How often and how well do we pray? How often is easy to measure. During a great revival in the 1800s, Horace Greeley, the newspaper editor, once sought to know how many men were praying in New York City. He sent a man in a buggy around to the various churches to count the number of men and women praying on their lunch hour. There were so many, the man could not get to all the churches to count. We can do similar counts today and there are several ministries and poling places that do counting, but I think the percentage of men praying then, was far greater than those praying today.
So much for the question of how often, the second question is a bit more difficult to determine, how well do we pray. There are many measures used by people, but there should be only one measure of how well we pray. It is much more than the number of men and women who pray, or even the men and women who have a prayer habit. Those who pray well, command the power of God in prayer and in their hands prayer is powerful. They are able and regularly do move heaven and earth by prayer.
With this as a measure, how do we measure up? E.M. Bounds describes the measure of prayer as, “men with whom prayer is a mighty force, an energy that moves heaven and pours untold treasures of good on earth”. Are our prayers a mighty force? Are our prayers an energy that moves heaven and earth? Have you been praying and by your prayers pouring out treasure of good on earth?
If we do not measure up to this standard, what can we do to change? Even if we do measure up, are their things we can do to be better? There are many possible answers, but one fundamental answer that we must investigate. We must check ourselves and see if we meet God’s standard of personal purity. Too often people are comfortable creating their own personal standard. However, we are people of His covenant or we are not, we cannot change the terms and conditions to suit our wants and desires. We are bought with a price and if we claim to be His, if we long to have His power in prayer, then we must meet His requirements.
While he wrote a hundred and fifty years ago, E. M. Bounds captures the problem we too often face today.
The age of Church organization and Church machinery is not an age noted for elevated and strong personal piety. Machinery looks for engineers and organizations for generals, and not for saints, to run them. The simplest organization may aid parity as well as strength but beyond that narrow limit organization swallows up the individual, and is careless of personal purity; push, activity, enthusiasm, zeal for an organization, come in as the vicious substitutes for spiritual character. Holiness and all the spiritual graces of hardy culture and slow growth are discarded as too slow and too costly for the progress and rush of the age. By dint of machinery, new organizations, and spiritual weakness, results are vainly expected to be secured which can only be secured by faith, prayer, and waiting on God.
The man and his spiritual character is what God is looking after. If men, holy men, can be turned out by the easy processes of Church machinery readier and better than by the old-time processes, we would gladly invest in every new and improved patent; but we do not believe it. We adhere to the old way—the way the holy prophets went, the king’s highway of holiness.
There is a path for us to walk, a way of holiness. If we are to measure up in prayer, we must walk in His way. Let us be holy even as He is holy, so we can pray.
A highway shall be there, and a road, And it shall be called the Highway of Holiness. The unclean shall not pass over it, But it shall be for others. Whoever walks the road, although a fool, Shall not go astray. No lion shall be there, Nor shall any ravenous beast go up on it; It shall not be found there. But the redeemed shall walk there, And the ransomed of the Lord shall return, And come to Zion with singing, With everlasting joy on their heads. They shall obtain joy and gladness, And sorrow and sighing shall flee away.
Isaiah 35:8-10 (NKJV)
I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service. And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.
Romans 12:1-2 (NKJV)
