Week 33 Sunday
Week 33 Sunday
Prayer Is Surrender
Psalm 143:10; Matthew 26:42; 2 Corinthians 12:7-10
We saw last week that everything from mineral to humanity has to lose itself in something higher in order to find itself. We love George Washington because he lost his Mount Vernon self in the cause of freedom; so he finds himself enshrined in our hearts as the Father of our country. We love Abraham Lincoln because he lost himself in the cause of freedom for the slave; so he finds himself as the Great Emancipator. All life comes to one conclusion:
Sweetest the strain when in the song
The singer has been lost.*
We lose the “I-that-is” in order to find the “I-that-ought-to-be.” This is done by a once-and-for-all surrender, but it is also done as a continual process. The continual process is prayer. Prayer is fundamentally and essentially self-surrender. I once asked Toyohiko Kagawa, the great Japanese Christian, what was the first thing in prayer, and he answered, “Surrender.”** He was right.
But the idea of surrender cuts across the usual idea of prayer as a method of obtaining from God your wishes. That idea is self-assertion. This is self-surrender.
Then is prayer passive submission? A denial of the will to live? Is it the will to die? Far from it. Prayer is a will to die on the level of a defeated, empty, ineffective, short-circuited life, and a will to live on the level of a victorious, full, effective, and cosmic-connected life. It is self-renunciation in order to find self-realization. Your petty self is renounced in order that your potential self might be realized. Prayer is the wire surrendering to the dynamo, the flower surrendering to the sun, the child surrendering to education, the patient surrendering to the surgeon, the part surrendering to the whole—prayer is life surrendering to Life.
A branch not surrendered to the vine, but cut off and on its own, is not free; it is dead. A person who doesn’t pray isn’t free but futile. That person is blind who won’t surrender the blindness to the surgeon in order to see. That person is free—to remain blind.
O God, my Lord, forgive me that I fear to surrender my sundered will to your saving will. I am afraid—of life. Help me, as I begin this adventure of prayer, that it may be no sideline activity. May it become me, that I may become you. For I must have your life to live. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
* Widely attributed to nineteenth-century author and activist Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward.
* * Kagawa (1888–1960) was a Japanese Christian reformer who worked on ways to employ Christian principles in the ordering of society.
Week 33 Monday
Prayer Is Alert Passivity
Luke 21:36; John 15:7; Ephesians 6:18; Philippians 4:6-7
We saw yesterday that prayer is essentially surrender, but not a passive surrender. It is an “alert passivity.” It is a passivity that awakens us to an amazing activity. The musician listens in the silence to music, surrenders to it, and then pours it forth with complete abandon—creative because receptive.
The scientist surrenders to the facts of nature—flings open the doors of the senses to be guided and directed by the facts—passive, but with an alert passivity. Facts now become factors; they are gathered up and put to work in factories, turned out as finished products to serve the world. The surrender was really a mastery.
One day, in the train, instead of thinking, I simply surrendered to Thought. My mind was perfectly passive and yet perfectly active. It seemed that Thought awakened thought. I accomplished more actual thinking in those blissful hours than in days of thinking on my own. We must learn to live in the passive voice. Only those who do so know what it means to live in the active voice. The fussy activity of the modern person is not life; it is the nervous twitching of disordered and starved nerves. When animals lack certain vitamins, they will become nervous, jumpy, and hysterical. The rush of modern life is not the calm, poised sureness of mastery. Rather, it is the jumpy hysteria of starved nerves crying out for vitamins of real life. Someone has said that no one commits suicide because he is tired of life, but because he is tired of a lack of life.
Jesus put the alternatives this way: “men ought always to pray, and not to faint” (Luke 18:1 KJV). It is pray or faint—literally that. Those who pray do not faint, and those who faint do not pray. You can become alive to your fingertips—every cell in your body alert, active, creative—provided you pray. Otherwise you faint.
Pray or be a prey: to fears, to futilities, to ineffectiveness.
Gracious Lord, I thank you that power, power, power is open to me if I but take it. Help me empty my hands of trifling toys that I may take, take, take the things you are offering me—release, power, victory. Why should I do myself and others this wrong?—weak when I might be strong, a victim when I might be victor. Amen.
Week 33 Tuesday
Is Prayer Autosuggestion?
Psalm 55:22; Matthew 7:7; John 14:13
But is not prayer “autosuggestion,” “wishful thinking,” “an echo of your own voice”? Suppose it were just autosuggestion; even on that level it would be a healthy thing, for you are suggesting to yourself the highest instead of the lowest. Even if it were no more than autosuggestion, prayer would be worthwhile. It would heighten our powers to suggest the highest to them. But how is it that those who use prayer most are convinced that it is Other-suggestion rather than autosuggestion? Only those who use it least, or not at all, claim that it is autosuggestion. Are they competent witnesses? Prayer would never have survived had it been only autosuggestion, with no Voice answering our voice, no Heart answering ours.
Whoso has felt the Spirit of the Highest
Cannot confound nor doubt Him nor deny:
Yea, with one voice, O world, tho’ thou deniest,
Stand thou on that side, for on this am I.*
Can the flower believe that the sun is only the projection of itself? Does the wire believe that the energy within comes from itself and not from the dynamo? The sense of Otherness is in true prayer. Something answers, and answers in terms that are worthy: release, power, vitality, insight, heightened accomplishment.
Prayer is the perfect instrument of development and of doing: it is outgoing, it is incoming; it is faith in God, and faith in oneself; it is active, it is passive; it is strenuous, it is calm; it works as if the whole thing depended on us, and trusts as if the whole thing depends on God. Is such a faith, so sound and health-giving, itself a delusion? Like produces like. How is it that the bitter and disillusioned deride prayer; and the calm, the poised, the hopeful, the radiant delight in prayer? It was said of William E. Gladstone, “He lived from a great depth of being.”** Is it better to live from a great depth of being, or to live from the shallow life around one?
My God and my Lord, I would live in you and have you live in me. For then, then my life will throb with energy and poise, with power and with peace. Then I, too, shall live at a great depth of being. Teach me to pray, for I would live—live abundantly. Amen.
* Frederic William Henry Myers, Saint Paul (New York: Macmillan and Co., 1887), 42.
** James Mudge, Religious Experience Exemplified in the Lives of Illustrious Christians (Cincinnati: Jennings and Graham, 1913), 59.
Week 33 Wednesday
Prayer: The Greatest Single Power
Psalms 27:14; 30:2; Luke 11:1; James 5:16
Dr. William Sadler, the psychiatrist, says that in neglecting prayer we are “neglecting the greatest single power in the healing of disease.”* He refuses to take a patient who does not believe in God; says it is impossible to get patients straightened out unless they have something to tie to and love beyond themselves. We are literally coming down to this alternative: meditation or medication. And even the latter is not effective unless linked with the former.
Then the art of prayer must be learned, for reservoirs of power are at our disposal if we can learn this art. “If we learn it”—that is the rub. People expect results without any practice of the art. We would deem a person foolish who stepped up to a musical instrument only occasionally, expecting to tune into music and become the instrument of music without long training and practice. The little son of a missionary bought a mouth organ in India, and came home in tears: “That man cheated me. There is no ‘God Save the King’ in this mouth organ.” We just as foolishly believe we can get ready-made results without the practice of prayer.
We live in an open universe. Anything that is right is possible if we will obey the laws of accomplishment and relate ourselves to its powers. Just as God has left open certain things contingent upon the human will, and they will never be accomplished unless that will decides; so God has left open certain things contingent upon prayer—things which will never be accomplished unless we pray. To paraphrase Rudyard Kipling: “Anyone might have heard it, but his whisper came to her.” Why? She was trained in the art of listening.**
There are three steps in the art of prayer: (1) Listen; (2) Learn; (3) Obey. Without all three, prayer will be a farce instead of a force.
If we spent half the time in learning the art of prayer that we spend in learning any other art, we would get ten times the results.
Gracious Christ, teach me to pray. For if I fall down here, I fall down everywhere—anemia spreads through my whole being. Give me the mind to pray, the love to pray, the will to pray. Let prayer be the aroma of every act, the atmosphere of every thought, my native air. In your name. Amen.
* Published source unknown.
**Paraphrase of a line in “The Explorer” (1898).
Week 33 Thursday
Nine Steps in Prayer
Matthew 6:5-15; James 1:6
While the three steps we mentioned in closing yesterday—Listen, Learn, Obey—are the three general steps in prayer, we must now come to specific steps in the art of prayer. There are nine.
(1) Decide what you really want. I would stress the you, not a part of you, a vagrant portion of you wandering into the prayer hour as a side adventure. It must be you, the whole you. For prayer is not a luxury; it is a life. If you take things from God, there will be one result: God will get you, or prayer will cease, blocked by the refusal of self-giving. The request must be backed by you, or the answer will not be backed by God. God cannot give things to you apart from Godself, and you cannot take things from God apart from yourself. Prayer involves mutual self-giving. Decide what you really want, for if the whole you does not really want it, the prayer is blocked.
(2) Decide whether the thing you want is a Christian thing. God is a Christlike God; God’s actions are Christlike actions; and God can answer prayer only if the thing desired is in accord with Christ. That is what Jesus meant when he said, “If you ask anything m my name . . . ” (John 14:14)—in my character, according to my Spirit. Don’t try to get God to do something that isn’t Christlike. God can’t do something against God’s own nature. Within that limit God gives you freedom to ask “anything.”
(3) Write it down. The expression will deepen the impression. I find that to write down a thing is almost destiny. I think I will change it; but once written, it is almost impossible to change it. With Pilate, we say, “What I have written I have written” (John 19:22). If you are willing to commit your prayer to paper, you probably really mean it. In writing it down, you do two things: You write it more deeply on your own heart; you commit yourself more fully to a line of action. To write it down is one step in self-committal.
Patient Christ, my feet stumble on this pathway of prayer. I am learning to walk—help me over the hard places. For I would learn this art. This is life, and I must learn it. I begin to feel I can do anything in and with you. My liberties are dawning. I thank you. Amen.
Week 33 Friday
Further Steps in Prayer
Psalms 46:1-2, 10; 55:22; 62:5
We come to the next step in the art of prayer:
(4) Still the mind. Just as the moon cannot reflect well on a restless sea, so God cannot get to an unquiet mind. “Be still, and know” (Ps. 46:10); be unstill and you do not know; God cannot get to you. In the stillness, the prayer itself may be corrected. For God not only answers prayer but also corrects prayer and makes it more answerable. One night, I bowed my head in silent prayer before a sermon and whispered to God, “O God, help me.” Very quickly came back the reply: “I will do something better; I will use you.”
That amendment was decidedly better. I was asking God to help me—I was the center; I was calling God in for my purposes. But “I will use you” meant I was not the center; something beyond me was the center, and I was only the instrument of that purpose beyond myself. God’s answer shifted the whole center of gravity of the prayer.
(5) Talk with God about it. The order of these steps is important: Listen to God before you talk. For, as someone has said, “Instead of saying, Speak, Lord, for your servant heareth,’ many say, ‘Listen, Lord, for your servant speaketh.’ ” Let God have the first word and the last word; you take the middle word. Let your speaking with God be largely a turning over of the whole matter into God’s hands—you becoming the instrument of God’s purposes. Remember, the word is, “Talk with God,” and not, “Talk to God.” Make prayer a two-way conversation.
(6) Promise God what you will do to make this prayer come true. As the conversation is a two-way affair, so the accomplishment is a double affair. God answers the prayer, not for you, but with you. The answering of prayer is a cooperative endeavor. For God’s interest is not to give you things, but to make you, through the getting of those things. The end of the whole process of prayer is not the prayer but the person.
O Lord, I begin to see—my object has been things I thought I needed, and now I see that your object is to make me. I asked for the little; you are giving the great, the permanent, the everlasting. Help me be responsive at the depth of your purposes. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Week 33 Saturday
The Final Steps of Prayer
Psalms 40:1; 121:7-8; 1 Peter 5:10; 1 John 3:16-18
We pursue the nine steps of prayer.
(7) Do everything loving that comes to your mind about it. That word loving is important. If the thing suggested to your mind is unloving, it is from below, perhaps from the depths of your subconscious mind; but if it is loving, it is from above. A discerning friend said, “The only thing the devil cannot get into is the love of Christ, for if he did, he wouldn’t be the devil any longer.” That word do is also important, for if you are unwilling to do, you have tied God’s hands. God can’t do, if you won’t. Prayer is the working out of what God works in.
(8) Thank God for answering in God’s own way. Remember that no is an answer, as well as yes. Sometimes God has to save us, as Rabindranath Tagore says, “by hard refusals.”* But if God refuses on one level, it is only to make an offer on a higher level. God’s no is only in order to reach a higher yes. But the probabilities are that if the prayer has run the gantlet of the previous steps and survived to this stage, it is a prayer that is answerable by yes. But that yes may be delayed in order to put persistence and toughened fiber in us. God often holds us off to deepen our character, so that we won’t be spiritual crybabies if we don’t get everything at once.
(9) Release the whole prayer from your conscious thinking. If the prayer is real and has hold of you, it will be at work in the subconscious mind; there will be an undertone of prayer in all you do. But it should be released from the conscious mind lest it become an anxiety center and make you tense and wrought up. The very releasing of it from the conscious mind is an act of faith in God. You relax and trust God to do the right thing in the matter.
These nine steps are the ladder by which you climb from your emptiness to God’s fullness. And prayer is just that; it is the opening of a channel from your emptiness to God’s fullness.
Gracious Spirit, I cannot pray as I ought unless I become Spirit-taught. Inspire the prayers within me that I may pray according to your will, and hence be answered according to your power. For I would live a Spirit-inspired life, and hence a Spirit-empowered life. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
* Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali (London: Chiswick Press for the India Society, 1912), chap. 14.