Divine Efficacy of Prayer 67 on preaching. But what is preaching without praying! Ser mons are but pulpit performances, learned essays, rhetorical orations, popular lectures, or it may be political harangues, until God gives, in answer to earnest prayer, the preparation of the heart, and the answer of the tongue. It is only he who prays that can truly preach. Many a sermon that has shown no intellectual genius and has violated all homiletic rules and standards has had dynamic spiritual force. Some how it has moved men, melted them, moulded them. The man whose lips are touched by God’s living coal from off the altar may even stammer, but his hearers soon find out that, he is on fire with one consuming passion to save souls. We need saints in the pew as well as in the pulpit, and saintship everywhere is fed and nourished on piayer. The man of business who prays, learns to abide in his calling with God; his secular affairs and transactions become sacred by being brought into the searchlight of God’s presence. His own business becomes his Father’s business. He does not trample on God’s commands in order to make money, nor does he drive his trade and traffic through the sacred limits of the Lord’s day, or defraud his customers, “breaking God’s law for a dividend.” Praying souls become prevailing saints. Those who gee farthest on in the school of prayer and learn most of its hid den secrets often develop a sort of prescience which comes nearest to the prophetic spirit, the Holy Spirit showing them “things to come.” They seem, like Savonarola, to know some thing of the purpose of God, to anticipate His plans, and to forepast the history of their own times. The great suppli- cators have been also the seers. There is no higher virtue in a church than that it should be a praying church, for it is prayer that makes eternal reali ties both prominent and dominant. A church and a pastor may have any one of the current, popular types of “religious”
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