The open secret of discipleship

Convinced. No fanciful words, no imaginary expression, only this one thing, this cry of the very soul... Why, why the slowness to grasp and lay hold of the secret of the universe, the impelling of all that we have now become, our very life blood and ability of being made any use whatsoever even if this be but the result. The means, the desire ... [i]earnestness[/i], fortitude, desire, groanings which cannot be uttered.

So descriptive this matter. So lacking in persuavsiveness so it seems. We have tried a camaflauged guilt, subtle, perhaps even unimagined, not intended or motivated as such. Pleading. Exhorting. Proven example, testimony. Rebuking for the very lack there of.

Half hearted we can be, resting in the natural order of things. Over and over again the attempts to reset the mind, turn towards the inward man and look hard at his desires and his compulssions, the deeper deep that calls out to be answered. Could it be that somewhere in this is where the point of contention is?

By now the obvious stretch of articulation is evident. There is both a [i]must[/i] and a unspeakable privelage. Could but weep prufusely in all honesty that it is this where we stumble, where the church is led astray, where the unity that the Lord desired is thwarted, where a segmented atribute is injected, where it is practically evident that a forgetting is what we may be quite guilty of;

[i]In those days there was no king in Israel, but every man did that which was right in his own eyes.[/i]
Jdg 17:6

More plainly, prayer [i]is[/i] the greatest of all matters and how to 'teach' or compel may only be answered by more praying. Especially one still a student of this all encompassing condition. Here, wish to bring example after example. Testimony after testimony. Welcoming the saints to share and partake, give and take, real life evidence, old souls and new. Outakes and longwinded speech's, perhaps an agitation and a contagion could be spread, what matter is it, only to get the Lord's people to praying.

This morning may be a good as a place to start as any. Through no boasting whatsoever the Lord has seen fit to call this creature to the early morning hour for a number of years now. The variance is profound. The possibilities unlimited. That so often a great difficulty is the first obstacle, a pressing past [i]feeling[/i] and even a down right denial of ones own thoughts, yes, we are clever devils after all. The flesh [i]is[/i] weak, it remains so, all the strenuous muscle activity in the world is no match for an overcoming of the desires and propensities of this [i]other[/i] matter. It has to be often bypassed, ignored and sometimes dealt with very severly. No is a strong word to be leveled against one's self.

Awakenings are of a greater and greater notice of late. Remnant's of the night's mysteries, dream fragments, bit's and pieces, not all dream it has been said, have my doubt's about that but rather beside the point. First thought's out of the midst, the gray hangover-ish confussion left from the dark night of restfulness. Ever wonder, ponder this? Something of a childlike humbling to recognize another level playing field of human creatureliness, like death, like birth, how much human greatness evident upon wrinkled faces, eye boogers and displaced coiffeur's? So much for human dignity.

First thought's, ever grab them, challenge them? Where the mind gravitates towards, [i]what[/i] the mind clings first to. Has the devil influence upon our thought's? Even us saints? Though we would prefer to think otherwise scripture is full of contrary evidence, life is enough of it's own if we are but paying attention. Rather not open that all up to misintrepetation suffice it to say our own proclivities enough of a problem.

Work. A great preoccupation with circumstances being what they are. Surely this capacity is common to all, first thought's? The dream state left overs, today's not very pleasant. A verbal show down with the step-son, boy did I tell him off... Ah, the ugliness and possibilities of the natural life, deny to the hilt and yet something so primative as sleep unmasking the deep parts where we are apt to forgoe.

Little wonder that prayer was the understood remedy, the flesh in high denial and the poor feelings frankly more apt to have the inward discourse of what needs to be done today. Don't 'feel' like praying in that paradoxical mingling, do but I don't, should but ... maybe I will just read something else, maybe I will ... write.

As experience has shown over and over again, to not put the soul to the test, to not put the face to the earth and truly pray is to welcome the only ability left and that is dependence upon one's self, the great accomplishment that the Lord Jesus called; Nothing. Our brother here had noted it earlier as HAVE. A have to. Can I or can I not state it this way as a 'have' as a 'must'? Have to pray, must pray. More and better examples will bear this out. Will just state that all things can wait but prayer. And even this morning's desires were changed by the very truth of;

[i]And from the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force.[/i] Mat 11:12

... teach us to pray

HOW GOD ANSWERS PRAYER

FOR man fully to understand God and all His dealings with us is an utter impossibility. “O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past tracing out!”(Rom.xi. 33.) True, but we need not make difficulties where none exists. If God has all power and all knowledge, surely prayer has no difficulties, though occasionally there may be perplexities. We cannot discover God’s method, but we know something of His manner of answering prayer.

But at the very outset may we remind ourselves how little we know about ordinary things? Mr. Edison, whose knowledge is pretty profound, wrote in August, 1921, “We don’t know the millionth part of one per cent about anything. We don’t know what water is. We don’t know what light is.We don’t know what gravitation is. We don’t know what enables us to keep on our feet to stand up. We don’t know what electricity is. We don’t know what heat is. We don’t know anything about magnetism. We have a lot of hypotheses, but that is all.” But we do not allow our ignorance about all these things to deprive us of their use! We do not know much about prayer, but surely this need not prevent us from praying! We do know what our Lord has taught us about prayer. And we do know that He has sent the Holy Spirit to teach us all things (John xiv. 26). How, then, does God answer prayer? One way is just this: —

He reveals His mind to those who pray. His Holy Spirit puts fresh ideas into the minds of praying people. We are quite aware that the devil and his angels are busy enough putting bad thoughts into our minds. Surely, then, God and His holy angels can give us good thoughts? Even poor, weak, sinful men and women can put good thoughts into the minds of others. That is what we try to do in writing! We do not stop to think what a wonderful thing it is that a few peculiar-shaped black marks on this white paper can uplift and inspire, or depress and cast down, or even convict of sin!

But, to an untutored savage, it is a stupendous miracle. Moreover, you and I can often read people’s thoughts or wishes from an expression on the face or a glance of the eye. Even thought transference between man and man is a commonplace today. And God can in many ways convey His thoughts to us. A remarkable instance of this was related by a speaker last year at Northfield. Three or four years ago, he met an old whaling captain who told him this story.

“A good many years ago, I was sailing in the desolate seas off Cape Horn, hunting whales. One day we were beating directly south in the face of a hard wind. We had been tacking this way and that all the morning, and were making very little headway. About 11 o’clock, as I stood at the wheel, the idea suddenly came into my mind, ‘Why batter the ship against these waves? There are probably as many whales to the north as to the south. Suppose we run with the wind instead of against it? In response to that sudden idea I changed the course of the ship, and began to sail north instead of south. One hour later, at noon, the look-out at the masthead shouted ‘Boats ahead!’

Presently we overtook four lifeboats, in which were fourteen sailors, the only survivors of the crew of a ship which had burned to the water’s edge ten days before. Those men had been adrift in their boats ever since, praying God frantically for rescue; and we arrived just in time to save them. They could not have survived another day.”

Then the old whaler added, “I don’t know whether you believe in religion or not, but I happen to be a Christian. I have begun every day of my life with prayer that God would use me to help someone else, and I am convinced that God, that day, put the idea into my mind to change the course of my ship. That idea was the means of saving fourteen lives.”

God has many things to say to us. He has many thoughts to put into our minds. We are apt to be so busy doing His work that we do not stop to listen to His Word. Prayer gives God the opportunity of speaking to us and revealing His will to us. May our attitude often be: “Speak, Lord, Thy servant heareth.”

[i]The Kneeling Christian[/i] ~ Unknown Christian

If prayer is the greatest achievement on earth, we may be sure it will call for a discipline that corresponds to its power. The School of Prayer has its conditions and demands. It is a forbidden place to all but those of set purpose and resolute heart. Strong men often break down under the strain of study. Concentration is a heavier task than handling a hammer or guiding a plow. The discipline curbs freedom, and drills the mind to attention. Understanding is more taxing than doing, and meditation is a severer tax than service. The reason so many people do not pray is because of its cost. The cost is not so much in the sweat of agonizing supplication as in the daily fidelity to the life of prayer. It is the acid test of devotion. Nothing in the life of faith is so difficult to maintain.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

[i]Prayer is the soul's sincere desire,
Uttered or unexpressed,
The motion of a hidden fire
That trembles in the breast.
Prayer is the simplest form of speech
That infant lips can try;
Prayer the sublimest strains that reach
The Majesty on high.[/i]

That is gloriously true. A cry brings God. A cry is mightier than the polished phrase. The Pharisee prayed within himself. His prayers revolved on ruts of vanity in his own mind and heart. The publican cried and was heard. It is not of emergency exits of the soul we are thinking, but the sustained habit and experience of the man of prayer. Such prayer comes by training, and there is no discipline so exacting. Coleridge says of such praying that it is the very highest energy of which the human heart is capable, and it calls for the total concentration of all the faculties. The great mass of worldly men and learned men he pronounced incapable of prayer. To pray as God would have us pray is the greatest achievement on earth.

Such a life of prayer costs. It takes time. Hurried prayers and muttered litanies can never produce souls mighty in prayer. To become skilled in art and mechanism, learners give hours regularly every day that they may become proficient. Our Lord rose before daybreak that He might pray, and not infrequently He spent all night in prayer. All praying saints have spent hours every day in prayer. One is afraid to quote examples. In these days there is no time to pray; but without time, and a lot of it, we shall never learn to pray. It ought to be possible to give God one hour out of twenty-four all to Himself. Anyway, let us make a start in the discipline of training in prayer by setting apart a fixed time every day for the exercise of prayer. We must seriously set our hearts to learn how to pray. "To pray with all your heart and strength, with the reason and the will, to believe vividly that God will listen to your voice through Christ, and verily do the thing He pleaseth thereupon -- this is the last, the greatest achievement of the Christian's warfare upon earth." Teach us to pray, O Lord, we beseech thee.

[i]The Praying Spirit breathe,
The watching power impart,
From all entanglements beneath,
Call off my anxious heart.
My feeble mind sustain,
By worldly thoughts oppressed,
Appear, and bid me turn again
To my eternal rest.[/i]

When you feel the strain of discipline remember these words:

[i]Thou art oft most present, Lord,
In weak, distracted prayer;
A sinner out of heart with self,
Most often finds thee there.
For prayer that humbles, sets the soul
From all delusions free,
And teaches it how utterly
Dear Lord, it hangs on thee.[/i]

Samuel Chadwick

We are intimidated by silence Art Katz said about our praying. Losing patience with patience, something quick, fastidious, pragmatic, layered with spiritual overtones.

Human cleverness and marketability, human greatness and productivity, churning out 'saint's' before [i]making disciples[/i] and wondering at the lack of any spiritual fortitude. Far, far too much of the man and his whim's and fancies, his beggarly proclivities, the vainly imagined prophetic word's that reveal just how short any real communion has taken place. They speak of another character, an unknown, heretofore speaking that is not He Himself. How have we put up with this? Is it not fear of offending that keeps us in a quagmire of doubtful things?

How depleting it is to go on exhorting and rebuking, speaking of contemplation, encouraging and attempting to gain an audience for the balm that is our answer for the ills that assail us. Another dirge, another tangent, crying, heartbreak, verse upon verse, example upon example and testimony upon testimony, little of it persuasive. Redundant, this complaint.

Psa 142:2 [i] poured out my complaint before him; I shewed before him my trouble.[/i]

We love controversy as much if not more than the so called separated world that we are part of. Only our separation is those alarming things that we have found ourselves to be aboveboard, [i]not like[/i], a subtle smugness and specious superiority that gives us vent to condone and condemn, a similitude to our Lord and thereby an assumed authority to speak our minds.

How often the writer smitten by his own pen...

Waiting. Waiting on the Lord. Why, why won't we? Why can we not tarry one hour? Why will we not pray and overcome the intimidation of silence by being silent, allowing the examination of contemplation, let patience posses our souls and garrison our minds?

Ranting and prating, tale-bearing, harsh criticism, politics, the ever changing daily news has more of a grip upon our minds and characterizes, manipulates our spirituality then we would care to admit to. We may desire notice and appreciation, how adept and scholarly we may be at moving through the scriptures as if we had written them ourselves. It is a gross generalization yet, find yourself in this? The scholar and the theologian, the student, these are not to be blamed nor slighted in any sense for there are many amongst us and many that are extracting out from the heart that which has moved from the head. To be moved only by emotion, swayed by feelings without consideration, the tongue, the lip's, the heart out of sequence, this is what is troubling. The agitation, the supposing and assuming, the readiness and willingness to launch, something of a hair trigger, something lacking in our makeup, something not yet replaced.

The devil has so greatly succeeded by a seducing to self reliance that it is little wonder that few are aghast at what is the very root of the matter. Prayer. Lack of, the littleness of it, even the word itself is met with a subliminal shrug, an [i]of course[/i] about it and still the obviousness, conspicuous by it's absence, the results thereof, the reproduction of it's kind gives us no pause to consider.

The 'great' saints, the past and even the present disciples have a certain characteristic that set's a distinguishing mark upon them, upon their words, upon their articulation. Their greatness is not their own it is the reflector of that same fragrance, the heat expensed from a burning heart. Recognize it? Only men of prayer can be produced from it and I believe only those given to much praying understand it. We can gain no real revelation of understanding without it. They are 'marked' men who need no special recognition, applause or explanation. "Behold he prayeth". Is it just some romantic notion? Authority is an evidence, not a position or title.

Nothing new here. Better men have expressed better understandings and have done a greater service to grasping this monumental privilege. Most certainly hope this is read past the man, for he is faulty still, still grappling with his own articulation. Everything is hinged on this matter. There is no other way to internalize all the great truth's. No power nor effect nor fruit nor any eternal difference whatsoever unless we pray and the Lord fill us with His Holy Spirit, answering and agreeing with Himself, renewing our mind, burning off the dross of this world that so easily clings to us, challenging us to the scruple of honesty inwardly before we ever begin to consider that which we ought to be [i]doing[/i].

I am certain the Lord has a controversy with us over this and must admit that there is a weariness and sense that the whole thing will just once again fall on deaf ears. It is our own fault for the low level, the surface opinion, the lust of controversy, the leap frog approach of shouting down one another or elevating a human, naturalistic thought one atop another. Where is the Lord in all this? Where is the consideration of His thought, His will, His desire? And why do we not know what that is?

It is impossible to parse this, it is far to exacting of the present state of matters;

[i]From where do wars and fightings among you come? Is it not from this, from your lusts which war in your members? You desire, and do not have. You murder, and are jealous, and cannot obtain. You fight and war, yet you have not because you ask not. You ask and receive not, because you ask amiss, that you may spend it upon your lusts. Adulterers and adulteresses! Do you not know that the friendship of the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever desires to be a friend of the world is the enemy of God.

Do you think that the Scripture says in vain, [u]The spirit that dwells in us[/u] [b]yearns to envy[/b]?

But He gives more grace. Therefore He says, God resists the proud, but He gives grace to the humble. Therefore submit yourselves to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Draw near to God, and He will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, sinners; and purify your hearts, double-minded ones. Be afflicted, and mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to heaviness.

Be humbled before the Lord, and He will lift you up. Do not speak against one another, brothers. He who speaks against his brother, and who judges his brother, speaks against the Law and judges the Law. But if you judge the Law, you are not a doer of the Law, but a judge. There is one Lawgiver, who is able to save and to destroy. Who are you who judges another? Come now, those saying, Today or tomorrow we will go into such a city and spend a year there, and we will trade and will make a profit, who do not know of the morrow.

For what is your life?

For it is a vapor, which appears for a little time, and then disappears. Instead of you saying, If the Lord wills, we shall live and do this or that. But now you boast in your presumptions. All such boasting is evil. Therefore to him who knows to do good, and does not do it, to him it is sin.[/i] Jam 4:1-17

How much to consider from all this... Boasting, [i]such[/i] boasting is [i]evil[/i], boasting in presumptions and the presumptions are of the substance of [i]we will go[/i], unchecked, unprayed for assumptions. If it's the Lord's will we cannot know, if we cannot ask and I am wondering if we can even begin to ask amiss if we haven't even begun to [b]ask[/b], pray, in the first place to take this all apart backward.

[i]"yearns to envy"[/i] Oh, feel [i]this[/i]? Is it not the same as "[i]Grieve not the Holy Spirit[/i]"? Do we care, more so are we even aware of it?

[i]Ye of little faith[/i] ... any wonder? Could it not be rightly associated that it is due to, Ye of little [i]prayer[/i]? Feel no sting from the Lord's words? And what of the additional admonishen that we may have glided right past; [i]if they have kept My saying, they will keep yours also[/i], meaning all that the apostles said holds sway as well. And how much of a vast importance did they lay stress on praying?

Ah, I fear what this very well may amount to is that we just don't believe it.

Hi Mike...

Good stuff! This is very encouraging and convicting. Thank you for sharing!

:-)

No power nor effect nor fruit nor any eternal difference whatsoever unless we pray and the Lord fill us with His Holy Spirit, answering and agreeing with Himself,

[b]answering and agreeing with Himself[/b]

[b]answering[/b]

[b]and agreeing[/b]

[b]with Himself[/b]

[b][color=000000]And lo a voice from heaven, saying,[/color][/b]

[b][color=0033CC]This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased[/color][/b]