Part 1: The Place of Prayer

To desire revival…and at the same time to neglect (personal) prayer and devotion is to wish one way and walk another. ~ A.W. Tozer

There is a place where thou canst touch the eyes

Of blinded men to instant, perfect sight;

There is a place where thou canst say, “Arise”

To dying captives, bound in chains of night;

There is a place where thou canst reach the store

Of hoarded gold and free it for the Lord;

There is a place–upon some distant shore–

Where thou canst send the worker and the Word.

Where is that secret place–dost thou ask, “Where?”

O soul, it is the secret place of prayer!
~ Alfred Lord Tennyson

The prayer power has never been tried to its full capacity…if we want to see mighty wonders of divine power and grace wrought in the place of weakness, failure and disappointment, let us answer God’s standing challenge, “Call unto me, and I will answer thee, and show thee great and mighty things which thou knowest not."        
 ~ J. Hudson Taylor

Part 1: The Place of Prayer

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Ask of Me, and I will give You
The nations for Your inheritance,
And the ends of the earth for Your possession.

Psalm 2:8

Soaring bird, high above the jagged landscape -- dipping, dipping, catching the currents of wind, light reflecting from his feathers all-beautiful, the sunset dancing on his back. 

The bird is prayer and the wind is the Spirit moving, directing that prayer, the rays of truth and light and grace reflecting on its golden feathers. 

Thinking over these past days on the place of prayer . . .  

In my own life, in the life of the Church, as the breath of the body of His fellowship. 

And when they had prayed, the place where they were assembled together was shaken; and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and they spoke the word of God with boldness. Acts 4:31

So much emphasis these days upon study--studying God's Word, learning more, storing up facts--

And study of God's Word is important -- and has its place in the life of the Church--

Study has its legitimate place. 

But Jesus never said, "Study, that you do not enter into temptation . . . "

He said, Pray. 

There is power in believing, Spirit-filled prayer--

And the gates of hell cannot prevail against that all-consuming, never-tiring, eternal-reaching power. 

The power of prayer. 

Prayer -- what everything else flows from, what everything else must flow from, if there is to be any power attached to it. 

What evangelism flows from . . . 

What revival flows from . . . 

What personal holiness flows from . . . 

And study puts truth into our minds. 

But persevering, believing prayer gives that truth wings. 

Sometimes we have to ask ourselves, we have to honestly evaluate--would I rather study or pray?

Prayer is difficult. Prayer is the hard work of tilling the rugged soil and waiting for the rain of heaven to pour. 

Prayer is the Elijah-altar drenched and dripping until the fire of God falls to consume the sacrifice. 

Reading the biography of George Mueller has encouraged me and opened my eyes to the place of prayer in the believer's life. 

Mueller, a very intelligent, studied man spent hours on his knees -- and this is how he spent those hours--

With the Word of God spread open before him, praying through the Scriptures, quietly listening and meditating on the Word of God. 

Mueller believed that the Word would speak to him in any given situation -- in his sermon preparation, he would wait on his knees for the Lord to open the truth to him when he came across difficult passages. 

He was a man of prayer, a man who moved heaven through his humble obedience to the will and to the Word of God. 

And Heaven moved to hear him, a man upon his knees, a man who trusted God and it was accounted to him for righteousness.

A man knitted to the Holy will . . . on his knees -- his mouth open wide that God alone might fill it. 

A.W. Tozer, another faithful, humble servant of God--

His power in preaching and writing is attributed not to his study (although he did that much) but to his prayer life. 

He was labeled at times as a recluse because he would withdraw for so long into his prayer closet.

When he arrived at his study, he would change into his "prayer trousers," a pair of worn pants dedicated to the time that he spent upon his knees -- He didn't want to ruin the suit that he needed to preach in. 

So these trousers became the testament to the hours that he spent in communion with his Father. 

Tozer loved and held a high regard for the "Mystics" because of their prayer life -- He collected their works and revered their devotion through prayer and meditation. 

D. Martyn LLoyd-Jones recalls a conversation that he had with Tozer in Snyder's In Pursuit of God: 

'Once', Martyn Lloyd-Jones recalled, 'Dr. Tozer and I shared a conference years ago, and I appreciated his ministry and his fellowship very much. One day he said to me: 'Lloyd-Jones, you and I hold just about the same position on spiritual matters, but we have come to this position by different routes.' 'How do you mean?' I asked. 'Well,' Tozer replied, 'you came by way of the Puritans and I came by way of the mystics.' And, you know,' said Lloyd-Jones, 'he was right.'

Tozer regarded study as a high pursuit, but revered the place of prayer, in his own life and in the life of the church. 

Tozer's biographer, James Snyder, further says of him, 

"Tozer's hunger for God led him to study the Christian mystics. Their know-ledge of God and absorbing love for Him profoundly attracted Tozer. They were spirits kindred to his own. 'These people know God, and I want to know what they know.' But at the same time, the Bible remained absolutely central."

Tozer was a man filled with the Spirit, in his personal life and in his preaching and writing because he realized the place of prayer and meditation and exercised the discipline and joy of it . . . 

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I can become so caught up at times with studying the Word of God, with filling my mind with more and more facts, that I forget the place of prayer. 

Martin Luther, the great Reformer said, "Work, work, from morning until late at night.  In fact, I have so much to do that I shall have to spend the first three hours in prayer. "

Luther recognized the place of prayer in accomplishing any true good, in sowing any lasting fruit for the Lord. Because it is the Lord who works through us, through prayer, through His Spirit groaning and praying in and through us. 

Prayer. It has its place -- a place of prominence in the believer's life. For me to neglect it is to neglect communion with the One from whom all things flow. It is to distance myself from the Fountain, the Wellspring, the River of joy and delight. 

Study makes us dry without the accompanying grace of prayer. Prayer is the fire and the water and the breath, pouring life into our relationship with Christ, fueling heart-revival and empowering the saints.  

Part 2-- next blog post: The Importance of Prayer

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The Friend of Those Who Seek Him

To have found God and still to pursue Him is the soul’s paradox of love.”

-A.W. Tozer

 

"I have heard people say that 'only doctrine is important.' Would they leave no room for Christian experience? Consider the preaching and the example of the famed Jonathan Edwards, used so mightily by God in the Great Awakening throughout New England in the 18th century. But you say, 'Jonathan Edwards was a Calvinist!' I know--and that is my point. Edwards was acknowledged by society to have been one of the greatest intellects of his time. Yet he believed in genuine Christian experience so positively that he wrote a well-accepted book, Religious Affections, in defense of Christian emotion. Charged by some that his revivals had too much emotion, Edwards stood forth and proclaimed that when men and women meet God, accepting His terms, they experience an awareness that lifts their hearts to rapture. What higher privilege is granted to mankind on earth than to be admitted into the circle of the friends of God!"

  -A.W. Tozer

And the Scripture was fulfilled which says, “Abraham believed God, and it was accounted to him for righteousness.”And he was called the friend of God.

James 2:23

"It is important that we get still to wait on God. And it is best that we get alone, preferably with our Bible outspread before us. Then the happy moment when the Spirit begins to illuminate the Scriptures, and that which had been only a sound, or at best a voice, now becomes an intelligible word, warm and intimate and clear as the word of a dear friend."

-A.W. Tozer

It was a sunny day. An hour before supper and my husband was home, so I tucked Elisha into my sling and we all four traipsed down our dead end street and into the woods.


A hot and sticky summer day, but the evening-coming brought a bit of coolness into the air and the deeper we went into the lovely, hushing trees, the more bearable the heat became, even with a warm baby pressed to my body.


All my life, our dead-end street has led into these woods, and so I knew that sometimes dead-ends aren't that at all, but may lead into something delightful and deeper--


So Debbie's little feet scurried down the paths and we all hurried to keep up with her and the dust stuck to our sneakers and the prickly branches to our clothes--


And we stopped along the way and watched the ducks swimming at a safe distance in the pond nestled in the trees and we heard the beautiful, unhurried voices of songbirds and saw an adolescent cottontail frisk across the path and looked up into the great expanse of the trees and saw the touch of the Creator over every bit and we took pleasure in His handiwork.


It was a beautiful day.

And as we walked home and Debbie skipped a bit ahead, I knew a freedom in my soul that could only be the Great Father drawing my heart.


So many, many times I have walked through these woods and known doctrinally that the Lord is with me always, but this time, as at other times in the past, I knew a special sense of His presence with me -- the Holy Spirit speaking to me, drawing me near, touching my mind as I enjoyed His creation and yes, whispering His love to me.


Because He is a Person. And sometimes I can become so caught up in "doctrine" that I forget that He is a Person-


Doctrine is important. Because without it, the Person of God only becomes Who or what we imagine or want Him to be.


Doctrine puts flesh on experience and experience puts life and blood into doctrine and the two mesh and meet and become one and we are made alive in Him, in the living, breathing marriage of our faith.


Pure doctrine takes flight in the experience of divine Love.


And many times, especially in the more Reformed "camps" of thinking, we become afraid of "experience."


We shy away from the mystic writers and pride ourselves in "common-sense" Christian living, based upon the practical principles of the Word.


We are so carefully cautious that we become mummified and half-frightened specters of orthodoxy.


Vance Havner said, "Christianity is neither a corpse nor a ghost."


And it is a beautiful paradox that our minds and hearts can be engaged without being mutually exclusive of the other in our relationship with Jesus.


The more we love Him, the more He will reveal His Word to us. The more He reveals His Word to us, the more we love Him.


Christian "experience" when grounded in the Word of God is not something to be afraid of, but rather embraced.

Because doctrine without experience makes us into bloodless, lifeless corpses, and experience without doctrine makes us into unstable, flighty mountain-top-moment seekers.


We are driven by doctrine and softened by the experience of that doctrine being practically worked out.


One doesn't cancel out the other.


For a long time, I have enjoyed reading more supposedly "mystical" Christian writers--Andrew Murray, Oswald Chambers, Lillias Trotter, Thomas A'Kempis, and Ann Voskamp, among others.


Sometimes, these writers are "discouraged" within Reformed or more Conservative circles of Christianity, and though I believe that we need to use prayerful discernment as Christians (and feel hesitant when more emphasis is placed upon experience itself and not girded by sound doctrine), I also believe that it is an equal danger to become so "wary" of any Christian experience that we become spiritual stones -- all lovely and polished but dead on the inside.


I was encouraged when I discovered that A.W. Tozer (known for his incredibly solid doctrinal foundation) was a lover of the mystic writers.


I was delighted to discover this quote in his biography.


"Martyn Lloyd-Jones recalled, 'Dr. Tozer and I shared a conference years ago, and I appreciated his ministry and his fellowship very much. One day he said to me: 'Lloyd-Jones, you and I hold just about the same position on spiritual matters, but we have come to this position by different routes.' 'How do you mean?' I asked. 'Well,' Tozer replied, 'you came by way of the Puritans and I came by way of the mystics.'"


That I can be unshackled to experience God without fear is freeing to me.


Because our beings, our souls were created for a relationship, not a religion -- for a warm, intimate connection with a Heavenly Abba Father and with the Son who bore our sins in love and with the Spirit who enlightens and instructs and teaches us.


They are One -- and one with us -- through the believing, trusting orthodoxy of experiencing God -- deeper and deeper into the vast "forest" of the wonder of Who He is -- a realm of trees and streams and birdsong and loveliness that cannot be fully explored or explained in this life.


Because our relationship with Jesus is not a "dead-end street," but an experience of entering in -- into the great realm of all that He is, all that His precious Word communicates that He is.


And He is precious, a friend of those who seek Him.