PRAYER
AND DESIRE
"There
are those who will mock me, and tell me to stick to my trade
as a cobbler, and not trouble my mind with philosophy and
theology. But the truth of God did so burn in my bones, that I
took my pen in hand and began to set down what I had
seen." -- JACOB BEHMEN.
DESIRE is not
merely a simple wish; it is a deep seated craving; an intense
longing, for attainment. In the realm of spiritual affairs, it
is an important adjunct to prayer. So important is it, that one
might say, almost, that desire is an absolute essential of
prayer. Desire precedes prayer, accompanies it, is followed by
it. Desire goes before prayer, and by it, created and
intensified. Prayer is the oral expression of desire. If prayer
is asking God for something, then prayer must be expressed.
Prayer comes out into the open. Desire is silent. Prayer is
heard; desire, unheard. The deeper the desire, the stronger the
prayer. Without desire, prayer is a meaningless mumble of words.
Such perfunctory, formal praying, with no heart, no feeling, no
real desire accompanying it, is to be shunned like a pestilence.
Its exercise is a waste of precious time, and from it, no real
blessing accrues.
And yet even if
it be discovered that desire is honestly absent, we
should pray, anyway. We ought to pray. The
"ought" comes in, in order that both desire and
expression be cultivated. God's Word commands it. Our judgment
tells us we ought to pray -- to pray whether we feel like it or
not -- and not to allow our feelings to determine our habits of
prayer. In such circumstance, we ought to pray for the desire
to pray; for such a desire is God-given and heaven-born. We
should pray for desire; then, when desire has been given, we
should pray according to its dictates. Lack of spiritual desire
should grieve us, and lead us to lament its absence, to seek
earnestly for its bestowal, so that our praying, henceforth,
should be an expression of "the soul's sincere
desire."
A sense of need
creates or should create, earnest desire. The stronger the sense
of need, before God, the greater should be the desire, the more
earnest the praying. The "poor in spirit" are
eminently competent to pray.
Hunger is an
active sense of physical need. It prompts the request for bread.
In like manner, the inward consciousness of spiritual need
creates desire, and desire breaks forth in prayer. Desire is an
inward longing for something of which we are not possessed, of
which we stand in need -- something which God has promised, and
which may be secured by an earnest supplication of His throne of
grace.
Spiritual
desire, carried to a higher degree, is the evidence of the new
birth. It is born in the renewed soul:
"As
newborn babes, desire the sincere milk of the word, that ye
may grow thereby."
The absence of
this holy desire in the heart is presumptive proof, either of a
decline in spiritual ecstasy, or, that the new birth has never
taken place.
"Blessed
are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for
they shall be filled."
These heaven-given
appetites are the proof of a renewed heart, the evidence of a
stirring spiritual life. Physical appetites are the attributes
of a living body, not of a corpse, and spiritual desires belong
to a soul made alive to God. And as the renewed soul hungers and
thirsts after righteousness, these holy inward desires break out
into earnest, supplicating prayer.
In prayer, we
are shut up to the Name, merit and intercessory virtue of Jesus
Christ, our great High Priest. Probing down, below the
accompanying conditions and forces in prayer, we come to its
vital basis, which is seated in the human heart. It is not
simply our need; it is the heart's yearning for what we need,
and for which we feel impelled to pray. Desire is the will in
action; a strong, conscious longing, excited in the inner
nature, for some great good. Desire exalts the object of its
longing, and fixes the mind on it. It has choice, and fixedness,
and flame in it, and prayer, based thereon, is explicit and
specific. It knows its need, feels and sees the thing that will
meet it, and hastens to acquire it.
Holy desire is
much helped by devout contemplation. Meditation on our spiritual
need, and on God's readiness and ability to correct it, aids
desire to grow. Serious thought engaged in before praying,
increases desire, makes it more insistent, and tends to save us
from the menace of private prayer -- wandering thought. We fail
much more in desire, than in its outward expression. We retain
the form, while the inner life fades and almost dies.
One might well
ask, whether the feebleness of our desires for God, the Holy
Spirit, and for all the fulness of Christ, is not the cause of
our so little praying, and of our languishing in the exercise of
prayer? Do we really feel these inward pantings of desire after
heavenly treasures? Do the inbred groanings of desire stir our
souls to mighty wrestlings? Alas for us! The fire burns
altogether too low. The flaming heat of soul has been tempered
down to a tepid lukewarmness. This, it should be remembered, was
the central cause of the sad and desperate condition of the
Laodicean Christians, of whom the awful condemnation is written
that they were "rich, and increased in goods and had
need of nothing," and knew not that they "were
wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind."
Again: we might
well inquire -- have we that desire which presses us to close
communion with God, which is filled with unutterable burnings,
and holds us there through the agony of an intense and
soul-stirred supplication? Our hearts need much to be worked
over, not only to get the evil out of them, but to get the good
into them. And the foundation and inspiration to the incoming
good, is strong, propelling desire. This holy and fervid flame
in the soul awakens the interest of heaven, attracts the
attention of God, and places at the disposal of those who
exercise it, the exhaustless riches of Divine grace.
The dampening
of the flame of holy desire, is destructive of the vital and
aggressive forces in church life. God requires to be represented
by a fiery Church, or He is not in any proper sense, represented
at all. God, Himself, is all on fire, and His Church, if it is
to be like Him, must also be at white heat. The great and
eternal interests of heaven-born, God-given religion are the
only things about which His Church can afford to be on fire. Yet
holy zeal need not to be fussy in order to be consuming. Our
Lord was the incarnate antithesis of nervous excitability, the
absolute opposite of intolerant or clamorous declamation, yet
the zeal of God's house consumed Him; and the world is still
feeling the glow of His fierce, consuming flame and responding
to it, with an ever-increasing readiness and an ever-enlarging
response.
A lack of
ardour in prayer, is the sure sign of a lack of depth and of
intensity of desire; and the absence of intense desire is a sure
sign of God's absence from the heart! To abate fervour is to
retire from God. He can, and does, tolerate many things in the
way of infirmity and error in His children. He can, and will
pardon sin when the penitent prays, but two things are
intolerable to Him -- insincerity and lukewarmness. Lack of
heart and lack of heat are two things He loathes, and to the
Laodiceans He said, in terms of unmistakable severity and
condemnation:
"I would
thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and
neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of My mouth."
This
was God's expressed judgment on the lack of fire in one of the
Seven Churches, and it is His indictment against individual
Christians for the fatal want of sacred zeal. In prayer, fire is
the motive power. Religious principles which do not emerge in
flame, have neither force nor effect. Flame is the wing on which
faith ascends; fervency is the soul of prayer. It was the
"fervent, effectual prayer" which availed much. Love
is kindled in a flame, and ardency is its life. Flame is the air
which true Christian experience breathes. It feeds on fire; it
can withstand anything, rather than a feeble flame; and it dies,
chilled and starved to its vitals, when the surrounding
atmosphere is frigid or lukewarm.
True prayer, must
be aflame. Christian life and character need to be all on fire.
Lack of spiritual heat creates more infidelity than lack of
faith. Not to be consumingly interested about the things of
heaven, is not to be interested in them at all. The fiery souls
are those who conquer in the day of battle, from whom the
kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and who take it by force.
The citadel of God is taken only by those, who storm it in
dreadful earnestness, who besiege it, with fiery, unabated zeal.
Nothing short
of being red hot for God, can keep the glow of heaven in our
hearts, these chilly days. The early Methodists had no heating
apparatus in their churches. They declared that the flame in the
pew and the fire in the pulpit must suffice to keep them warm.
And we, of this hour, have need to have the live coal from God's
altar and the consuming flame from heaven glowing in our hearts.
This flame is not mental vehemence nor fleshy energy. It is
Divine fire in the soul, intense, dross-consuming -- the very
essence of the Spirit of God.
No erudition,
no purity of diction, no width of mental outlook, no flowers of
eloquence, no grace of person, can atone for lack of fire.
Prayer ascends by fire. Flame gives prayer access as well as
wings, acceptance as well as energy. There is no incense without
fire; no prayer without flame.
Ardent desire
is the basis of unceasing prayer. It is not a shallow, fickle
inclination, but a strong yearning, an unquenchable ardour,
which impregnates, glows, burns and fixes the heart. It is the
flame of a present and active principle mounting up to God. It
is ardour propelled by desire, that burns its way to the Throne
of mercy, and gains its plea. It is the pertinacity of desire
that gives triumph to the conflict, in a great struggle of
prayer. It is the burden of a weighty desire that sobers, makes
restless, and reduces to quietness the soul just emerged from
its mighty wrestlings. It is the embracing character of desire
which arms prayer with a thousand pleas, and robes it with an
invincible courage and an all-conquering power.
The
Syrophenician woman is an object lesson of desire, settled to
its consistency, but invulnerable in its intensity and
pertinacious boldness. The importunate widow represents desire
gaining its end, through obstacles insuperable to feebler
impulses.
Prayer is not
the rehearsal of a mere performance; nor is it an indefinite,
widespread clamour. Desire, while it kindles the soul, holds it
to the object sought. Prayer is an indispensable phase of
spiritual habit, but it ceases to be prayer when carried on by
habit alone. It is depth and intensity of spiritual desire which
give intensity and depth to prayer. The soul cannot be listless
when some great desire fires and inflames it. The urgency of our
desire holds us to the thing desired with a tenacity which
refuses to be lessened or loosened; it stays and pleads and
persists, and refuses to let go until the blessing has been
vouchsafed.
"Lord, I
cannot let Thee go, Till a blessing Thou bestow; Do not turn
away Thy face; Mine's an urgent, pressing case."
The secret of
faint heartedness, lack of importunity, want of courage and
strength in prayer, lies in the weakness of spiritual desire,
while the non-observance of prayer is the fearful token of that
desire having ceased to live. That soul has turned from God
whose desire after Him no longer presses it to the inner
chamber. There can be no successful praying without consuming
desire. Of course there can be much seeming to pray,
without desire of any kind.
Many things may
be catalogued and much ground covered. But does desire compile
the catalogue? Does desire map out the region to be covered? On
the answer, hangs the issue of whether our petitioning be
prating or prayer. Desire is intense, but narrow; it cannot
spread itself over a wide area. It wants a few things, and wants
them badly, so badly, that nothing but God's willingness to
answer, can bring it easement or content.
Desire
single-shots at its objective. There may be many things desired,
but they are specifically and individually felt and expressed.
David did not yearn for everything; nor did he allow his desires
to spread out everywhere and hit nothing. Here is the way his
desires ran and found expression:
"One
thing have I desired of the Lord, that will I seek after; that
I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life,
to behold the beauty of the Lord, and to enquire in His
temple."
It is this
singleness of desire, this definiteness of yearning, which
counts in praying, and which drives prayer directly to core and
centre of supply.
In the
Beatitudes Jesus voiced the words which directly bear upon the
innate desires of a renewed soul, and the promise that they will
be granted: "Blessed are they that do hunger and thirst
after righteousness, for they shall be filled."
This, then, is
the basis of prayer which compels an answer -- that strong
inward desire has entered into the spiritual appetite, and
clamours to be satisfied. Alas for us! It is altogether too true
and frequent, that our prayers operate in the arid region of a
mere wish, or in the leafless area of a memorized prayer.
Sometimes, indeed, our prayers are merely stereotyped
expressions of set phrases, and conventional proportions, the
freshness and life of which have departed long years ago.
Without desire,
there is no burden of soul, no sense of need, no ardency, no
vision, no strength, no glow of faith. There is no mighty
pressure, no holding on to God, with a deathless, despairing
grasp -- "I will not let Thee go, except Thou bless
me." There is no utter self-abandonment, as there was with
Moses, when, lost in the throes of a desperate, pertinacious,
and all-consuming plea he cried: "Yet now, if Thou wilt
forgive their sin; if not, blot me, I pray Thee, out of Thy
book." Or, as there was with John Knox when he pleaded:
"Give me Scotland, or I die!"
God draws
mightily near to the praying soul. To see God, to know God, and
to live for God -- these form the objective of all true praying.
Thus praying is, after all, inspired to seek after God.
Prayer-desire is inflamed to see God, to have clearer, fuller,
sweeter and richer revelation of God. So to those who thus pray,
the Bible becomes a new Bible, and Christ a new Saviour,
by the light and revelation of the inner chamber.
We iterate and
reiterate that burning desire -- enlarged and ever enlarging --
for the best, and most powerful gifts and graces of the Spirit
of God, is the legitimate heritage of true and effectual
praying. Self and service cannot be divorced -- cannot,
possibly, be separated. More than that: desire must be made
intensely personal, must be centered on God with an insatiable
hungering and thirsting after Him and His righteousness.
"My soul thirsteth for God, the living God." The
indispensable requisite for all true praying is a deeply seated
desire which seeks after God Himself, and remains unappeased,
until the choicest gifts in heaven's bestowal, have been richly
and abundantly vouchsafed.
