Prayer And Fervency
"St. Teresa rose off her deathbed to finish her work. She inspected, with all her
quickness of eye and love of order the whole of the house in which she had been
carried to die. She saw everything put into its proper place, and every one answering
to their proper order, after which she attended the divine offices of the day. She
then went back to her bed, summoned her daughters around her . . . and, with the
most penitential of David's penitential prayers upon her tongue, Teresa of Jesus
went forth to meet her Bridegroom." -- ALEXANDER WHYTE.
Prayer, without fervour, stakes nothing on the issue, because it has nothing to
stake. It comes with empty hands. Hands which are listless, as well as empty, which
have never learned the lesson of clinging to the Cross.
Fervourless prayer has no heart in it; it is an empty thing, an unfit vessel. Heart,
soul, and life, must find place in all real praying. Heaven must be made to feel
the force of this crying unto God.
Paul was a notable example of the man who possessed a fervent spirit of prayer.
His petitioning was all-consuming, centered immovably upon the object of his desire,
and the God who was able to meet it.
Prayers must be red hot. It is the fervent prayer that is effectual and that avail.
Coldness of spirit hinders praying; prayer cannot live in a wintry atmosphere. Chilly
surroundings freeze out petitioning; and dry up the springs of supplication. It
takes fire to make prayers go. Warmth of soul creates an atmosphere favourable to
prayer, because it is favourable to fervency. By flame, prayer ascends to heaven.
Yet fire is not fuss, nor heat, noise. Heat is intensity -- something that glows
and burns. Heaven is a mighty poor market for ice.
God wants warm-hearted servants. The Holy Spirit comes as a fire, to dwell
in us; we are to be baptized, with the Holy Spirit and with fire. Fervency is warmth
of soul. A luke-warm temperament is strongly opposed to vital experience. If our
religion does not set us on fire, it is because we have frozen hearts. God dwells
in a flame; the Holy Spirit descends in fire. To be absorbed in God's will, to be
so greatly in earnest about doing it that our whole being takes fire, is the qualifying
condition of the man who would engage in effectual prayer.
Our Lord warns us against feeble praying. "Men ought always to pray," He declares,
"and not to faint." That means, that we are to possess sufficient fervency to carry
us through the severe and long periods of pleading prayer. Fire makes one alert
and vigilant, and brings him off, more than conqueror. The atmosphere about us is
too heavily charged with resisting forces for limp prayers to make headway. It takes
heat, and fervency and meteoric fire, to push through, to the upper heavens, where
God dwells with His saints, in light.
Many of the great Bible characters were notable examples of fervency of spirit when
seeking God. The Psalmist declares with great earnestness:
"My soul is consumed with longing for your laws at all times." (Psalm 119:20)
What strong desires of heart are here! What earnest soul longings for the Word of
the living God!
An even greater fervency is expressed by him in another place:
"As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, O God. My soul
thirsts for God, for the living God. When can I go and meet with God?" (Psalm 42:1-2)
That is the word of a man who lived in a state of grace, which had been deeply and
supernaturally wrought in his soul.
Fervency before God counts in the hour of prayer, and finds a speedy and rich reward
at His hands. The Psalmist gives us this statement of what God had done for the
king, as his heart turned toward his Lord:
"You have given him his heart's desire, and have not withheld the request of his
lips."
At another time, he thus expresses himself directly to God in preferring his request:
"Lord, all my desire are before You; and my groaning is not hid from You."
What a cheering thought! Our inward groanings, our secret desires, our heart-longings,
are not hidden from the eyes of Him with whom we have to deal in prayer.
The incentive to fervency of spirit before God, is precisely the same as it is for
continued and earnest prayer. While fervency is not prayer, yet it derives from
an earnest soul, and is precious in the sight of God. Fervency in prayer is the
precursor of what God will do by way of answer. God stands pledged to give us the
desire of our hearts in proportion to the fervency of spirit we exhibit, when seeking
His face in prayer.
Fervency has its seat in the heart, not in the brain, nor in the intellectual faculties
of the mind. Fervency therefore, is not an expression of the intellect. Fervency
of spirit is something far transcending poetical fancy or sentimental imagery. It
is something else besides mere preference, the contrasting of like with dislike.
Fervency is the throb and gesture of the emotional nature.
It is not in our power, perhaps, to create fervency of spirit at will, but we can
pray God to implant it. It is ours, then, to nourish and cherish it, to guard it
against extinction, to prevent its abatement or decline. The process of personal
salvation is not only to pray, to express our desires to God, but to acquire a fervent
spirit and seek, by all proper means, to cultivate it. It is never out of place
to pray God to beget within us, and to keep alive the spirit of fervent prayer.
Fervency has to do with God, just as prayer has to do with Him. Desire always has
an objective. If we desire at all, we desire something. The degree of fervency
with which we fashion our spiritual desires, will always serve to determine the
earnestness of our praying. In this relation, Adoniram Judson says:
"A travailing spirit, the throes of a great burdened desire, belongs to prayer. A
fervency strong enough to drive away sleep, which devotes and inflames the spirit,
and which retires all earthly ties, all this belongs to wrestling, prevailing prayer.
The Spirit, the power, the air, and food of prayer is in such a spirit."
Prayer must be clothed with fervency, strength and power. It is the force which,
centered on God, determines the outlay of Himself for earthly good. Men who are
fervent in spirit are bent on attaining to righteousness, truth, grace, and all
other sublime and powerful graces which adorn the character of the authentic, unquestioned
child of God.
God once declared, by the mouth of a brave prophet, to a king who, at one time,
had been true to God, but, by the incoming of success and material prosperity, had
lost his faith, the following message:
"For the eyes of the Lord range throughout the earth to strengthen those whose hearts
are fully committed to him. You have done a foolish thing, and from now on you will
be at war" (2 Chr. 16:9)
God had heard Asa's prayer in early life, but disaster came and trouble was sent,
because he had given up the life of prayer and simple faith.
In Romans 15:30, we have the word, "strive," occurring, in the request which Paul
made for prayerful cooperation.
In Colossians 4:12, we have the same word, but translated differently: "Epaphras
always labouring fervently for you in prayer." Paul charged the Romans to "strive
together with him in prayer," that is, to help him in his struggle of prayer. The
word means to enter into a contest, to fight against adversaries. It means, moreover,
to engage with fervent zeal to endeavour to obtain.
These recorded instances of the exercise and reward of faith, give us easily to
see that, in almost every instance, faith was blended with trust until it is not
too much to say that the former was swallowed up in the latter. It is hard to properly
distinguish the specific activities of these two qualities, faith and trust. But
there is a point, beyond all peradventure, at which faith is relieved of its burden,
so to speak; where trust comes along and says: "You have done your part, the rest
is mine!"
In the incident of the barren fig tree, our Lord transfers the marvellous power
of faith to His disciples. To their exclamation, "How soon is the fig tree withered
alway!" He said:
"If you have faith, and doubt not, you shall not only do this which is done to the
fig tree, but also if you shall say to this mountain, Be removed, and be cast into
the sea; it shall be done. And all things, whatsoever you shall ask in prayer, believing,
you shall receive."
When a Christian believer attains to faith of such magnificent proportions as these,
he steps into the realm of implicit trust. He stands without a tremor on the apex
of his spiritual outreaching. He has attained faith's veritable top stone which
is unswerving, unalterable, unalienable trust in the power of the living God.
- E.M. Bounds