266
June 1929
T h e
K i n g ' s
B u s i n e s s
tear-gland did its work, and kept washing the eyeball clean. You can keep unspotted from the world. Listen. The blood of Jesus Christ is cleansing us from all sin. You must keep in fellowship with God, if you would keep right. Many a man has prayed and received no an swer to his prayers because his life was not right. G eorge M u l l e r ’ s G rea t F a it h But you say, “Why, I could have prayed, too, if I had lived in St. Paul’s day.” Well, take George Muller in mod ern times. One day the heating apparatus in the Bristol Orphan Homes broke down. It was a serious matter. A cold wind was blowing, and there was a danger of the lit tle children suffering terribly from the cold during the night. George Muller was one of the men who had this work in charge, and he did what some of us would have forgotten to do. He dropped down on his knees and said, “O God, these children are in my charge as Thy Reward. Thou dost hold the winds in Thy fist. Would it not be for Thy glory to change the course of the wind, and protect the children?” And it was as if God had bent down from His throne. Almost instantly the wind changed to the south. I am not stating this as my opinion. It is written in history. Those little children were protected, for God had enfolded them. Then, as if to make the answer more sig nificant, when the heating apparatus had been repaired the wind went back to the north again. W h y A re O u r P rayers N ot A n sw e r e d ? There are many reasons. Turn to 1 Peter 4 :7: “Be ye therefore sober, and watch unto prayer.” That means, “Do not be intoxicated when you pray.” You say, “I do not take strong drink.” But that is not the only way to be intoxicated. A rich man, who had made millions of dol lars within a few years, was once a member of my church. About three months after he joined the church, he came to me and said, “You will have to pray for me. I am getting intoxicated with my wealth, and fascinated with the world. I am losing my power.” There is many a man whose prayers do not rise higher than the roof, who used to pray with power. There is many a woman whose prayer is not a prayer at all. Why ? Because the man is held in the clutch of business. He is putting business in the place of God. The woman is held with the charm of society. She is putting society in the place of fellowship with God. Hear me, friends. There is a life for prayer, and unless our lives are right we can not pray. T h r e e A n sw e r s to P rayer There are three answers to prayer. You may say that you have had three hundred. Yes, but you have only had three. That is, you have only had three different kinds. The first is—Yes. God still says it. He said it to me within these past few days. He said it to you within a year. God answers prayer. I was staying in an hotel in Chicago, where a gentleman came in to see me. He said, “My wife was a member of your church in Philadelphia.” I said, “Well, how about you?” And he burst out into such a torrent of blasphemy that I said, “You must be quiet or leave. I cannot hear you talk about God like this.” Then he told me he was nearly frantic. He said, “My boy is dying of pleuro-pneumonia. I am in want, and have no money to pay for the doctor.” I wanted to give him money, but he would not take it. ,,jpy
P rayers of S a in t P a u l Now, may I give you two or three examples of prayer from St. Paul? The first is in Ephesians 3:17: St. Paul prays for Pentecost. He asks that “Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith.” He does not say “come in for a moment,” but he uses the word “dwell.” There is really no excuse for an intermittent Christian experience. You say that you are on the mountain today, and in the valley tomorrow; but there is no reason why you should be. If we were living where God wants us to live, He would all the time be .filling u s ; He would always be using us. St. Paul prayed for Pentecost. And the reason why some of us are praying and receiving no answer, is because when we pray we are out of connection with heaven. We are away under the juniper-tree, in the darkness of doubt. Secondly, St. Paul prayed, in Colossians 1 :9, for per ception. "We . . . do not cease to pray for you, and to desire that you might be filled with the knowledge o f his will.” Now, to know the will of God is one thing, and to know it and do it is another thing; and to know it and love to do it is a very much higher kind of service. Many of us have been praying and receiving no answer to our prayers, because our wills do not articulate with God’s will. We are out of fellowship, and God cannot trust a man who is out of fellowship. In the third place, Paul prayed for perfection. He brews 13:20: “Now, the God of peace . . . make you per fect in every good work to do His will.” That is a prayer for sanctification. We are afraid of the term. Whenever a man says he is sanctified, we say we will watch him and see how he lives. I am not dis cussing any views of sanctification which you may have as a theory, or which you may have worked out in your Christian experience, but I am saying that the word “sanctification” means separation. And when St. Paul says, “This is the will of God, even your sanctification,” he means separation. Separation from the world, separa tion from wilfulness, separation from pride, separation from sin, separation from self. Many a man has prayed and had no answer to his prayer because he was in touch with' the world, and the current ran through him and out of Kim. He could not hold the answer if God had given it to him. If a man says he is perfect, we always question it. We always wonder whether he is or not, or whether his wife would say he was. But the word does not mean “sin lessness.” When St. Paul says, “The God of peace make you perfect,” he. is not talking about sinlessness. A friend of mine who knows his Greek Testament better than I know my English Testament, says that the word here is a medical term, meaning “to set a bone.” He says that St. Paul, when he prays, is saying, “The God •of peace set a bone that is out o f joint.” And there is many a man who has prayed and received no answer to bis prayer because he is out of joint. The Greek word that St. Paul uses here, "perfect,” is exactly the same word that is used when the disciples are described as “mending” their nets. So St. Paul says, “The God o f peace mend you.” And some of us need a great deal of mending. I went down a mine in our country once. I saw the miners going to their work, with their hands and faces clean. When they came out their hands and faces were black, but there was one part of the face perfectly clean. It was the ball of the eye. And the reason why that was clean and all the rest of the face black, was not because the dust did not strike the eye. It was because the little
Made with FlippingBook - Online magazine maker