The King’s Business
Voi. 4
DECEMBER, 1913
No. 12
Prayer the Need of the Hour T HERE seems to be an increasing feeling in the hearts of many of the children of God in all lands that the great need of the hour is PRAYER. It is felt that for years we have been laying too much emphasis on organization and advertising and effort in the energy of the flesh. There has been great activity but little result. This has been true both in the regular church work and in special evangelistic efforts. Organizations have been multiplied until many earnest Christians have become so entangled in the multiplicity of organizations that they have had little time for personal com munion with God either in the study of His Word or in prayer. The demands of this committee and that, and this organization and that, have been so numer ous and so insistent that oftentimes our most earnest men and women seem to have but little time for anything except to rush from committee to committee and from meeting to meeting. The results, of course, have ndt been at all com mensurate with the efforts out forth. We have boasted about the superiority of our methods over those of olden times but are they so superior? Is the new method of evangelism producing the definite results in the way of deep con viction of sin and thorough-going conversion to God that the method of, say for example, Charles G. Finney did ? With him the constant emphasis, as far as human agency was concerned, was uoon prayer. He reached men as almost no other evangelist has ever reached men, and men of the highest intellectual type, a very large share of his converts were among lawyers and judges and men of that stamo. We need to oray more as individual Christians; we need to pray more as ministers; we need to pray more as churches. The Week of Prayer T HIS number of T he K ing ’ s B usiness will get into the hands of our readers early in December. It is none too early to prepare for the Week of Prayer. One of the most discouraging signs of the times is the way in which the observance of the Week of Prayer has dropped out in many of our churches. It ought to be observed in everv church. The subjects sug gested by the World’s Evangelical Alliance ought to be follow'ed (see pages 556-81. not the subjects put forth by the Committee in America. The World’s Evangelical Alliance really covers the world. Its subjects are wisely chosen and cover the whole field of Christian activity at home and abroad. There is tremendous power when the whole church is praying along the same line at the same time, the church not only in America but the church in Eng land, Germany, India, China, Japan, Africa, the whole world. The old-fashioned wav of following up the Week of Prayer with special evangelistic efforts was productive of immeasurable good. It is to be hoped that many churches will follow the old-fashioned way this year.
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