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Divine Efficacy of Prayer
God is calling His people to a revival of faith in the Divine efficacy of prayer. Our Lord teaches us that the prayer of faith has the power of a fiat or a Divine decree. God said sublimely, “Let light be!” and light was. The Lord Jesus Christ says: If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed”—in which, how ever small, is the possibility and potency of life— ‘ye shall say to this mountain, Be thou removed; or to this syca more tree, Be thou plucked up by the root, and it shall obey you.” This is the language not of petition, but 6f decree. It is, in some sort, a laying hold on Omnipotence, so that nothing is impossible to the praying soul. When we reach such heights of teaching and compare them with the low level of our life we are struck dumb with amaze ment, first at the astounding possibilities of faith, as put be fore us, and then at the equally astounding impossibilities which unbelief substitutes for the offered omnipotence of supplication. When we think of the possible heights of inter cession we seem again to hear the saintly McCheyne crying out: “Do everything in earnest 1 If it is worth doing, then do it with all your might. Above all, keep much in the presence of God; never see the face of man till you have seen His face.” That is the preparation of prayer, prevail ing first with God to enable us to prevail with man. Jacobi must have been thinking along these lines when he said: “My watchword, and that of my reason, is not I, but One who is more and better than I ; One who is entirely different from what I am—I mean God. I neither am, nor care to be, if He is not!” I t is prayer that makes God real—the highest reality and verity; and that sends us back into the world with the conviction and consciousness that He is, and is in us, mighty to work in us, and through us, as instruments, so that nothing shall be Impossible to the instrument, because of the Workman, back of it, who holds and wields the weapon.
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