By the Arm of Prayer by W. A. S.

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Mar 27, 1913

By the Arm of Prayer

By W. A. S.

While Paul was laboring amid special difficulties in Asia, he was conscious of the fact that across the Ægean, in Corinth, a praying church was “helping together by prayer” unto God for him. It is one of the lessons written by Inspiration to teach us that prayer actually does things away beyond the reach of personal effort.

Many will remember the photographic reproduction of the message of greeting from our Chinese brethren in Shanghai, printed in the Review a few weeks ago. Many an earnest prayer, we may be sure, went up to heaven from believers who read that message in the translation that accompanied the Chinese characters.

A letter just received from Shanghai reminds us of that week of prayer message. Writing of other matters, Brother F. E. Stafford closes his letter with the words:—

We are very thankful to say that the Lord is blessing the present effort far beyond anything we have experienced before; and we believe that we shall gather a good-sized harvest here before the Lord comes. My Chinese evangelist said yesterday that he believed that our brethren and sisters in other lands were praying for us, and that was the reason we were receiving such help at this time. I trust it is so, and we praise God for it.

Keep on praying, brethren and sisters. These prayers are lifting burdens far away.

“Away in foreign lands they wondered how Their single word had power; At home the Christians, two or three, had met To pray an hour.”

All the resources that we can dedicate to service are, after all, but tokens of our consecration to the Master in the closing work. Our numbers and our means, of themselves, can never accomplish the results. The results must all be wrought of God, and we must cry to him to give power to the message and to finish the work quickly.

In the far fields it is courage and strength to the missionaries to know that by prayer believers left behind in the churches are actually working with them in the daily round. The other day we received a letter testifying anew to this. Sister Elnora Davis, one of the little band of nurses in Uruguay, South America, wrote:—

So many times when I was in the Washington Foreign Mission Seminary did I hear earnest petitions going up to the throne of grace for the workers in every part of the globe, and I used to think how grateful they would be if they could only hear these prayers, and know that such earnest requests were ascending in their behalf. Then my mind went ahead to the time when I should probably be numbered among the foreign workers, and I thought how comforting it would be to me to know that I should be remembered also. And it surely is a blessed thought to me now; it seems to me that we are all so closely united by prayer. When we all talk to the very same Father, and we know that he is listening to each of us, I am sure it draws us all closer together.

Thank God for the arm of prayer by which we join one another in the fellowship of service even though separated by seas and continents.

Since writing the lines just preceding, an unusual call has come in, showing how the missionaries depend on this ministry of prayer by the great family of believers. Over the telephone, three words were passed on to the General Conference Office from the Washington cable office: “Puno, persecution, pray.” The words had come from Puno, the telegraph station on Lake Titicaca, in Peru, about twenty-five miles from our Indian station. They meant that again trouble had come—doubtless more serious than ever—to the believers in the Indian mission, on those bleak highlands of the Andes, where a fanatical Catholicism has reigned with unchallenged power for centuries. And the workers desired that the church at home might join in praying God to overrule all to his glory. We know that our brethren will pray; and, somehow, out of the determined effort of the enemy to block the splendid work going forward in that wild region, the victory will come, and many souls will be saved.

W. A. S.