Prayer Keys - Earnestness
“Elijah was a man just like us. He prayed earnestly that it would not rain, and it did not rain on the land for three and a half years. Again he prayed, and the heavens gave rain, and the earth produced its crops.” James 5:17-18
George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, future US Presidents, were among the delegates meeting at St. John’s Church in Richmond, Virginia, on March 23, 1775, considering a resolution sending Virginia troops to the Revolutionary War. The Virginia House of Burgesses was unconvinced. Finally, Patrick Henry spoke. He concluded:
“What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!”
Reportedly, those in attendance, upon hearing the speech, also shouted, “give me liberty or give me death!”
That passionate speech is credited with turning the tide. It is one of the most passionate lines from the American Revolution. It changed the course of history.
That line reminds me of a passionate prayer, prayed over 200 years earlier. John Knox prayed “Give me Scotland or I die.”
John Knox was described as low in stature and of a weakly constitution. A contemporary, Mr. Thomas Smeaton, said, “I know not if God ever placed a more godly and great spirit in a body so little and frail.”
When that frail body went to his knees, Mary, Queen of Scots, trembled. She said she feared the prayers of John Knox more than the combined armies of Europe.
Larry Christenson in his book, The Christian Family, says John Knox prayed with such power that all Scotland was awakened. He goes so far as to attribute the whole reformation of Scotland to Knox’s prayers. He writes, “’Lord, Give me Scotland or I’ll die!’ [Knox] cried. And he prayed with such intensity that the Lord answered.”
Jonathan Edwards, a man used by God in the First Great Awakening, also prayed with fervent intensity. I have read that he preached in a weak, squeaking, monotone voice and held his tiny manuscript so close to his face that people could not see his expressions. When he preached, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” in his weak, squeaking, monotone, people had to strain to hear him. It is said that he preached powerfully without the eloquence or theatrics some modern “evangelists” depend on. Strong men gripped pews and pillars as if they felt themselves falling into hell. Judgment day had dawned and they were desperately holding on to life until the altar call.
For three days before he first preached that sermon, he did not eat or sleep. Claiming New England for Christ was the only thing that mattered to him. Prayer was important to him. Food and sleep were not. Nothing distracted him. I am certain he did not intend it, but people passing his room heard his weak, squeaking voice as he sobbed, “God, give me New England! Give me New England!”
He finally rose from his knees and made his way to the pulpit. He was so weak, he could barely prop himself up. But before he opened his mouth, great conviction had already fallen on the congregation.
David Brainerd, a missionary to the Indians from 1743 to 1747, also prayed with fervent intensity.
Like John Knox, he was frail. Unlike John Knox, he never finished college, being expelled from Yale for criticizing a professor and for attending meetings of the “New Lights,” a religious organization. He was described at melancholy and despondent.
When we discussed holiness as a prayer key, I disagreed with those who described Luther and Spurgeon and other great preachers as “clinically depressed.” I suspect that they were more sensitive to their own sin than most of us are to our sins. They knew that any sin against the infinitely holy God is an infinitely wretched sin. We can surrender too easily in our struggle with sin, believing that confession and forgiveness are easy alternatives. We rarely mention that sorrow precedes repentance.
“Since we have these promises, dear friends, let us purify ourselves from everything that contaminates body and spirit, perfecting holiness out of reverence for God… Yet now I am happy, not because you were made sorry, but because your sorrow led you to repentance. For you became sorrowful as God intended and so were not harmed in any way by us. Godly sorrow brings repentance that leads to salvation and leaves no regret…” 2 Corinthians 7:1, 9-10.
Godly sorry leads to repentance. It is not a casual, “Lord, forgive me my sins,” every night before bed. Repentance is never a casual thing.
I suspect that at least some of the bouts with severe depression for Luther, Spurgeon, and Brainerd were not clinical, but were the results of godly sorrow, sorrow for sins we might ignore.
Now back to David Brainerd as a missionary who prayed fervently.
Modern missions agencies would have rejected David Brainerd. In addition to his expulsion, he had tuberculosis. He died from it when he was only 29.
On Brainerd’s first missionary journey, he went to the Forks of the Delaware to reach a ferocious tribe. He camped just outside their settlement, planning to enter the next morning to preach the gospel to them. He did not know that his every move was being watched. Warriors had come out to kill him. F. W. Boreham recorded the incident:
“But when the braves drew closer to Brainerd’s tent, they saw the paleface on his knees. And as he prayed, suddenly a rattlesnake slipped to his side, lifted up its ugly head to strike, flicked its forked tongue almost in his face, and then without any apparent reason, glided swiftly away into the brushwood. ‘The Great Spirit is with the paleface!’ the Indians said; and thus they accorded him a prophet’s welcome.”
Page after page of his diary included entries like:
Wednesday, April 21 …and God again enabled me to wrestle for numbers of souls, and had much fervency in the sweet duty of intercession…
Lord’s Day, April 25. This morning I spent about two hours in secret duties and was enabled more than ordinarily to agonize for immortal souls. Though it was early in the morning and the sun scarcely shined at all, yet my body was quite wet with sweat…
There were times he started to pray in the morning, and the day was gone before he realized it. Though sickly, he sometimes knelt in the snow praying for hours.
His diary also recorded the results of prayer and ministry.
Nov. 20. I have now baptized, in all, forty-seven persons of the Indians. Twenty-three adults and twenty-four children…Through rich grace, none of them as yet have been left to disgrace their profession of Christianity by any scandalous or unbelieving behavior.
How many modern pastors of evangelists can say that 47 of the first 47 they baptized were so true to the faith?
Lord’s Day, December 29 …After public worship was over, I went to my house, proposing to preach again after a short season of intermission. But they soon came in one after another; with tears in their eyes, to know, “what they should do to be saved…” It was an amazing season of power among them, and seemed as if God had “bowed the heavens and come down…” and that God was about to convert the whole world.
These men are examples of praying fervently.
We may fool ourselves with the other prayer keys, but not this one. We may tell ourselves we want God’s will when we have our own ideas about what his will should be. We may tell ourselves our prayer is sincere when we have ulterior motives. We may tell ourselves we are praying for the glory of God or we are praying in humility while secretly hoping someone will notice. We may tell ourselves we are praying in faith, not doubting, while we are afraid to admit our doubts even to ourselves. We may tell ourselves we are praying as the Spirit leads when we have already decided where we want him to lead us.
When we pray fervently, all our heart, soul, mind, and strength is focused on praying as the Spirit leads. We will not feel hunger or thirst, like Jonathan Edwards before preaching “Sinners in the Hand of an Angry God.” We will not feel heat or cold, like David Brainard kneeling for hours in the snow. We will not feel stiff necks or sore knees. Our hearts and minds will not wander, a too frequent occurrence for me while praying. We will be unconcerned with time and oblivious to boredom.
So what is the source of fervent prayer?
For Hannah, it was years of praying faithfully that led to more and more passion, to fervency. Hannah had a wonderful husband, but no children. Hannah had prayed for years to have a son. One year, the family made their annual visit to Shiloh to pray and offer sacrifices to God. While others were eating and drinking and rejoicing, Hannah stayed back at the temple crying and praying to God. “In bitterness of soul Hannah wept much and prayed to the Lord,” 1 Samuel 1:10. She prayed from the very depths of her being. She prayed fervently. Samuel was the answer to her prayers.
There is a time to pray quietly and privately, but there is also a time to pray fervently and corporately. For the Church in Acts, it was an awareness of the dangers they faced in the world that led to fervent corporate prayer.
In Acts 12, Peter was on death row. He was in prison awaiting execution. No earthly hope was left. No appeal was left. Nothing under heaven could save him. Nothing under heaven did.
As the Church prayed fervently, God sent an angel to the prison. The angel entered the prison where Peter slept between two guards, chained with two chains and guards outside the door. The angel struck him on the side and told him to get up. He got up, the chains fell down, and the gate just opened. He walked through the inner ward, the outer ward, and the gate onto the street.
Nothing under heaven could save him. Nothing under heaven did. The Church prayed fervently and God sent an angel to do the humanly impossible.
For Daniel, time in the Word led to fervent prayer.
In Daniel 9:4-19, Daniel poured out his heart in prayer before God that his people, who had been taken out of their homeland and held as captives in Babylon, would return to their land. The basis of his prayer can be seen in verses 2-3:
“…I, Daniel, understood from the Scriptures, according to the word of the Lord given to Jeremiah the prophet, that the desolation of Jerusalem would last seventy years. So I turned to the Lord God andpleaded with him in prayer and petition, in fasting, and in saclcoth and ashes.”
The Lord had spoken right at the time when Judah had gone into captivity that they would be in Babylon for seventy years (Jeremiah 25:11-12). Daniel, reading the Scriptures one day, came across that promise and realized that the seventy year period was almost completed. However, he didn’t just sit back and wait for God to do it. Daniel began to PRAY that what God had promised would be fulfilled. The Lord has chosen to give us the privilege and responsibility of being involved with Him in His purposes on earth. Daniel lived to see his people return!
James gives us Elijah as the example of effective prayer in action (see verses 17-18). What gave Elijah the boldness to pray that the rain would stop, and then, at his word, start again? (1 Kings 17:1; 18:41-45). Elijah’s prayer was BASED ON THE WORD OF GOD!
All of Israel had turned away from the Lord to worship Baal, the idol-god of a cruel heathen religion. Up stands one solitary man, a total unknown, and boldly proclaims to the king that “there will be neither dew nor rain in the next few years except at my word!” But his authority was based on a promise and warning found in Deuteronomy 11:16-17:
The more earnest we are in prayer, the more we resemble Christ. “During the days of Jesus’ life on earth, he offered up prayers and petitions with loud cries and tears…” (Hebrews 5:7).
