I want to talk about prayer, and in
the 4th chapter of Philippians, the 6th verse,
be careful for nothing, that is, have no
care about anything.
But in everything by prayer and supplication with
thanksgiving, let your requests be made known unto
God.
And so I'm going to choose this phrase,
in everything by prayer, and in doing it
I will not be doing violence to the
scriptures, because what it actually says is, in
everything by prayer and supplication, but supplication is
a form of prayer, with thanksgiving, but thanksgiving
is a form of prayer, let your requests
be made known, and letting your requests be
made known is a form of prayer.
So in everything by prayer is what the
Holy Spirit said.
Now, this is a remarkable phrase, and it
is a key to the treasure house of
God, and all that God has is ours.
But we are not enjoying all that God
has, either because we don't know it's ours,
or because we have not practiced in everything
by prayer.
Here we have an unfailing technique for spiritual
success, and this motto, in everything by prayer,
is one that might well be on the
cornerstone of every church building.
It ought to be in every pulpit, and
it ought to be in every boardroom.
In fact, for the average boardroom I would
suggest four of them, one for each wall,
large enough so that no matter which way
a board member was looking, he'd see it.
In everything by prayer.
Now, I don't know whether my method is
a good one or not, but Brother is
going to speak on absolutely nothing.
I whispered to somebody that I do that
myself frequently, but I don't know whether the
philosophy of things, but I like to do
it that way.
So I want to show you why this
morning.
Everything we do in God's church has to
be done by prayer.
I want to show you why.
It isn't simply that the Lord said it,
now you believe it.
But there's a reason why he said it.
There's a reason for it being true, and
the reason is that there coexist two kingdoms.
There is the kingdom of man and the
kingdom of God, and these coexist, and to
some measure they mingle, but not too much.
They touch in any way, and they live
side by side with each other.
And it's the kingdom of man into which
we are born.
When we are born, and the doctor says
it's a boy, it's a girl, we are
born into the kingdom of man.
That's the exiled man who is in rebellion
against God.
That's fallen man.
We were all born to fallen parents, into
a fallen society, and became members of a
fallen race by nature.
And this fallen race, this race of man,
they disagree an awful lot, but they are
in agreement on certain things.
You remember how Herod and Pilate had been
enemies.
Then when they came to judging Jesus, they
made themselves friends again.
They were apart on certain political things, but
they were together on this that they weren't
going to have anything to do with Jesus.
And so in the world out there, we
have the West against the East, and we
have races against races, and we have political
party against political party, and all this kind
of division.
But those are local things.
Actually, the human race agrees on one thing.
The human race agrees on the basic principle
that we call human self-sufficiency.
We believe that we are sufficient unto ourselves.
People believe that.
Oh, you occasionally will find a poor little
chap with no chin, infected and distressed, who
goes about not thinking much of himself.
But if you will press him and press
him, you will learn after a while that
he has quite a high opinion of himself
and his ability.
And if he doesn't have of himself, he
does have of humanity.
And he believes in what they call the
instinctive wisdom of the race.
Now it's a strange thing that the great
philosophers, I'm thinking particularly now of Emerson, talk
about the instinctive wisdom of the race, whereas
God talks about the folly of the human
race.
God says that we are fools, and men
say we're wise men.
God says that we act like foolish children
and know not as much as an ox
knows, for he knows his home and knows
how to come back, and a bird knows
its nest and knows how to fly home.
But we don't know our spiritual home, and
we don't know the hand that feeds us,
and we're not sufficient unto ourselves.
And then we believe in the soundness of
moral judgments.
The human race believes that there may be
a little mistake here and there, and there
may be a juvenile delinquent and a beatnik
occasionally show up, but that for the most
part we know what is right, and we
believe in the soundness of our moral judgments.
And then they believe in human righteousness, allowing
for a few flaws.
We believe that human beings are right and
good.
I wrote something one time to the effect
that people were bad, the world was bad,
and a woman, a very intelligent woman obviously
from her letter, wrote me a very sharp
letter and wanted to know what was the
matter with me, that I would make such
a statement that the human race was bad.
Didn't I know that they were conquering cancer?
Didn't I know that they were conquering polio?
Didn't I know that men were becoming brothers?
Didn't I know that there were hospitals everywhere,
that we were taking care of the insane?
Didn't I know that we had children's asylums
where children went and were cared for?
Didn't I know that insane people were not
driven out into the bushes as they used
to be, but were cared for?
Didn't I know these things?
Well, I don't know whether she was asking
me merely rhetorical questions or whether she thought
that I just had never been to school.
But I did know those things, but I
still believe in the basic badness of the
human race.
I do know those things, but I believe
in the basic evil of the human race.
I came up from New York Friday night,
and sitting to my left was a man
who told me, a middle-aged man, who
said he had been 30 years a newspaper
editor in the city in Canada.
And when you're up against a man like
that, you're careful what you say.
But pretty soon I forgot that I was
talking to a man who knew the world
pretty well, and we got to discussing politics
and communism and religion.
And I told him he was very much
distressed.
He was a very fine gentleman who was
very much distressed over world conditions, particularly over
the breakdown of the home.
And I said to him, well, don't you
know that this is simply a proof of
John Calvin's belief in the total depravity of
the human race?
And he said that he did.
Now, his name was Pat Kelly, and he
was an Anglican.
He was an Anglican, and I believe he
said, if I recall, that he was the
chairman of either the Red Cross or Harker
Cancer Society of Canada.
He believed in that, and he said, I
hope you won't think that I am too
pessimistic.
And I said, no, I've just written a
book that's worse than that, it's just about
as bad.
Because I don't believe in humanity, I don't
believe in the goodness of people, unless God
helps us, unless God gets into us, or
unless we get into the kingdom of God.
People are not good by nature, they're bad.
But we don't believe it.
Humanity doesn't believe that, people don't believe it.
And there's man's kingdom, filled with the subjects
of Satan.
And it's organized, and it's implemented by science,
and it has in its favor history, and
familiarity, and visible success.
And it is of the flesh, and it's
from the flesh, and it's for the flesh,
and it's dedicated to the flesh and to
the passing world.
Now, that's the kingdom of man, into which
you and I are born.
Regardless of our race, that's the kingdom into
which we're born, a fallen, hostile, alienated race.
Then there's another kingdom, and that is the
kingdom of God.
And that kingdom consists of recreated persons, persons
who have been born again anew, persons who
have made Christ their Lord and in whom
Christ is honored, persons who have no confidence
in fallen humanity, persons who have no confidence
in the soundness of man's moral judgment, but
believe that left to himself man law would
go wrong, persons who know that they can
do nothing in themselves and have no confidence
in the flesh or in their own strength,
persons who trust in God alone to do
an immortal work in them and through them.
These are called Christians, and they make up
the true Church of Christ of whatever denomination.
But it's a different kingdom altogether.
There is the kingdom of man, and there
is the kingdom of God.
And those two kingdoms coexist, and sometimes they
spill over into each other as water spills
over into the boat and has to be
bailed out to get together.
And I suppose there isn't any church anywhere
that is totally, totally, totally committed to the
kingdom of God to a point where everything
is done by God.
I suppose there will be a little bit
of flesh and a little bit of old
Adam and a little bit of the kingdom
of this world get into all churches.
I've never heard of one that didn't have
a little of it.
Then there are churches that have almost totally
given themselves over to the kingdom of man,
and their philosophy is man's philosophy.
Their beliefs are man's beliefs, and their viewpoint
is man's viewpoint.
And they go the way man goes, and
they live the way man lives, and yet
they call themselves churches.
Then there are such churches as this, where
an effort at least is made that the
majority of what we do should be divine,
and the majority should be on the side
of the kingdom of God.
But where undoubtedly around the edges there are
things that God is not in, in the
business of a minister, in the business of
elders and deacons and church members and Christians
everywhere, is to keep the church and make
the church just as pure as she can
be, and to keep all the kingdom of
man out of her, and to keep her
so replete with the kingdom of God that
when you step into the fellowship of the
Saints, you step into a divine fellowship, a
fellowship dedicated to the proposition that all men
are bad until they are made good by
the blood of the Lamb, dedicated to the
proposition that we're on the wrong road until
we find the road home to God through
the cross, dedicated to the belief that it's
only God in us that can do an
immortal work.
So we in the kingdom of God have
for our motto, in everything by prayer, because
we've already admitted we can't do anything.
We've already admitted there's nothing in human muscle
that can do the work of God.
We've already admitted there's nothing in the human
brain that can think the word of God.
We've already admitted there's nothing in human nature
good enough to build into the temple of
holiness which God is raising in his universe.
We already have admitted that.
How then can we do?
What shall we do?
Hunt a monastery somewhere and hide ourselves away?
No.
We're to be in active work, but we're
to do it by prayer, in everything by
prayer.
Now let me show you the contrast between
the kingdom of man and the kingdom of
the world, the kingdom of God and the
kingdom of man, and then you see how
locate yourself, locate this church, locate me, locate
us, locate ourselves in this.
Now the world says in everything by money.
Just have money enough, you can do anything.
Everything.
Money talks, and money opens doors, and money,
money, always money.
The more money, the better we get along.
Always money.
Christ hadn't a dime, but we say money,
if we had more money.
But the church says in everything by prayer.
The church says we're wise enough to know
that money is needed in the kingdom of
God, and that God uses it, and says
let everybody lay up in store on the
first day of the week.
We know that.
And we know that when we give, God
takes it and blesses it.
He hath spread abroad, he hath given to
the poor, scattered abroad, he hath given to
the poor, his righteousness remaineth forever.
We know that.
We know that in the kingdom of God,
God uses money, but he uses it only
because everything is done by prayer.
But if you have money without prayer, you
have a great curse on you.
I believe the greatest curse could happen to
have in your old church would be for
somebody to will us $100,000 and the
Lord not to raise up praying people commensurate
with it.
If God will raise up men and women
commensurate with the gift, then I wouldn't hesitate
to accept $100,000 and put it to
work.
But you get money without prayer and you
have a curse.
Yet prayer without money is amazing what God
can do and where he'll find money.
Amazing where he'll find money.
So the world says, and everything by money.
And then churches rise up and they're dedicated
to the kingdom of this world without knowing
it, the kingdom of man, and so they
try to run the church the way man
runs the church.
One man said, I'm a such-and-such,
that is, he was a certain denomination which
I'll try not to divulge.
He said, there hasn't been anybody interested in
my soul in all these years.
I said, nobody.
He said, I make my pledge yearly and
I send in my check monthly, and nobody
has bothered me in years.
I said, I never go to church.
He said, why don't you go to church?
I said, I never go to church because
nobody's interested in me.
He said, they're only interested in my pledge
and my check.
And he said, I see to it that
I get my pledge and my check in,
and that takes care of my religious responsibility.
Now he was sarcastic in that.
He didn't believe it, but he knew the
church believed it.
The church got his check and that's what
they wanted.
He could stay home.
Pastor could preach to his empty seat because
the check was in.
I'll take the people, you can have the
checks.
I'll take the people, God's people, God's good
loving people.
I love the people.
But you know, I find that if you
get the fish, you get the coin.
And you get the fish, there'll be a
coin in his mouth.
And if you get the sheep, they'll have
wool on his back.
So it isn't a choice between getting the
people and getting the money, because if you
get the people, you get the money.
The point is if you go after the
money and don't care about the people, we're
hirelings and not shepherds.
And the church that only wants somebody's money,
it's no church at all.
It's running after the principles of the kingdom
of man.
And then the world says, and everything by
social prestige.
I flipped the radio on last night.
After I'd gone to bed, I have a
little radio.
I don't listen to daytime to it, but
at night I sometimes do, often do.
And somebody was being interviewed as Jagar Gabor
was her name.
I don't know whether you know Jagar or
not, but she was being interviewed.
And I listened a while to what Jagar
had to say.
And everything by social prestige.
Get up there, get up there, and get
to know somebody.
And they say it's not what you know,
but whom you know.
Get to know people, big shots.
Well, I've always felt that social prestige won't
do it.
Christ was born in a manger, and Peter
was a fisherman, and John was a fisherman,
and Levi was a despised tax collector.
And the early church came up out of
people that didn't amount to very much.
Not many, not many are wise, not many
are learned, not many are rich, not many.
A few, but not many.
The early church was born up out of
the lower strata of society, and not out
of the higher strata.
She came up from the common people.
And the people who did miracles and went
about everywhere doing miracles were common people.
And some of our modern critics, our modern
scholars, shake their heads over Peter's Greek.
They say, Peter's Greek wasn't so good, it
wasn't anything like Paul's Greek.
No, it wasn't so good Greek, but he
managed to write some epistles that have blessed
a few million people down the centuries, and
he managed to preach a sermon that converted
3,000, and he managed to do a
few other things, and yet his Greek wasn't
so good.
I suppose that if he had been more
proficient in the Greek, he would not have
had one ounce of power more than he
had, because everything was done by prayer.
It was not by social prestige, but by
prayer.
And then in everything by publicity.
I sometimes tremble to think that my son
is now head of a publicity, a public
relations society, public relations.
They are talking about getting a Bureau of
Public Relations in the Christian Missionary Alliance.
Bureau of Public Relations.
I don't even think I know what they
mean.
I don't really know.
You go out and stand on the street
corner and preach Christ to the passing crowd,
you have public relations.
You preach Christ to the people you work
with, and that's public relations.
Be decent to your neighbor, and that's public
relations.
Behave yourself and obey the law, and that's
public relations.
Live as a Christian should, and that's public
relations.
But I don't think we need a Bureau
of Public Relations.
I don't think we need somebody sitting back
at the desk deciding how he can make
everybody like him, and win friends and influence
people for the Christian and Missionary Alliance.
My brethren, what we need is the power
of God, and let the public think what
they will.
And if we have the power of God
on us and live like Christians, regardless of
what the world thinks of me.
I want to stand well with God, and
if I stand well with God, I'm likely
to stand well with his best people.
And after that, I'm not much concerned.
But the world says public relations.
We ought to have a Bureau of Public
Relations.
I went to a church when my wife
and I went there before we were married.
We continued there after we were married for
a while, until I began to preach.
It was a great church, really a great
church.
They used to pray and testify and sing,
and the power of God was there.
They'd come at communion service and kneel down
to take communion.
I've seen them break into tears and break
into laughter along the altar, and the joy
of God was on the place.
The little church was packed full, and we
were having great times.
Then something happened, and they had a tremendous
church row, and the pastor was thrown out
and the devil was voted in.
Then they established a Bureau for Public Relations.
We used to get literature from them, the
such-and-such Bureau of Public Relations.
Imagine that!
When they grieved the Holy Ghost so he
couldn't bless them, then they felt they should
do something to keep themselves in good with
the public.
Scripture says in everything by prayer, not in
everything by money.
In everything by prayer, not in everything by
social prestige.
In everything by prayer, not in everything by
publicity.
In everything by committees.
I claim that there is never one hour
of the day or night from the beginning
of spring to the last of winter, the
next year, that there isn't some alliance committee
up in the air somewhere floating around.
We just try to do everything by committees.
Something goes wrong, we get a committee together.
A committee, said Vance Havner, is a company
of the incompetent chosen by the unwilling to
do the unnecessary.
We have these expensive committees floating around.
Just one fellow!
If the Holy Ghost had come on one
man, he could make a decision and say,
do it this way, bang, and it's done.
He can go off about his business.
Instead of that, they have to sit around
and talk for hours about trifles, talk for
half an hour about whether to take a
fifteen or seventeen minute coffee break in a
religious office.
They have to have it to relax.
Everybody knows coffee doesn't relax you.
It does exactly the opposite.
I drink it, but I know it doesn't
relax me.
Everything by committees.
I am for one more committee.
I would like to see a committee formed
for the abolition of all committees, for at
least a little while.
No, you've got to have them, I suppose.
They are like cleaning house and scrubbing the
dog and doing things you've got to do.
You don't like it, but it's necessary.
I suppose there have to be committees until
the end of time.
They had them in the Bible all down
the years, and we've got them now.
But the point is, if we realize that
a committee could cut its time down one
half if it prayed more.
Moody said that the length of time a
man prayed in public was sure to be
an inverse proportion to the length of time
he prayed in private.
If he prayed a long time in private,
he made his public prayers short.
But if he was short in private, he
was long in public.
I believe that the committee meetings that run
endlessly are simply indicating that they haven't prayed
enough.
If we pray more, we can talk less.
Then in everything by business methods.
We are trying to do the work of
the Holy Ghost after the technique of modern
businessmen.
It won't work.
In everything by prayer, everything by education, they
say now.
What we need is a more educated clergy,
more educated ministry.
Well, I believe in education.
I have said that many times.
I believe in education.
And if you don't get it in school,
you ought to get it in somewhere or
other.
There are books everywhere.
You can go down here to Eaton's, and
for $25 you can buy yourself enough good
books to get yourself an education in some
fields.
And you can get it in a year's
time if you read.
But I have noticed that when a denomination
starts to backslide, they always start to elevate
their standards academically.
The less we have of the Holy Ghost,
the more we have to know about Plato
and Aristotle.
Call that being acquainted with contemporary theology.
I think that we ought to be acquainted
with the ancient theology of Moses, Isaiah, David,
Daniel, Paul, Peter, John, and the rest.
And let the contemporary fellows kick the football
around, because always there is a bunch of
self-conscious intellectuals who are busy kicking around
a current football having to do with theology.
Nowadays it's neo-orthodoxy and neo-evangelicalism.
Those are big, long words that don't mean
very much, really.
But in everything by prayer, says the Holy
Ghost, and he made good on it.
Then the world says, in everything by compromise.
I met a man not long ago, a
Canadian man, who says that he is a
goodwill ambassador for industry between the United States
and Canada.
I pressed him to know what he did.
He said, I go from United States to
Canada, back and forth all the time, from
city to city, representing Canadian industry in the
United States to keep us in harmony.
I like that job.
It's a nice job, but it's trying to
get harmony between the two.
He said this odd little thing.
He said, the difficulty is to make the
two countries see that they are foreign to
each other.
He said, they don't act as if they
were foreign countries.
He said, they want to act alike.
He said, they can't do that under law.
I said, it's a pretty nice way to
be, though.
He said, it's a nice way to be
socially, but under law they are two countries,
but they are one socially in friendships.
That's a good thing, I suppose, to make
compromises where you can.
But in the Kingdom of God, compromising is
a pretty deadly business.
As long as the Church goes out to
the world and follows the world's ways, the
Church says, Compromise where you can.
Compromise everywhere and take in anybody.
I don't think there is a gangster anywhere
from San Francisco to Long Island, but what
could join some church in the United States?
I don't know about Canada, but I suppose
you're about the same.
They could get in somehow, rather you know.
If you smile and give them a check
and dress well and comb your hair nicely
if you have any, they'll take you in.
Nobody asks any questions.
Compromise is a curse in everything by compromise.
Try to get along with people.
Let the Church get along with the world.
The Church in the days of her power
never got along with the world, and the
world never got along with the Church.
In the days of her weakness, she gets
along with the Church, and the Church uses
her like a cat's paw.
A politician wants to get elected, so he
makes love to the pastor, hoping the pastor
will be silly enough to tell his congregation
that they ought to vote for the big
lug.
I wouldn't vote for him if he wrote
me a letter.
Just the fact he wrote me a letter,
I wouldn't vote for him.
Try to use the Church.
The Church isn't to be used, brethren.
The Church is to serve her generation by
the will of God.
But she'll decide how she's to serve her
generation, and the world won't decide it for
her.
The truth is, you can't delegate prayer.
There are some things you can delegate.
I can delegate my singing, for instance.
I can have Nathan McCracken sing my solos
for me, because I can't sing solos.
But I can't delegate my prayer.
Nobody else can do my praying for me,
unless I'm unconscious.
Then your wife sends for somebody to come
pray for you if you can't pray for
yourself.
But normally, you pray and we'll do the
practical things.
You pray and I'll sing.
You pray and I'll give.
You pray and I'll entertain missionaries.
You pray and I'll teach or sow or
serve.
You pray and I'll do the practical things.
That is a deadly snare.
If you cannot and will not pray, God
won't accept your sowing.
If you can and will not pray, God
won't accept your singing.
If you cannot and will not pray, God
won't accept your entertaining people.
God won't accept your money if you cannot
and will not pray.
It is prayer that gives power to all
these other things.
Singing, giving, entertaining, teaching, sowing, working, serving.
Those are all good things if we set
them aflame by prayer.
But if we try to do them without
praying, it's wood, hay and stubble in the
day of Jesus Christ.
The true success of any church is going
to be prayer.
We can easily deceive ourselves, but our purity
and our power and our spirituality and our
holiness will parallel our prayer.
If you were to have a graph that
businessmen love so well, and politicians, if you
were to take a graph and put it
up here and have two lines across it,
zigzag lines.
One you mark prayer, the other one you
mark spirituality, including purity and power and holiness.
Spirituality, prayer.
You would find those two graphs, those two
lines on the graph, they zigzag a little,
but they parallel each other almost perfectly.
Because morality will be dependent upon whether I
do everything by prayer or whether I think
I can do it.
Now, I'd like to say this, and I
hope it will be taken right, but whether
it is or not, I'm going to say
it, that no one has any scriptural right
to teach a Sunday school class who doesn't
do it by prayer.
If he isn't a praying man, he oughtn't
to be a teaching man, because no man
can teach anything that he isn't.
He may try to teach some truth, but
it won't do him any good and it
may not do anybody else any good.
The teacher ought to be a praying person.
No one ought to head a department in
Sunday school unless he is a praying person.
No one ought to seek to counsel others
unless they are a praying person.
No one ought to serve even in the
humblest capacity in any church unless they are
a praying person.
No one ever ought to serve on the
board unless they are a praying person.
Nobody who doesn't practice prayer, at least in
some degree of regularity, ever should accept a
job in any church as deacon or elder.
Deacons and elders are picked because they are
spiritual people, and if they are not praying,
people are not spiritual people.
I think it is a travesty and a
tragedy that in some of our Alliance churches
the women do the praying and the men
do the bossing.
The men sit around the boardroom and decide
how the church is to go, and the
women kneel in the prayer room and ask
God Almighty to bless it.
It won't work.
No man ever should sit and discuss the
affairs of the church a holy body unless
he is a praying man.
If he hasn't prayed, he has no right
to make decisions.
However, for us men, I'd like to say
this in our favor.
The women have the prayer bands, but there
are a lot of men who pray and
we don't know they are praying because they
don't belong to a prayer band.
So let's not divide between the two sexes
and say the women do all the praying.
They don't do it all.
I know some godly men who do some
praying, too.
I have no doubt that we have praying
men, and plenty of them on our boards
in this church.
But I merely lay down a rule which
is good not only here, but it's good
all over the world, wherever the Church of
Christ is found, that if you are going
to serve, you have to pray or else
your service will be wood, hay and stubble.
Everything we do must be done by prayer.
If I'm not a praying man, my preaching
will not do much good.
If I'm not a praying man, my writing
won't do much good.
It's said about Pere Grue, the great Saint,
Von Hubel said about him, the reason Pere
Grue's writings are so consistently and habitually blessed
and help so many people is that Pere
Grue refuses, absolutely refuses to write anything until
he has blessed himself.
He says he wants the oil of God
on him flowing where he won't touch a
pen.
I think that's beautiful.
They said about Andrew Murray, was it, or
George Mueller, one of the two, I've forgotten
which, one of them said, I will not
enter the pulpit stale, I will not enter
the pulpit dry.
He said, if I am to speak anywhere,
I wait on God and see to it
that the grace of God is flowing in
my soul before I dare to address anybody.
Oh, friends, if we want this Church to
be a rich, fruitful, God-filled Church, we're
going to have to accept the Holy Ghost's
philosophy in everything by prayer.
We're going to have to accept the Holy
Ghost's technique in everything by prayer.
We're going to have to accept it as
a rule for us, from everybody, from the
newest convert to the oldest Saint in the
Church, in everything by prayer.
And I promise you, my friend and your
friend and our brother, Robert Gray and I,
will take this as our motto.
And we'll never try to throw our weight
around, but we'll in everything pray, pray, pray
that the power of God and the grace
of God and the Holy Spirit of God
may be upon what we're trying to do.
Will you go along with this in that?
Amen?
Amen.