Profiting From the Word # 17

1. We are profited from the Scriptures when we are brought to realize the deep importance of prayer.  It is really to be feared that many present-day readers (and even students) of the Bible have no deep convictions that a definite prayer life is absolutely essential to a daily walking and communing with God, as it is for deliverance from the power of indwelling sin, the seductions of the world, and the assaults of satan.  If such a conviction really gripped their hearts, would they not spend far more time on their faces before God? It is worse than idle to reply, "A multitude of duties which have to be performed crowd out prayer, though much against my wishes." But the fact remains that each of us takes time for anything we deem to be imperative. Who ever lived a busier life than our Saviour? Yet who found more time for prayer? If we truly yearn to be suppliants and intercessors before God and use all the available time we now have, He will so order things for us that we hall have more time.


The lack of positive conviction of the deep importance of prayer is plainly evidenced in the corporate life of professing Christians. God has plainly said, "My house shall be called the house of prayer" (Matthew 21:13). Note, not "the house of preaching and singing," but of prayer.  Yet, in the great majority of even so-called orthodox churches, the ministry of prayer has become a negligible quantity. There are still evangelistic campaigns, and Bible-teaching conferences, but how rarely one hears of two weeks set apart for special prayer! And how much good do these Bible conferences accomplish if the prayer life of the churches is not strengthened? But when the Spirit of God applies in power to our hearts such words as "Watch ye and pray, lest ye enter into temptation" (Mark 14:38). "In everything by prayer an supplication with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God" (Phil. 4:6). "Continue in prayer, and watch in the same with thanksgiving" (Col. 4:), then are we being profited from the Scriptures.


2. We are profited from the Scriptures when we are made to feel that we know not how to pray. "We know not what we should pray for as we ought" (Romans 8:26). How very few professing Christians really believe this! The idea most generally entertained is that people know well enough what they should pray for, only they are careless and wicked, and so fail to pray for what they are fully assured is their duty. But such a conception is at direct variance with this inspired declaration in Romans 8:26. It is to be observed that that flesh-humbling affirmation is made not simply of men and women  in general, but of the saints of God in particular, among which the apostle did not hesitate to include himself: "We know not what we should pray for as we ought." If this be the condition of the regenerate, how much more so of the unregenerate! Yet it is one thing to read and mentally assent to what this verse says, but it is quite another to have an experimental realization of it, for the heart to be made to feel that what God requires from us He must Himself work in and through us.

"I often say my prayers,

But do I ever pray?

And do the wishes of my heart

Go with the words I say?

I may as well kneel down

And worship gods of stone,

As offer to the living God

A prayer of words alone"

~A. W. Pink~

(continued with # 18)