The Blog of Hobbes

E. M. Bounds wrote:

“The prayers of God’s saints strengthen the unborn generation against the desolating waves of sin and evil. Woe to the generation of sons who find their own censers empty of the rich incense of prayer, whose fathers have been too busy or too unbelieving to pray, and who have inexpressible perils and untold consequences for their heritage! They whose fathers and mothers have left them a wealthy legacy of prayer are very fortunate, indeed.”

Such strong and provocative language only makes sense if we possess an exalted understanding of prayer. If prayer is just something that we do in order to be seen to be faithful in God’s eyes, then the language Bounds uses seems preposterous. After all, prayer that is inconsequential makes prayerlessness equally inconsequential. If it makes no difference if we do pray, then, conversely, it makes no difference if we don’t pray.

Bounds sees it quite differently. Prayer is the incredible grace of communicating with the living God - the prelude to powerful, world-changing acts of God. We do not have because we do not ask. And, we often only receive exactly what we request - sometimes nothing more - when more could have been asked for. If we are able to receive great things from God through prayer, then not to pray is to rob the world of those great things. Jeremy Taylor wrote:

“The prayers of holy men appease God’s wrath, drive away temptations, resist and overcome the Devil, procure the ministry and service of angels, rescind the decrees of God. Prayer cures sickness and obtains pardon; it arrests the sun in its course and stays the wheels of the chariot of the moon; it rules over all gods and opens and shuts the storehouses of rain; it unlocks the cabinet of the womb and quenches the violence of fire; it stops the mouths of lions and reconciles our suffering and weak faculties with the violence of torment and violence of persecution; it pleases God and supplies all our need.”

Therefore, if this is true, then not to pray for these things is equivalent to bringing a curse. If we do not pray for these things, then we might as well be against them. We must avoid the terrible consequences of prayerlessness.

I read the following quote on Thabiti Anyabwile’s blog. I don’t think I’ve read a better quotation on prayer for a long time, perhaps except this one.

This, then, is the prayer of faith: to ask God to accomplish what He has promised in His Word. That promise is the only ground for our confidence in asking. Such confidence is not “worked up” from within our emotional life; rather, it is given and supported by what God has said in Scripture.

Truly ‘righteous’ men and women of faith know the value of their heavenly Father’s promises. They go to Him, as children do to a loving human father. They know that if they can say to an earthly father, ‘But, father, you promised…,’ they can both persist in asking and be confident that he will keep his word. How much more our heavenly Father, who has given His Son for our salvation! We have no other grounds of confidence that He hears our prayers. We need none.

Such appeal to God’s promises constitutes what John Calvin, following Turtullian, calls ‘legitimate prayer.’

Some Christians find this disappointing. It seems to remove the mystique from the prayer of faith. Are we not tying down our faith to ask only for what God already has promised? But such disappointment reveals a spiritual malaise: would we rather devise our own spirituality (preferably spectacular) than God’s (frequently modest)?

The struggles we sometimes experience in prayer, then, are often part of the process by which God gradually brings us to ask for only what He has promised to give. The struggle is not our wrestling to bring Him to give us what we desire, but our wrestling with His Word until we are illuminated and subdued by it, saying, ‘Not my will, but Your will be done.’ Then, as Calvin again says, we learn ‘not to ask for more than God allows.’

This is why true prayer can never be divorced from real holiness. The prayer of faith can be made only by the ‘righteous’ man whose life is being more and more aligned with the covenant grace and purposes of God. In the realm of prayer, too (since it is a microcosm of the whole of the Christian life), faith (prayer to the covenant Lord) without works (obedience to the covenant Lord) is dead.

From Sinclair Ferguson, In Christ Alone: Living the Gospel Centered Life (Orlando, FL: Reformation Trust), pp. 146-147.

Have you ever had the experience where you give greater devotion to the practice of prayer, only to find yourself becoming more impatient, irritable, and uncharitable? Or, when you tried to live for God alone, in all compartments of your life, only to find yourself more riddled with sin than ever before?

Well, don’t worry. Such godly practices have not caused this decent into ungodliness. You are simply seeing yourself as you truly are.

You’re welcome.

‘I would exhort those who have entertained a hope of their being true converts–and who since their supposed conversion have left off the duty of secret prayer, and ordinarily allow themselves in the omission of it–to throw away their hope. If you have left off calling upon God, it is time for you to leave off hoping and flattering yourselves with an imagination that you are children of God.’

Jonathan Edwards, Hypocrites Deficient in the Duty of Prayer, in Works, ed. Hickman, 2:74.

It is manifest, we are not appointed in this duty [of prayer], to declare God’s perfections, his majesty, holiness, goodness, and all-sufficiency, and our own meanness, emptiness, dependence, and unworthiness, and our wants and desires, to inform God of these things, or to incline his heart, and prevail with him to be willing to show us mercy; but suitably to affect our own hearts with the things we express, and so to prepare us to receive the blessings we ask. And such gestures and manner of external behavior in the worship of God, which custom has made to be significations of humility and reverence, can be of no further use than as they have some tendency to affect our own hearts, or the hearts of others.

Religious Affections 1.ii.9

When I first read this I was not sure if I agreed at all, but I can see the point Edwards is making, I think. After all, as an act in itself, bowing before God has no value. Telling God that he is majestic does not impress God, simply viewed as a speech-act. Edwards seems to imply that such things can be of no further use except to affect ourselves. They are to be practiced in order to affect us, rather than God, it seems. This does appear to be a self-centred attitude towards prayer and worship. However, Edwards believes that, for God to be glorified as He should, those who pray and worship should not only see His glory but also enjoy His glory. Perhaps this is what Edwards is speaking about here. The affecting of our own hearts is to respond to Gods glory appropriately. So, although God is never impressed with the simple acts of bowing and praying, He is most glorified when we are affected by what we pray for and by the One we worship - and if we are more affected by bowing down, then we should do so. This sounds self-centered, but is actually God-glorifying - as John Piper has repeatedly reminded us.