The Place Of Prayer In A Revival Campaign

I was in Len Broughton’s Tabernacle some time ago, and was greatly impressed with the way the singing and preaching seemed to carry themselves along. A few nights afterwards, Dr. Broughton came to the platform late. We had already started the singing. He tapped me on the shoulder and said, “I am sorry I am late; we over-ran the time tonight.” After the meeting, I said, “What did you mean by over-running the time?” He said, “Our prayer meeting.” I said, “Do you have a prayer meeting before the service each night?” He said, “Oh yes. You haven’t been allowed to preach a night on this platform without the church officers meeting in the chapel and praying for God’s blessing on these services.” Then I understood why it was such an easy place in which to preach and sing and win souls.

I am going to speak to you a few minutes this afternoon because of Dr. Broughton’s absence. “Pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest, that he will send forth labourers into his harvest.” “Pray.” One would think that the Master had become extravagant indeed to talk about praying and harvesting. Harvesting—that means sweating, rolling up the sleeves, working after supper time at the close of the day, gathering a few more sheaves, callousing the hands, coming in almost too tired to read a chapter before going to bed. And yet the Master says, “Pray for the harvesting,” not “Toil for the harvesting.”

If you can have in this conference I genuine revival of New Testament prayer, you will shake this city with open air work before the last of August. If we cannot soon produce a New Testament Prayer Revival, we are going to fall into outright discouragement, no matter what we do in foreign mission fields. America cannot stand much longer in the church work without a real prayer revival. Jesus had great reason for saying, “Pray and harvest.” In the first place, it is His harvest. In the second place, it is our prayer. The harvest is His and He proposes that we shall rest while we do it. Properly considered, I suppose that preaching is the most restful kind of undertaking, but preaching that has in it the conviction that Joseph Parker had when he said it was “bloodletting” will kill a man in less than a week unless he knows the “rest of faith.” And the “rest of faith” always rests on proficiency in prayer—New Testament prayer.

It is time we repented for neglecting prayer. If the membership in the prayer meeting represents the spirit of interest in the church, it is time for a loud call to repentance. It will not do for us to say we will pray better or pray more or take more interest in prayer meeting; we must come to the point where we will say, “We have sinned against God in substituting anything for prayer.” Prayer is not trying to work a trick on God, and then proclaim ourselves clever. It is not trying to make God mind, and then saying to the world, “See, He minds.” It is not a verification of whether he exists. He exists whether we verify it or not. Prayer is God’s fountain pen, full of grace up to the top, and it is our business to hold it in our hand and move it back and forth and write the message of God’s will among the people. If we have made organization, or study, or oratory, or music, or sociability more prominent than prayer, it is time for us to stop short and repent.

Jesus never appeared so near extravagant as on the day when He said, “Whatsoever ye shall ask the Father in my name, he will give it you” (John 16:23), “that the Father may be glorified in the Son” (John 14:13). One is ready to say immediately that He must have forgotten Himself to turn a man loose on a promise like that. But “whatsoever ye shall ask in my name, He will give it to you.” And nothing in practice will so test a man’s Christianity as a New Testament prayer. When a man prays in the name of the Lord Jesus, is ready to have anything done that will make the Lord Jesus pleased.

Message from The Third Annual Conference on Summer Evangelism and Open Air Work, The Moody Church, May 31–June 3, 1910.