Prevailing Prayer

“As a prince hast thou power with God and with men.” —Genesis 32:28, KJV

I presume if I were to ask the members of this congregation to name their favorite Bible character, we would receive a great variety of answers. I know that some would pick Joseph, others Jonathan or David; and some might choose Samuel, while others undoubtedly would select Daniel, but I do not think anyone would pick Jacob as their favorite, and yet it is well for me to remind you that God has more to say about Jacob in the Bible than any other person, apart from His Son, Jesus Christ the Lord. Thirteen times God is called “The God of Jacob” and once “The Almighty God of Jacob” and innumerable times He calls Himself “The God of Israel” and frequently the reference is directly to the patriarch.

While Jacob was very far from being faultless, as we all so well know, yet he was also very far removed from being a despicable man. While he was crooked in some respects, he was not crooked in every respect. Indeed, Jacob was a man of sterling character in some very important phases. He was a man made in a big mould. He was shrewd, of great courage, a man of tremendous determination and of very high ambition—I might almost say he had a holy ambition—buy over against these splendid characteristics, there was weaknesses which handicapped him through all his long and eventful life.

Much Given, Much Required

The men who are doing things for the devil in Chicago and the world today (some of them very evil things), are, for the most part, men of great ability; misdirected men. It is a great thing to have ten talents if they are controlled by the Holy Spirit, but it is a dreadful thing if Satan has control of them. Jacob’s abilities became his snare.

Just as it was said of Elijah that he was “a man of like passions as we are,” so it could be said of Jacob, and in this fact there is great encouragement for every one of us. For as Jacob succeeded, so we may succeed, no matter how handicapped we may be by weakness which we have inherited. Now the secret of Jacob’s success is an open one. He knew the way to the throne of God; he knew how to pray. If you will study the story of his life, you will find that this is why he was never defeated by any man. His enemies could not triumph over him because he knew how to hide “under the shadow of the Almighty.” Prayer clothed him with the might and the majesty of the Omnipotent God. But someone may say, “Well, I pray, and I am also defeated.” But do you know, beloved people, it is possible for one to “ask amiss,” and receive nothing at all in answer to prayer? If you learn to pray as Jacob prayed, you can “move the arm that moves the world.” Now let us observe some of the features of the prayer before us in the preceding chapter. This, I believe, is the petition he presented at the throne that night when the angel of the Lord wrestled with him until daylight: “And Jacob said, O God of my father Abraham, and God of my father Isaac, the Lord which saidst unto me, Return unto thy country, and to thy kindred, and I will deal well with thee:  I am not worthy of the least of all the mercies, and of all the truth, which thou hast shewed unto thy servant; for with my staff I passed over this Jordan; and now I am become two bands. Deliver me, I pray thee, from the hand of my brother, from the hand of Esau: for I fear him, lest he will come and smite me, and the mother with the children. And thou saidst, I will surely do thee good, and make thy seed as the sand of the sea, which cannot be numbered for multitude” (Genesis 32:9–12).

Now a man that can pray a prayer like that, a man with such faith in God’s promises as Jacob had is a hard man to fight against. His weapon is invisible, but it “is mighty to the pulling down of the strongholds of Satan” and in the overcoming of all his foes.

Reverence And Godly Fear

First, I want you to observe that Jacob’s prayer was reverent and humble. He was a deeply reverent man. I remember once hearing of a great petition that was presented to the House of Lords in England, and that it was rejected simply because the petition had omitted one word, and that one word was “humbly.” He did not humbly petition that august body, and therefore his request was rejected. I cannot vouch for the truthfulness of this, but I am sure that a great many petitions presented at the Court of Heaven are rejected because they are lacking in humility and reverence. Mr. Moody used to say, “Humility is a great grace and very hard to find.” I just heard a little story the other day that will bear upon this statement. Someone in Canada desiring to pay a compliment to the great evangelist, D.L. Moody said to him: “I presume, sir, that you have preached to larger congregations than any man that ever lived.” With an expression of impatience, Mr. Moody brushed the statement aside, and said the writer who mentioned this fact in one of the leading papers of Canada just last week: “Moody fought for humility just as some men fight for honor and popularity.”

When I consider how humble this great man of God really was, I discover the secret of the blessing that was ever falling upon him and his ministry. I sometimes wish that many of the present day preachers and evangelists would emulate his example, and cease to bore us with these exaggerated accounts of so many “thousands” waiting to hear them and of the countless numbers that are converted under their ministry. “Let us have grace,” exhorts the apostle Paul, “whereby we may serve God acceptably with reverence and godly fear.” It is just here that I would sound a note of warning to my own people. There is a great danger in a church like the Moody assembly of becoming careless and frivolous in our conduct in the house that has been set apart for the worship of the true and the living God. There is a vast difference between being free and informal in the house of the Lord and being boisterous and light, and I am sure much blessing is kept back from the assembly of God’s people because of disregard for the sanctity of the place where we have come to meet the Lord Jesus in a very special way.

I believe in freedom and the spirit of good cheer, the cordial handshake, etc., but sometimes there is joking “and jesting which are not convenient” and absolutely grievous to our precious Lord. Indeed, someone said to me the other day, “I don’t think any differently of this house which you call the church than of any house built of bricks and mortar.” But I am sure this is not the right attitude for one to take. This is the place that has been dedicated to the worship of our precious Lord. This is the place for the assembly of God’s people in the Name and the Person of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ—and when we have gathered in the right spirit, we may rest assured that His promise is literally fulfilled, “There am I in the midst of them.” And that fact alone should sanctify the room in which God’s people have met for worship.

There is a difference, beloved friends, between this house and some other. This is the house of prayer and praise. We cannot afford to forget that. When Jesus went into the temple in Jerusalem, and although the “Shekinah glory” had long since withdrawn from that place, yet Jesus, when he saw the trafficking and the laughing and bargaining, drove forth those irreverent money-changers and said, “It is written, My Father’s house shall be a house of prayer, and you have made it a den of thieves.”

He Bowed Very Low

“I am not worthy of the least of all the mercies and all the truth which thou hast showed unto they servant,” said Jacob. He was bowing very low in the presence of his Lord. Indeed all the great men of the past who have stood straight before the world of sin have been very humble men. They had little or no confidence in the flesh. Contrition and confession were chief characteristics in their prayers, as they kneeled before the throne. “Take off thy shoes from thy feet,” said Jehovah to Moses, “for the ground on which thou standest is holy ground,” and as Moses drew near to that bush with awe and reverence, God spake and Moses heard. And so it was with Joshua and with Job and with Daniel, and with the beloved John, when he saw Jesus in that vision at Patmos. “He fell at His feet as dead,” he tells us. Never let us forget that the one whom John saw on that occasion was the risen Christ, walking in the midst of the seven golden candlesticks, which symbolized the seven churches, and the great truth taught is, wherever His people are assembled, He is walking in the midst of them. God help us ever to be mindful of the fact of His invisible presence.

At His Wits’ End

Another feature of his prayer is: Jacob had reached an extremity; he did not know what to do. He was a man of great resources, a born genius, full of schemes and plans, but these had all failed him, and now his only hope is in the God of his fathers. But do you know, friends, we always do our best praying when we have gotten to the end of ourselves and other things, when we can only look up and say with Wesley:

“Other refuge have I none,
Hangs my helpless soul on Thee.”

It is when we have some great sorrow, are cornered with some terrible difficulty, trouble that is too great for us, when we have come to feel that everybody else has failed us and that we have failed ourselves, and that God alone is our refuge and strength, that we do our best praying.

A number of years ago, I had a friend, a man whom I greatly loved—he was so faithful to his Lord and such a lover of his fellow-men. He was brought to Christ in a rather remarkable way. His wife was a Christian and, of course, desired him to be one too, but in ten years of married life, nothing had ever seemed to touch him religiously. There came one day to our town two evangelists—men of God—they were having great meetings and a goodly number were coming to Christ. My friend was a traveling man and away from home most of the time, but his wife planned so that she might have him at home at least for the last week of these special meetings, and he attended them, every one. The last night came; the farewell address was being given. He sat with a great multitude listening to words of power under which many hearts were yielding to Christ, but his own was as hard as adamant. The last hymn was sung and the people were pressing forward to shake hands with these preachers whom God had so used. My friend wondered why his wife did not go forward with the others, for he knew she thought very highly of the evangelists, but she was strangely silent and simply said as she touched his arm—“Come, let us go home.” They walked out amidst great numbers of people and were passing along the principal streets of the city when suddenly she grabbed his arm and staggered as if about to fall. He thought his wife had fainted and said, “Oh, what can the matter be?” Clutching him more tightly she replied: “Oh my dear, I feel as if I were going to die.” “Are you ill?” he asked. “No, my heart is breaking. Will you never be saved? Is nothing ever going to move you to God? I feel as if I should die if you do not yield to Him,” and my friend said, “I felt as if I was going to die too.” Like the psalmist, he felt “the pains of hell gat hold upon him” and he never knew a moment’s rest or peace until the following Sunday morning while his own pastor was preaching he let his head fall on the back of the seat before him and yielded his life to God. You see, friends, his wife had prevailed—she had power with God and power with men, when she had reached the extremity, when she felt God must do something or she would die. That’s where Jacob was when he cried, “I will not let Thee go unless Thou dost bless me.”

There are several other features of his prayer that I intended to stress this morning, but for the lack of time we must wait until another day, but in closing, just let me point out the present tense of Jacob’s plea: He did not say in his prayer, “I was not worthy 20 years ago when I crossed over this ford a poor boy, with nothing but a staff in my hand, a fugitive from justice, fleeing from the wrath of my brother—I was not worthy then I know, but O God, I am not worthy now, with all my cattle, with all my money, though I am rich and increased in goods, I dare not so much as raise my eyes to heaven and plead any merit.” Indeed, friends, I would have you observe that he looks upon his temporal wealth as mercies coming directly from God and the fact that he was wealthy seemed to increase his sense of responsibility, and I seem to feel as he prays that his thought is “Oh Lord, if when a poor boy with only a staff I needed Thee, how much more do I need Thee now with all this wealth and with my family?” You see, increase of wealth had increased his sense of responsibility.

I pity any man who is growing rich and losing the sense of obligation to God. And you know how God came to Jacob, changed his name and gave him power because he prevailed in prayer. If that passage of Scripture does not mean that, I don’t know what it means. “Thou has prevailed”—it means he got something from God that he never would have received had he not prayed. If that is true, may God teach us how to pray.