Having considered the
five phases of prayer, namely, communion, submission,
petition, co-operation and conflict, we shall now go on a
little further to consider some of the problems which are
related to prayer. As we have said, very often an
undefined sense of contradiction or uncertainty in the
background of our minds has the effect of crippling or
paralyzing prayer, and we are sometimes hindered by
certain mental difficulties which we have never seriously
set ourselves to analyze or define. Our object now is to
seek to define some of these things, to analyze them, and
to nail them down, by way of clearing the ground for
prayer in certainty and confidence.
Prayer
and the Will of God
In this connection one
of the primary difficulties in prayer arises in relation
to the will of God. That, of course, is a very wide
sphere of contemplation and consideration, and includes a
very large number of different phases, aspects and
points, but we shall seek to narrow it down, and as we go
on we shall see a great deal more wrapped up in what we
say.
As to the will of God,
the basic question seems to me to be this: Is it absolute
or is it relative? What we are dealing with is that
question as to whether the will of God for us is absolute
or relative. When it is put like that you may not be
helped very much. It sounds very academic, but I will
explain what I mean.
Does God permit things
because they are His absolute will, or because He would
draw us out by them to some position? In the latter case
the will of God is relative and not absolute, that is,
things do not represent what is absolutely the will of
God, but He has permitted them for other purposes, and,
therefore, they represent the relative will of God. Now
you have your foundation and basis for a very
comprehensive consideration of the will of God in
relation to prayer. If we are dealing with the relative
will of God, the issue will be either that those things,
having fulfilled their purpose, are set aside and cease
to have any place at all in the will of God, or they are
allowed to remain but we are in a place of ascendancy
over them and they become our servants. They are there,
not because God in the fullness of His will and purpose
wants them to be there, but because He sees they are
things which are necessary to maintain us in a certain
position. If we were perfect creatures the will of God
would always be absolute. There would be no place for the
relative will of God, for it would be unnecessary for Him
to permit things to get us to new positions. But, being
imperfect, fallen creatures, the will of God for us is
more often relative than otherwise.
Conflict
Between Submission and Importunity
So the problem arises
for us along the line of submission and importunity.
Those two things seem to be antagonistic to one another,
to represent conflict and contradiction. How can you
reconcile importunity with submission? Does not
importunity rule out submission? Does not submission rule
out importunity? These seem mutually against each other,
and yet that is not so. The problem which comes up in
prayer is to keep on hammering at the door, to continue
knocking, and yet to know submission. Does not submission
take the driving force out of your knocking? Does not the
force of your knocking imply that you have not learned
submission? It may not always be defined in that way in
the mind, but it creeps in, remaining in the background,
and very often tends to draw that positiveness, certainty
and definiteness out of prayer so that you find yourself
in a no-man's-land.
Well, that is a
problem, and we have to settle it as definitely as we
possibly can. The solving of that problem, I think, is
along the line of recognizing that the moral element
comes in, and God is largely concerned with moral
elements and questions. There is something which has to
be got over, or got through, in us, and that means that
in the relative will of God there will be many things
which are only allowed, or may even be sent by the Lord,
with the object of, and for the purpose of, getting over
certain things in us, or getting us through certain
things in ourselves because moral factors are in view. (I
am using the word 'moral' in its broadest sense now, and
not in any narrow sense.) We must recognize that the new
creation is a moral matter and is not complete so far as
we are concerned. It is perfect and complete in itself,
but it is not complete in us. The old creation still
exists. It is objective and external to the new creation,
but it has great influence which it exercises upon the
new. Sin is not extinct for the believer, nor is the
world as something which registers itself upon the
believer. And you do not need me to tell you that the
devil is not extinct for the believer! But right at the
centre of that old creation is the new creation, which is
a moral thing. But it is a moral thing - we may say - in
its infancy, and all its moral elements and factors have
to be developed to make us moral creatures, in the full
sense of the word - that is, responsible creatures,
intelligent creatures, and creatures with a new
conscience, a new standard of values and a new
recognition of principles. A whole new heavenly world has
come in, and its knowledge and wisdom have to be
possessed intelligently. Its secrets have to be known and
its virtues have to be inwrought. By regeneration the
Lord has not made us mere automatons or machines, to be
acted upon from without, irrespective of our will, our
feelings, our desires, our reason or our intelligence, to
be carried hither and thither and caused to do things, or
made to do things, without reference to ourselves. That
is altogether contrary to Scriptures.
But what the Lord has
constituted us is moral creatures after a new morality, a
new heavenly system and an entirely new intelligence
which is not the natural man. We have an entirely new
system of judgments, values and appraisements, and in
everything the Lord will now refer to us. He will call
upon us to exercise ourselves in relation to the new
creation impression, consciousness, conviction and
intimation from within. Thus the new creation is a moral
thing, but because the old creation is still circling and
wrapping it round, the new creation will grow by
conquest, by conflict, and by strenuous exercise to
overcome by subjecting, triumphing over, and by
deliberate, strenuous, devoted and persistent
application. The renewed will, energized by the Holy
Spirit, will not be mechanically operated but will be
called to exercise itself in the Lord. Praying in the
will of God does not mean that the Holy Spirit comes and
holds your will and your volition and makes you say
things without your intelligence. That is an entirely
false realm. There is a good deal today where man's
intelligence is swept on one side and he begins to flow
out with all kinds of things that neither he nor anyone
else can understand, but that is not the new creation.
The Holy Spirit does not suspend the intelligence and
understanding of anyone He uses in this way, but He calls
upon the exercise of understanding. 'I will pray with the
spirit, and I will pray with the understanding also,'
said the Apostle, and prayer in the Holy Spirit is not
that we so abandon ourselves to Him that we lose all our
own moral life (using that word again in the fullest
sense).
Prayer
as Educative
Seeing, then, that
moral questions are pre-eminent in the Lord's mind where
we are concerned, prayer becomes an education and a
training. We speak of 'the school of prayer,' and that is
a very right designation. Education and training are not
the same thing. Education has to do with obtaining
knowledge, and training has to do with moral worth in
practical expression. Get that definition, for it is an
important one. We speak of an 'educated person,' and we
mean someone who knows a lot, but speak of a
'well-trained person' and we think of someone who is
worth something in practical value. There are a lot of
educated people who are perfectly useless. We are,
therefore, drawn out in prayer, and the Lord sees to it
that we are drawn out and extended in prayer, and that
represents, on the one hand, the acquiring of spiritual
knowledge. We do not get that unless we are drawn out in
prayer. It is remarkable how, when there is a full
extending in prayer, we learn things, we get secrets and
come into knowledge of things. And then, on the other
hand, that drawing out in prayer has the effect of
training, bringing us into a moral position and on to a
higher level morally. We will see what that means
presently. Prayerless people will be both ignorant and
weak, uneducated and untrained. They will not know God's
mind nor be able to do according to His mind.
So we must recognize
further that prayer is not merely individual advantage,
but it is the prosecuting of a campaign. There is a
Divine scheme of things to be entered into. Prayer is not
merely for personal and subjective value. It is
objective, collective and relative, even in the moral
values which result from individual prayer.
The
Nature of Importunity
Now we will seek to
summarize things a little. There are three sides to
importunate prayer - but do you see why importunity is
demanded, is necessary and is right? And do you see that
there is no contradiction between subjection and
importunity? Subjection, as we pointed out earlier, is an
active thing, a positive thing and not a passive thing.
It is coming into line with the Divine mind; and then
importunity follows for the development of moral
features.
The
Moral Excellencies of Christ Inwrought
As we have just said,
there are three sides to importunate prayer. Firstly,
there is the moral side, and that has its own two
aspects. We spoke of the ingredients of the incense to be
offered upon the golden altar, and we pointed out that
these ingredients represented the moral virtues of
Christ. On the one hand, these have to be apprehended and
appropriated by faith, and that is one aspect of the
moral side of importunate prayer: that faith
deliberately, persistently, apprehends and appropriates
the moral virtues and glories of the Lord Jesus. That is
exercise, and it very often represents putting back the
intrusion of those arguments which arise from our natural
selves and which would discourage prayer. When we come
into the presence of the Lord, we should certainly come
in with a sense of our own unworthiness, emptiness and
weakness, but that is not the ground of our exercise, for
that should be settled. Yet often positive, effectual
prayer is interfered with, arrested and even checked by
persistent obsession with our own sinfulness, weakness
and helplessness, and there is a need for positive
exercise over the moral virtues and excellencies of
Christ in order that we should get them into both of our
hands to get before God.
The enemy will thrust
in convictions, condemnations and accusations in the
presence of God, but we must with both hands lay hold of
the excellencies of the Lord Jesus, and until we have
done that we shall not get through to the throne, because
we cannot get there apart from those excellencies. There
has to be a deliberate refusal to take that condemnation
on. We know of some whose prayer-life has become an
almost far-off, impossible thing, because immediately
they cut themselves off for prayer there is such an
inrush of introspection, self-analysis, and consciousness
of themselves and the wrong things about themselves that
they never get through to anything positive at all.
On the one hand, then,
there is faith's exercise, the persistence of faith in
the appropriation of those ingredients, those
excellencies and virtues of the Lord Jesus, to bring us
through to God.
Then there is the other
side of the moral factor: those excellencies and virtues
have to be wrought in our own souls by the Holy Spirit.
The Lord Jesus in the presence of God is the
representative Man after God's own heart, but He is not
only the representative Man, He is the Man from Whom all
the members of the new creation in Christ are to take
their character, and His full content of virtues and
excellencies as perfect Man - and perfected Man - have to
be distributed to all His members, so that they take
their character from Him and become themselves partakers
of His nature in their own souls. These virtues of Christ
were tested virtues, tried virtues, proved virtues, and
triumphant virtues, and they are now energetic virtues,
and not merely passive. The Lord Jesus (may I say this
reverently) has not been put in a museum as a model, the
supreme specimen just to be looked at and to be admired,
but there is generic force and reality in Him. He lives.
He is not a model, or a statue. He is the living Christ
Who imparts Himself, and is ministered by the Holy
Spirit, to us, His members. His faith is not just
something that has been rounded off, perfected and
polished, something to be looked at as we look at a
beautiful specimen. It is a faith by which we have to
live. His patience is of the same character. We are
called to be fellows and partakers in the patience of
Christ. As we just mention these things you will have a
lot of Scripture rushing into your mind: "Add to
your faith...." Add, add, add - and these are
virtues of Christ being added to us
We are called, says the
Apostle, to be "partakers of Christ." So His
faith, His patience, His devotion, His obedience, His
suffering and His love have all been tested out, tried,
proved, and are triumphant, but not as things apart from
us but in relation to us. "He hath granted unto us
His precious and exceeding great promises; that through
these ye may become partakers of the divine
nature...."
The moral side of
importunate prayer, then, is that the virtues and
excellencies of Christ are wrought in us. When
importunity represents the demand for patience because
God does not answer at once, today, tomorrow, for a week,
a month, or a year, what is He doing? He is working into
us the moral excellencies of His Son, a perfected and
triumphant faith, a perfected and triumphant patience, a
perfected and triumphant devotion and an obedience to Him
which has no foundation other than that He has required
it. Prayer is a training school indeed! These virtues
come by exercise. Let us remember that God has an end in
view, and that our partnership with Christ to which we
are called at length will be moral. It will have to do
with character; hence the relative will of God. Sin is
not God's absolute will, but He has permitted it. Ah,
yes, but the relationship is with our conquest, and
with the development of the new creation moral life.
Suffering is not God's absolute will, but He has
permitted it, and He does permit it. It is, therefore,
His relative will, which means that His permission and
His allowing is for a purpose. When that purpose is
reached the suffering may go, or it may still be allowed
to remain to keep us in a position, but the position for
which it has been permitted has been reached so that the
relative will of God has been done. And that applies to
everything else. Circumstances, for instance. Many
circumstances that come into our lives are not God's
absolute will. A breakdown is not God's absolute will,
but inasmuch as nothing can come to any child of His
without His consent, it is His permissive will.
Spiritual
Understanding Secured
Now that raises for us
the whole question of seeking, in prayer, to know what
God means by things. That is our education. Coming to
know what God means by things through deep heart exercise
and travail is our training. We have reached a higher
standard of life. So the second thing in importunate
prayer is knowledge. In the first place the moral life,
and knowledge in the second place. There are those who
put themselves wholly into God's hands, and they are led
into strange experiences of apparent contradiction. There
may be a clear sense of what the Lord wants to do, but
the absolute impossibility of doing it! No way is open
and all the doors are closed. Delay after delay! What is
the Lord doing? The first effect should be to draw us out
in prayer, fully extend us in importunity. We cannot let
it go. We may decide that we will leave it all with the
Lord, but we find ourselves coming back to it again and
again, and the Lord will not allow us to be indifferent.
Well, He is after fuller knowledge and understanding on
our part. That is bound up with all the Lord's ways with
us, and one thing, which, of course, we know in
experience but which perhaps it will be as well for us to
have more clearly defined in our minds, is that we cannot
learn Divine principles, or obtain spiritual knowledge
from books or lectures. They can only be known as they
follow the process of generation. First of all there must
be conception, which is an inward thing; then there must
be formation, and then there must be travail leading to
birth. It is a life process. We cannot learn
Divine and spiritual things from manuals, not even the
Bible. We can only learn what is in the Bible along the
line of living experience. The Bible is not a
gramophone; it is a microphone. What is the
difference? A gramophone is a thing stored up in itself.
A microphone is that which transmits something beyond.
The Bible is not a gramophone. There has to come through
our reading of the Word something from beyond for our
understanding. We can have the gramophone kind of
knowledge of the Bible, that is, we may know the Bible as
a book through and through, we can have the most
wonderful analyses and diagrams, and we may still remain
- for all practical and spiritual purposes in a living
way - very little use to the Lord.
But if we have a
microphone apprehension of the Word, we have the
Scriptures, yes, but, more than that, God speaks through
the Scriptures to us and we have the living thing. We
have all, as children on the sea-shore, taken up shells
and put them to our ears to hear the sea roaring. We have
brought the shells home to the city, put them to our
ears, and have still heard the sea roaring. Is that true?
It is a childish delusion. We think when we are children
and have the shell in a town that we hear the roaring of
the sea, that the roaring of the sea is all stored up in
that shell and we have only to put it to our ear and
there it is - we hear it. That is a child's thought about
that shell, but it is nothing of the kind. That shell is
only acting like a funnel which is collecting the
vibrations of the atmospheric sounds and causing us to
hear what we would not hear with the naked ear. The shell
is nothing but a transmitter of the larger thing.
The Word of God taken
as a book is just like that shell. If we are in the
Spirit it will bring to us the mind of the Lord, but,
apart from the Holy Spirit's operation through it to us,
it may be just like any other book and we may read it and
get no more light from it than we get from any other
book. The necessity is for spiritual knowledge, but many
make the Bible just a manual.
Now what we are saying
is that we cannot know Divine principles or obtain
spiritual knowledge from books or from lectures. These
principles only come to us along the line of life and
experience. Something of a living character is done in
us, a life is formed in us and developed, and then it
brings us into travail for its full outworking. That is
how we get spiritual knowledge. That comes in importunate
prayer, and that is why God demands and makes importunate
prayer necessary. We get to know spiritual things from
the travail of our souls before God, in the long
drawn-out experience of anguish. Very often hurry - in
the long run - only means loss of time, and we have to
come back to get fuller knowledge because we were in too
great a hurry. The Lord has to bring many back and tie
them up so that they cannot move, and keep them there in
deep exercise for an extended period. Then they learn
what in the mind of the Lord was indispensable. There are
those who are made to know before they go out, but
whether it is before you go, or in your having to come
back, the same thing is in view with the Lord - that you
should know.
So the Lord's delays
are His times of drawing out in importunate prayer for
the sake of spiritual knowledge.
Taking
Responsibility in Prayer
Then, thirdly, there is
the collective aspect. Nehemiah spoke of the prayer which
he prayed day and night, but that prayer was relative,
for it had to do with the Lord's people. Christ's prayers
were of the same character. They were not just for
Himself, but they were related to His own and were drawn
out day and night for them. Paul's prayers were clearly
of the same order: "...do not cease to pray for
you"; "praying always with all prayer and
supplication... for all saints." There is
persistence and importunity, but it is a collective,
relative thing. The woman who is in the back of our minds
as we use the word 'importunate,' or 'importunity,' is
the one who confronts the unjust judge, and she
represents the Church. Christ's comment upon that word
was: "And shall not God avenge His own elect, which
cry day and night unto Him...."
What is the avenging of
the saints of their adversary? Well, it is the great
collective thing at the end, the great issue when the
accuser of the brethren is cast down, the one who accused
them before God, day and night. The great Judge will
avenge of the accuser, the harasser of the Church, and
this has its collective aspect. The incident of the
friend at midnight was again a relative thing, not merely
a personal thing. The man got up because his friend would
keep on knocking. The man was fetched out of bed by his
friend's importunity, but it was in relation to others.
All this represents a scheme, a plan, a campaign, in
which all the Lord's people are involved. God is not only
getting us individually to a place, but He is getting us
relatedly to a place with all His people: "till we all
come..." Our travail, our moral training, these
contradictions and delays which draw us out and extend us
fully are working in us in relation to the whole Body. It
becomes a relative thing, for it is on behalf of the
Body.
The Lord is seeking to
have His whole Body perfected, and every part must have a
due working in it in relation to the whole. One day the
cumulative effect of our trials, difficulties and
perplexities will be seen in the whole perfect Body, and
we shall see then that when we suffered we did not suffer
in isolation, that our sufferings were not detached
things but collective, related, a part of the whole, and
they contributed to a much bigger thing than our own
personal interests. We must allow God's full end to give
colour to our personal experience. That which we go
through is not simply because the Lord has marked us out
to be sufferers alone, but because the whole Body is His
end and we suffer in relation to the Body. For the Body's
sake we fill up that which is lacking of the sufferings
of Christ. The sufferings are relative, you see. They are
not the absolute will of God, but relative in this
further sense that they are moving on to a larger purpose
of God. When that larger purpose is reached then that
relative will of God in the sufferings will go, and there
will be no more pain and no more suffering. We must see
the whole plan of God and find that our required,
demanded persistence and importunity in prayer affects
these three things. The personal moral life of the
believer on the heavenly pattern, and the increase of
spiritual knowledge are behind the delays which call us
out to importunate prayer. There is something that we are
going to know that we do not know now. We are going to
learn something that we know nothing about, and this
drawing of us out is the way by which we come to know
what we do not know.
This exercise, this
travail, is related to the whole purpose of God and has
its place in relation to all His saints. There is no such
thing as coercion in God's will. That is foreign to the
thought of importunity. Importunity is - although it may
not seem like it - co-operation with God. We may think
that the effect of it is to coerce God and persuade Him
to do things, but God has only drawn us into that way to
draw us into cooperation with His will. That is what I
meant when I said there were things to be overcome in us,
and all kinds of old creation things that have to be got
over - our desires, our feelings, our preferences, our
judgments, our conceptions, our estimates. In the
exercise, activity and travail of prayer we have come
into co-operation with God, and we have found that in the
long run what we thought was trying to persuade the Lord
to do things was His way of getting us to a place where
He could do what He wanted. The Lord has strange ways,
but in the end He is justified and "Wisdom is
justified of her children".