Prayer

A sermon (No. 1469) delivered on Lord’s-Day morning, April 20th, 1879, by C. H. Spurgeon
At the Metropolitan Tabernacle, Newington

“In every thing by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God.”—Philippians 4:6.

ACCORDING TO THE TEXT, we are both by prayer and supplication to make known our requests unto God. If any distinction be intended here, I suppose that by prayer is meant the general act of devotion and the mention of our usual needs; and by supplication I think would be intended our distinct entreaties and special petitions. We are to offer the general prayer common to all the saints, and we are to add thereto the special and definite petitions which are peculiar to ourselves. We are to worship in prayer, for God is to be adored by all his saints, and then we are to beseech his favours for ourselves, according to the words of the text, letting our requests be made known unto God. Do not forget this second form of worship. There is a good deal of generalizing in prayer, and God forbid that we should say a word against it, so far as it is sincere worship, but we want to have more of specific, definite pleading with God, asking him for such-and-such things, with a clear knowledge of what we ask.

Reposted from The Cripplegate.

Eos fell in love with the mortal man, Tithonus, and asked Zeus to make him immortal. Zeus granted the request—with a catch. Eos forgot to specify her request as wanting eternal youth for her beau. So Tithonus did live forever but kept aging until he was so old that he couldn’t move or think and just lay still, babbling in dementia forever.

Another character, Chiron, learned from Eos’s mistake and asked for eternal youth and immortality, but forgot to include in his request immunity from pain. He was shot with a poisoned arrow that couldn’t kill him, so he endured the perpetual agony of dying without escape in death.

On another occasion, Midas was granted his wish to be able to turn whatever he touched into pure gold, and Midas immediately went to work creating a vast treasure of golden objects. But then he became hungry and sat down to eat. His food grew rigid and his drink hardened into golden ice. Midas realized he was starving to death and also that he would never embrace his wife or daughter again.

The fictitious gods of the Greek pantheon were unbelievably capricious and vindictive. The true and living God of the Bible is the exact opposite.

Reposted from The Cripplegate.

Today I want to share with you a simple way to deepen your prayer life. It requires discipline, time to pray (of course), and a desire to grow in godliness.

I learned this method of prayer during my first semester at seminary, when I found myself enrolled in prayer class. In retrospect it makes sense that a seminary would have a class on prayer, but at the time, I found it surprising. Even more surprising was the grading system. Most of our grade was derived from our daily prayers. We had to pray for an hour a day—every day—then record our prayers in outline form, turn them in, and the professor would grade them.

When confronted with the syllabus, I was shocked by two things, and I assume they are the same two things you are thinking of. First, is it even right to grade someone’s prayers? Turns out, the answer is yes, it is right. Or at the very least, it was helpful. Dr. Rosscup would slap cheesy prayer right out of class. I remember one student (now pastor Tony Arnds) say, “My paper bleeds it has so much red ink on it.” The red ink was daring us—“Go on,” it would say. “I DARE you to say, ‘Lord just be with so-and-so.’ What does that even mean?”

(About this series)

CHAPTER VI — THE PLACE OF PRAYER IN EVANGELISM

BY REV. R. A. TORREY, D. D., DEAN OF THE BIBLE INSTITUTE OF LOS ANGELES, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

The most important human factor in effective evangelism is PRAYER. Every great awakening in the history of the Church from the time of the Apostles until today has been the result of prayer. There have been great awakenings without much preaching, and there have been great awakenings with absolutely no organization, but there has never been a true awakening without much prayer.