(Reading for Monday, December 9)
By J. L. Shaw
The Relation of Prayer to the Finishing of the Work
THERE is yet a great work to be done, both in the deepening of the spiritual life of God’s people and in the heralding of the gospel of present truth at home and in the regions beyond, before the work is finished. In this, prayer has an important place. It is therefore wise that in this week devoted to prayer and to the extension of foreign missions we consider, first, the relation which prevailing prayer sustains to the increase of personal piety among God’s people, and second, the place it fills in the world-wide work which is to triumph in carrying this gospel of the kingdom to every kindred, tongue, and people. The remnant church is to reach a higher plane of spiritual life than churches of previous generations. Notice some of its characteristics: Its members are to be examples of patience—“Here is the patience of the saints.” They are to “keep the commandments of God,” and have a faith which is called “the faith of Jesus.” They will get the victory over sin, and be “without fault before the throne of God,” and have written in their foreheads the name of God the Father. It is such a people who will be trusted with a special outpouring of the Holy Spirit, and proclaim the last message to the world. To be called among such a people is surely the greatest call of God to-day, and it should therefore be our great concern how we shall meet the standard that God has set, and accomplish the work he has for us to do. In this call to a higher life, there is surely a call to a larger measure of prayer. Jesus, our example, lived a life of prayer. His whole ministry was freighted with believing and prevailing prayer. In the mountain, apart with God, he received grace for his ministry among the multitudes. It was communion with God that raised him above the life of sin about him. Though upon earth, he had that constant association with God that surrounded him with the atmosphere of heaven. When we realize the time Christ spent in prayer, and how the great events of his life were all connected with special prayer, we learn the necessity of direct and unceasing communion with the heavenly world. Notice some of the experiences of Christ in prayer, beginning with his baptism: As he came up from the water, we read, “and praying, the heaven was opened.” Luke 3:21. His prayer threw open the windows of heaven, and the loving voice of the Father said, “Thou art my beloved Son; in thee I am well pleased.” As his ministry began, Mark says of him, “And in the morning, rising up a great while before day, he went out, and departed into a solitary place, and there prayed.” Mark 1:35. Soon after, Luke says of his prayer life, “Great multitudes came together to hear, and to be healed by him of their infirmities. And he withdrew himself into the wilderness, and prayed.” Luke 5:15, 16. Though the sick and the suffering were waiting for him, he must himself draw from his Father the healing virtue. Continual teaching and healing exhausted his power, and communion with God was the source of his supply. If any one could have labored continuously without secret prayer, it was the Master. But he could not. He needed to have his supplies of grace replenished by times of uninterrupted communion with his Father. As the time came to appoint his disciples, “he went out into a mountain to pray, and continued all night in prayer to God.” Luke 6:12. It is very probable that in that night of close communion with his Father, he was shown whom he should choose as disciples and pillars of the Christian church. When popular favor rose high, and the people would have made him king, he withdrew into the mountain to pray. Matt. 14:23. In the transfiguration, the fashion of his countenance was changed; while in the mountain with Peter, James, and John, he prayed. No wonder that the Master’s prayer life impressed itself upon his disciples. They realized that they knew not how to pray, and in their need came their request, “Lord, teach us to pray.” He knew their desire, and in the three and one-half years of training in his school of prayer, Jesus taught them to pray. As the end drew near, his need seemed greater, and we find that he spent still more time in prayer. He prayed at the grave of Lazarus. In Gethsemane we see him pouring out his soul unto God; and the seventeenth chapter of John shows the close relation of the Son with the Father, as Christ drew near his end. It was his life of intercession that made him fit to be our intercessor. Our Saviour was a praying Saviour. His life on earth nineteen hundred years ago and his life in his children to-day is a prayer life. As he came to the end of his work, his communion with the Father was continuous and incessant; and so it will be with the remnant church of God. They will have developed in them the characteristics of the remnant, and will finish their work on earth through the ministry of prevailing prayer. As princes of God, as Israelites indeed, they will prevail with God, and will have written in their foreheads as sons of God the name of their Father. Great movements in the church of Christ have had their beginnings in prayer. So it was at Pentecost. At one time we see three thousand converted in a day. But going back of that, we find gathered in an upper chamber the disciples and a few women who knew how to pray. They had taken an advanced course in the school of prayer. They had prayed with Jesus before. It was not simply the few days of prayer just preceding the day of Pentecost that brought the outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon the disciples. It was Jesus’ life of prayer worked out in his followers that prepared them for the gift of the Holy Spirit, and gave them faith to accept and receive the promised gift. The movement at Pentecost was a prayer movement. It began with the disciples when associated with Jesus in his three and one-half years of ministry in prayer, and reached the full tide of its power in preaching a risen Saviour, first in Jerusalem and afterward to the heathen world. It was the Prayer Watch which kindled the fire of missionary zeal in the Moravian Church. No people since the days of the disciples have shown more love for souls than the Moravians under the leadership of Zinzendorf. It was shortly after the beginning of the Prayer Watch wherein the brethren gave themselves to a larger measure of prayer in the interests of those about them, that the first two missionaries went forth. The Moravian Brethren had learned from a slave the condition of slaves in the West Indies; and two men, with but a few shillings in their purse, but rich in faith in God and his care, set out afoot to give to those ignorant slaves a knowledge of the Master’s love. The year following, two went to Greenland, and the next year twelve went to open up industrial mission work among the Negroes. During the first twenty years the Moravians sent out more missionaries than the whole Protestant church had done in two hundred years. Such were the fruits of much and abundant prayer. It was not without much prayer that Judson and his associates, the first American missionaries, made their request known to the General Association, thus bringing into existence the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, and subsequently, owing to Judson’s change of views of baptism, the American Baptist Missionary Union. Little did Judson know the results that would follow in Burma, and little did the wife of Ebenezer Fiske think, while spending days in prayer that her offspring might be followers of Christ, that Fidelia Fiske, her granddaughter, would live the prayer life in Persia, and be among the first to bring about the conversion of Persian girls and women in answer to prayer. Nor yet did Hudson Taylor, the founder of the China Inland Mission, while in preparation know the17outworking of his earlier life of prayer. He determined not to go to China until he knew that God heard and answered prayer. He knew there would be hardships to endure and difficulties to overcome beyond his strength; and therefore while at school, and before leaving for the mission fields, he learned to look to God in prayer for all his needs, both temporal and spiritual, and with but little visible means of support to attempt work in China. The prayer life of Hudson Taylor, wherein he repeatedly put God to the test, gave him an experience every missionary should have before beginning work in a heathen land. He had the definite assurance of answered prayer. To some his first few years in China seemed presumption, but God cared for him and blessed his efforts at Ning-po. Then came the great test of his life,—health failed, and he returned to England to be told by physicians that it would be years before he could return to China. Yet in the midst of what seemed a great calamity, he trusted God’s promises, and began telling people of the great need in China. His faith rose, and he asked God to give him twenty-four workers, two for each of the eleven provinces of China without a missionary, and two for Mongolia. He also asked for their passage money and support. Such were the beginnings of the China Inland Mission. The Lord provided the men and the means. Taylor again went to China, more funds came in, and more missionaries entered the field. There were nearly a thousand missionaries laboring under the society when Hudson Taylor died. The answered prayers of the founder of the China Inland Mission are among the miracles of modern missions. And coming to our own work, we find it had its beginnings in prayer. Elder James White and Joseph Bates were men of large faith and much prayer. They, with those associated with them, looked to God for continual guidance with every advance step. When the first sheet was printed, and was brought home from Middletown, Conn., Brother and Sister White and those in their family bowed around it, asking God to bless the feeble efforts of his servants. Each number as it was brought from Middletown to Rockyhill was spread before the Lord, and earnest prayers, with tears, were offered to God, that his blessing would go with the silent messengers of truth. How marvelously God answered those prayers! Soon money came to publish the paper, and many souls began to obey the truth. Beginning in sacrifice and earnest prayer, our publishing work has continued to grow. One publishing house after another has been established, and from country to country the printed page has gone. Through much effort and many prayers of publishers and earnest canvassers, our literature has found its way around the world. It is now being printed in seventy-one languages. Its rapid growth is one of the great marvels of this message. As we see it grow and develop in Eastern lands, our hearts rejoice in God. In many tongues it is crying aloud the message in the East. The amount of literature distributed in India the present year will very likely more than double that of last. In China, where the advancement is much greater, the Chinese monthly journal has a circulation of more than one hundred thousand a month. Thus the humble prayers of sixty years ago are being answered the world around to-day. And yet our work in heathen lands has just begun; more prayer is imperative. The labors and prayers of the past, the growth of our institutions, the effectiveness of our organization, are not sufficient for the carrying of this message to the world. Independent of a special outpouring of the Holy Spirit, our world-wide mission program is an impossibility. Other missionary organizations are content with occupying a small territory in the mission fields, and they assert that we have undertaken an impossibility. We are facing a mountain greater than that before Zerubbabel when he was called to build the temple at Jerusalem, and it will not be “by army, nor by power, but by my Spirit, saith the Lord of hosts.” We have as yet scarcely skirted the coast lines of Asia and Africa. The heralding of the message in the many different tongues of the East is so great an undertaking that, unless we learn how to pray and make a larger use of this heaven-appointed channel for obtaining the Holy Spirit, we shall not finish the work in this generation. Consider the open doors in China, Africa, and other mission fields. There are one thousand million heathen, and more are dying every day than are being taught the gospel of Christ. Thirty millions go down in darkness every year without a knowledge of Christ. Surely the plans of the past are not sufficient for the problems of the future; we must fix our attention more upon the Godward aspect of the work, and realize that the work of God does not mean so much man’s work for God as God’s work through man, and that work is the work of the Holy Spirit. And we must have more of the Holy Spirit. In Volume VII of “Testimonies for the Church,” pages 32, 33, we read: “By the grace of Christ the apostles were made what they were. It was sincere devotion and humble, earnest prayer that brought them into close communion with him. They sat together with him in heavenly places. They realized the greatness of their debt to him. By earnest, persevering prayer they obtained the endowment of the Holy Spirit, and then they went forth, weighted with the burden of saving souls, filled with zeal to extend the triumphs of the cross. And under their labors many souls were brought from darkness to light, and many churches were raised up. . . . “Why has the history of the work of the disciples, as they labored with holy zeal, animated and vitalized by the Holy Spirit, been recorded, if it is not that from this record the Lord’s people to-day are to gain an inspiration to work earnestly for him? What the Lord did for his people in that time, it is just as essential, and more so, that he do for his people to-day. All that the apostles did, every church-member to-day is to do. And we are to work with as much more fervor, to be accompanied by the Holy Spirit in as much greater measure, as the increase of wickedness demands a more decided call to repentance. “Every one on whom is shining the light of present truth is to be stirred with compassion for those who are in darkness. From all believers light is to be reflected in clear, distinct rays. A work similar to that which the Lord did through his delegated messengers after the day of Pentecost he is waiting to do to-day. At this time, when the end of all things is at hand, should not the zeal of the church exceed even that of the early church? Zeal for the glory of God moved the disciples to bear witness to the truth with mighty power. Should not this zeal fire our hearts with a longing to tell the story of redeeming love, of Christ and him crucified? Should not the power of God be even more mightily revealed to-day than in the time of the apostles?” We are told in “Christ’s Object Lessons,” page 142: “Christ’s lessons in regard to prayer should be carefully considered. There is a divine science in prayer.” God has provided us his Word, the example of Christ, and the instruction of his servant, affording much on the subject of prayer, that through them we may know how to offer the effectual prayer that shall bring the necessary power for the finishing of the work. In no other way can the truth be told in the many languages in which it has never yet been heard. There are more than one hundred tongues in India alone in which we have no literature. The Telugu people, numbering more than twenty millions, and many other nations numbered by millions, have not one missionary of present truth among them. Are not such facts in themselves a call to prayer? The Mohammedan world is every day making advance moves. It is the strongest organized force against Christianity in the Orient. We have done something for Mohammedans in Europe, a little in Africa; yet there is Arabia, the home of Islam, where no worker has yet been sent; and in India there are nearly seventy millions having no worker especially appointed to labor among them. Such problems as these may well concern us in this week of prayer. Shall we not, with hearts touched, say, as did the disciples, “Lord, teach us to pray”? If we do this, he will teach us how; a larger measure of love for unwarned sinners will come into our own hearts; more power will be given; mission funds will be increased; the best and strongest of our sons and daughters will find their way to the mission fields; the Holy Spirit will accomplish a great work through the remnant church; the prophecy will be fulfilled, and we be gathered home.