have multiple spelling variations or inconsistent hyphenation
in the text. Obsolete and alternative spellings were left unchanged.
Misspelled words were corrected.
Words and phrases in italics are surrounded by underscores, _like
this_. Final stops missing at the end of sentences and abbreviations
were added. The following was changed: added unprinted “is” to ‘It is
so easy to lean …’
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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