XVIPRAYER AND THE HOLY GHOST DISPENSATION

How God needs, how the world needs, how the Church needs the flow of the mighty river, more blessed than the Nile, deeper, broader and more overflowing than the Amazon’s mighty current! and yet what mere rills we are! We need, the age needs, the Church needs, memorials of God’s mighty power, which will silence the enemy and the avenger, dumbfound God’s foes, strengthen weak saints, and fill strong ones with triumphant raptures.

—Edward Bounds.

The dispensation of the Holy Ghost was ushered in by prayer. Read these words from Acts 1:13—“And when they were come in, they went up into an upper room where abode both Peter and James and John and Andrew, Philip and Thomas, Bartholomew and Matthew, James, the son of Alpheus, and Simon Zelotes, and Judas, the brother of James. These all continued with one accord in prayer and supplication, with the women, and Mary, the mother of Jesus, and with his brethren.”

This was the attitude which the disciples assumed after Jesus had ascended to Heaven. That meeting for prayer ushered in the dispensation of theHoly Spirit, to which prophets had looked forward with entranced vision. And to prayer in a marked way has this dispensation, which holds in its keeping the fortune of the Gospel, been committed.

Apostolic men knew well the worth of prayer and were jealous of the most sacred offices which infringed on their time and strength and hindered them from “giving themselves continually to prayer and to the ministry of the Word.” They put prayer first. The Word depends on prayer that it “may have free course and be glorified.” Praying apostles make preaching apostles. Prayer gives edge, entrance and weight to the Word. Sermons conceived by prayer and saturated with prayer are weighty sermons. Sermons may be ponderous with thought, sparkle with the gems of genius and of taste, pleasing and popular, but without they have their birth and life in prayer, for God’s uses, they are trifles, dull and dead.

The Lord of the harvest sends out labourers, full in number and perfect in kind, in answer to prayer. It needs no prophetic ken to declare that if the Church had used prayer force to its utmost the light of the gospel would have long since girdled the world.

God’s Gospel has always waited more on prayer than on anything else for its successes. A praying Church is strong though poor in all besides. A prayerless Church is weak though rich in allbesides. Praying hearts only will build God’s Kingdom. Praying hands only will put the crown on the Saviour’s head.

The Holy Spirit is the Divinely appointed Substitute for and representative of the personal and humanised Christ. How much is He to us! And how we are to be filled by Him, live in Him, walk in Him, and be led by Him! How we are to conserve and kindle to a brighter and more consuming glow the holy flame! How careful should we be never to quench that pure flame! How watchful, tender, loving ought we to be so as not to grieve His sensitive, loving nature! How attentive, meek and obedient, never to resist His Divine impulses, always to hear His voice, and always to do His Divine will. How can all this be done without much and continuous prayer?

The importunate widow had a great case to win against helpless, hopeless despair, but she did it by importunate prayer. We have this great treasure to preserve and enhance, but we have a Divine Person to entertain and help. We can only be enabled to meet our duties by exceeding much prayer.

Prayer is the only element in which the Holy Spirit can live and work. Prayer is the golden chain which happily enslaves Him to His happy work in us.

Everything depends upon our having this Second Christ, and retaining Him in the fullness ofHis power. With the disciples, Pentecost was made by prayer. With them, Pentecost was continued by giving themselves to continued prayer. Persistent and unwearied prayer is the price we will have to pay for our Pentecost, by instant and continued prayer. Abiding in the fact and in the spirit of prayer is the only surety of our abiding in Pentecostal power and purity.

Not only should the many-sided operation of the Holy Spirit in us and for us, teach us the necessity of prayer for Him, but His condition with our praying assumes another attitude, the attitude of mutual dependence, that of action and reaction. The more we pray the more He helps us to pray, and the larger the measure of Himself He gives to us. We are not only to pray and press and wait for His coming to us, but after we have received Him in His fullness, we are to pray for a fuller and still larger bestowment of Himself to us. We are to pray for the largest and ever-increasing and constant fullness of capacity. “That ye might be strengthened with might by His Spirit in the inner man,” as Paul prayed for the Spirit-baptised Ephesian Church. It will be remembered that He also prayed that “Christ might dwell in your hearts by faith,” rooted and grounded in love, measuring up to the breadth, length, depth and height of the most perfect sainthood, and up to the immeasurable love of Christ, being “filled with all the fullness of God.”

In that wonderful prayer for those Christians, Paul laid himself out to pray to God, and by prayer he sought to fathom the fathomless depths and to measure the illimitable purposes and benefits of God’s plan of salvation for immortal souls by the presence and work of the Holy Spirit. Only importunate and invincible prayer can bring the Holy Spirit to us, and secure for us these ineffably gracious results. “Epaphras always labouring fervently in prayers, that ye may stand perfect and complete in all the will of God.”

The Word of God provides for a mighty, consciously realised religion in His saints, into whose happy, shining spirits God has been brought as a Dweller, and whose Heaven-toned lives have been attuned to melody by God’s own hand.

Then will it prove true: “He that believeth on me, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water.” Here is a promise concerning the indwelling and outflowing of the Holy Spirit in us, life-giving, fructifying, irresistible, a ceaseless outflow of the river of God in us.

How God needs, how the world needs, how the Church needs the flow of this mighty river, more blessed than the Nile, deeper, broader, more overflowing than the Amazon’s broad and mighty current! And yet what mere rills we are and have!

O that the Church, by the infilling and outflowing of the Holy Spirit, might be able to raise up everywhere memorials of the Holy Spirit’s power,which might fix the eye as well as engage the heart! We need, the age needs, the Church needs, memorials of God’s mighty power, which will silence the enemy and the avenger, dumbfound God’s foes, strengthen weak saints, and fill strong ones with triumphant raptures.

A glance at some more of the Divine promises concerning this vital question would show us how they need to be projected into the experimental and the actual. “If any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God or whether I speak of myself.” How we do need a conscious religion, personal and vital, unspeakable in its joy, and full of glory! The need is for a conscious religion, made so by the Spirit bearing witness that we are the children of God. A religion of “I know” is the only powerful, vital and aggressive religion. “One thing I know, whereas I once was blind, but now I see.” We need men and women in these loose days who can verify the above mentioned promise of Christ in their inner consciousness. And yet how many untold thousands of people in all of our churches, who have only a dim, impalpable, hope so, maybe so, I trust so, kind of religion, all dubious, intangible and unstable.

There is certainly a great need in these days in the modern Church, first, for Christians to see and seek and obtain the high privilege in the Gospel of a Heaven-born, clear cut, and happy religiousexperience, born of the presence of the Holy Spirit, giving an undoubted assurance of sins forgiven, and of adoption into the family of God.

And secondly, there is a need, subsequent to this conscious realization of Divine favour in the forgiveness of sins, and added to it, of the reception of the Holy Spirit in His fullness, purifying their hearts by faith, perfecting them in love, overcoming the world, and bestowing a Divine, inward power over all sin, both inward and outward, and giving boldness to bear witness and qualifying for real religious service in the Church and in the world.

There is a fearfully prevailing agnosticism along here in the Church just at this time. We greatly fear that a vast majority of our Church members are now in this school of spiritual agnosticism, and really deem it to be a virtue to be there. God’s word gives no encouragement whatever to a shadowy religion and a vague religious experience. It calls us definitely into the realm of knowledge. It crowns religion with the crown of “I know.” It passes us from the darkness of sin, doubt and inward misgiving into the marvelous light, where we see clearly and know fully our personal relations to God.

“The things unknown to feeble sense,Unseen by reason’s glimmering ray,With strong, commanding confidence,Their heavenly origin display.”

“The things unknown to feeble sense,

Unseen by reason’s glimmering ray,

With strong, commanding confidence,

Their heavenly origin display.”

Two things may be said just here in concluding this part of our study upon this subject: First, this sort of Bible religion, hereinbefore described, comes directly through the office of the Holy Spirit dealing personally with each soul; and secondly, the Holy Spirit in all of His offices pertaining to spiritual life and religious experience is secured by earnest, definite, prevailing prayer.

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