W. J. Seaton

I would like to bring before you a few questions regarding our prayer life which is a most vital of all our Christian offices and offer some words of encouragement and exhortation.

One of the great gifts that our Saviour obtained for us by His death on the Cross was the gift of “Priesthood”. Protestantism boasts of this fact, and rightly so. We need no human “mediator” such as Rome has, but have a direct access into the very presence of God through the “blood of God’s Son”. What an affront, then, it must be in the sight of God when His people fail to avail themselves in all fulness of such a privilege and mercy.

When this is the case in our “individual” Christian living, then we have every right to examine our “calling and election”; for as Spurgeon once truly stated, “A prayerless person is a Christless person”. However, it is with regard to our “corporate” prayer life – our prayer life as members of our own local Church – that I would like to see more concern exercised and shown.

These are days of great decline; churches are closing today – not just in some denominations that have drifted far from an evangelical faith, generally speaking; but churches are closing in ALL the denominations, Baptist included! One of our leading churches had now discontinued its Sunday evening service; and here is what I would like us to grasp hold of, it first of all discontinued its PRAYER MEETING! I believe I have marked for you on some occasions the steps of “backsliding”; let me remind you of those steps.

The first thing to go is the Prayer meeting; then goes the Sunday morning service, because this is usually classed as “ministry to the believers”, and may sometimes include a challenge regarding the believer’s prayer life; this leaves the “Gospel Service”, so-called, and there many a cold Christian has eked out their spiritual existence until the world has claimed them for its own again. If this applies to any reader, then I have but one word, and it’s “Back” – Back to the place where your feet started slipping!

Perhaps many people would be inclined to think that we, here in our own Church, have little to complain about as far as numbers at the Prayer Meeting are concerned, and this is probably true as present-day standards go. But, as minister of a Church, I am not concerned with a person’s presence at the prayer meeting, but rather with the fundamental lack in their spiritual life that keeps them from the prayer meeting. I know there are many who have genuine reasons for not meeting with the Church in prayer; let me say, however, that every reason must be able to stand before the absolute scrutiny of the all-seeing eye of God.

I have heard of some women in some churches who make the excuse that they can’t come to the morning service because thy have to stay at home and make the dinner. This is very feeble when we reflect on the fact that many women have no hesitation going “down-town for a hair-do” and leaving the dinner to simmer on the stove! Anyway, what harm would it do for the family to have to wait for three-quarters of an hour until the potatoes are boiled? Remember, the minister has to do that every week; if he didn’t then his wife would never be at Church. The minister and his wife, if they have small children can’t work on a “You go in the morning and I’ll go in the evening” basis. Am I being critical? Perhaps, but, don’t you see the point? If our excuses are so weak as to be obvious to our fellow-Christians, then how must they appear before the Lord Himself?

Now, hereon hangs the crux of the matter of “making our requests known unto God”. We are NOT called to pray so as to please men, but to please God. It’s God that sees. This serves both to exhort, and also to encourage. Remember the apostle Paul after he had been converted on the Damascus road and had been led in his blind condition to the house of one called Judas? “Arise”, our Lord said to a man called Ananias, “and go into the street which is called straight, and enquire in the house of Judas for one called Saul of Tarsus: for, BEHOLD HE PRAYETH”. The Lord had his eye on Saul! He knew the street that Saul was in; He knew the name of the street – it was called Straight; He knew the house that Saul was in, in that street; He knew the name of the man who owned that house! “Thou God seest me”! And although, as we’ve already said, we don’t pray as men-pleasers, nevertheless, what a witness to the world a praying Church can be.

Remember David Brainerd, the great missionary to the American Indians? When he walked into an Indian encampment one morning he was greeted – much to his amazement – a kind of white god. What had happened? When the Indians had gone out to “murder” him the night before, they had seen him in prayer; and as he prayed a rattlesnake had reared itself up in front of him to strike its deathblow, and then had fallen to the ground and slithered away. Just that one incident related to a praying man, but it opened the door of evangelism among those American Indians and brought many sons to glory. Well does the Scriptures tell us that men should always pray and not faint.

Taken from The Wicket Gate Magazine, used with permission.