Prayer - Living Alright — A.W. Tozer

The Effectual Power of Prayer

Have three texts of James, the sixteenth verse of this statement. The effectual left much for a chapter of the same book, but he did not, because the sixteenth of Luke came to this end, before it is given, so it is given before we have to do with prayer.

There is an ascension of the soul to God, translated into English, what the man said here, that it all the Old Testament and the New Testament teach, but this also the Old Testament and the New Testament demonstrate.

Now the text says that even though difficulties ought to faint. I could sit down after having said this, and I have said considerable already, I think, because these three texts have said it. States and across the line into Canada, I suppose all over the philosophy or something else.

Ups and downs, on this side of the tabernacle and end over there, your graph moving up and down. There were times when prayer was the peak of popularity, everybody was praying, and then there were times when it was considered rather old-fashioned to think about it, and then it would go back up again.

A popular thing, air passed them, the police have to ban them in the cities. Prayer just seems to be, it's quite the thing now, everybody prays. Between the First World War and the Second, it was philosophically bad to think about prayer.

It threw you over on somebody else, whereas you ought to be depending upon yourself. Then in the Second World War, there were no atheists in the foxholes, and everybody began to pray. The prizefighters even pray now.

When a prizefighter prays, he prays that he might be able to paralyze the other fellow, and then when after it's a nip-nip and tuck, and he's bloody but unbowed, and the other fellow is lying over, quivering in the corner, and they're fanning him, putting ice packs on his noble dome.

Why, they say, now all right, you say a word to your public. And he gets up and with much panting and breathing, says, I didn't do it, God did it. I didn't do it, God did it, we've been praying. I've got praying friends all over, and I want to take this opportunity to thank my praying friends for praying for me.

That kind of paganism belongs in New Guinea. It doesn't belong in the United States, but it's in the United States nevertheless. Can you imagine what kind of a God God would be? Should a prayer and unseeing be the third man who'd done the praying and missed and didn't duck in time while God would hit the other fellow so as to guard his friend?

That'd be a terrible thing to do. It'd be a sneaky thing to do to begin with, and it'd be unlike God and unlike Christ, and totally carnal and left-field. God would never be caught doing a common thing.

Everybody's praying, you know. People stop in the midst of any kind of wickedness and put up their little hand and pray. God's on everybody's mailing list. Everybody that wants anything, they go to God about it.

Prayer as a Means of Selfish Gain

I remember once reading an article about John D. Rockefeller and what a bunch of him and freeloaders all, one fellow wrote him this, Brother King, if you want to copy this for making money for the alliance missions, this works, you know, if you can get anybody to go along with it.

This man wrote and he said, Dear Mr. Rockefeller, you're a rich man and you're a man who understands business. I am not rich and I don't understand business. $500 and then invest it for me wisely. And then after it has made a big chunk of money, take out your 500 and send me the rest.

Now that's one way, that's one way of getting money. And that's the, that's one of the wolves of the rich man. He's on the mailing list of every freeloader and bum, you know, from the rock-bound coast of Maine to the sunny slopes of California.

As a politician said, and now Jack, because I've been up in Canada a year and a half and that's what they say, but project is American. Every kind of selfish project is being carried on, unscriptural, ungracious it may be, but it's sanctified with a text.

And it may have no higher motive, you know, than to relieve some fellow from doing an honest job or making an honest living with his own two little hard patties. A religious job somewhere and he thought up himself that it has, that has no place in the scriptures at all.

He didn't learn from the scriptures and he puts that across and works all his lifetime and gets old on that. To provide him an opportunity to travel at other people's expense. That's quite a popular thing now.

And yet the fellow will call prayer meetings and he'll even pray all night in order to get that prayer answered while asking God to bless the project that God never thought of. Jesus said that here are these trees and every tree that my father didn't plant will be cut down and thrown into the fire.

My dear people, we ought to be generous and we ought to give generously. But let me say to you most solemnly this morning, that if you waste your money contributing to the delinquency of religious delinquency of religious bums, you will pay for it in the day of Christ when he asks you what you did with your money.

You're not only to give, but you're to find out where you should give and give it and give it where God is doing something. Put your money where obviously the cloud and the fire are. And don't waste it giving to fair-haired, good, soft boys and to get out of a job.

A fellow one time had a letter, sent a letter around. Evidently sent it around to all of his mailing list. And I happen to be one of these suckers. Just to form, he said, I feel deeply, I feel called.

He said, I must go. The heathen are perishing. We must get the gospel out. And therefore, would you put a dollar in this envelope and send it in? If all of my friends to whom I write would send a dollar, I can make the missionary journey.

So he said, if you will send in enough. So I send out to my mailing list from, from Toronto and say, I want to go to Florida. This kind of business is it. God bless my trip to Bermuda. And I'll take my bathing suit along just in case.

Private Prayer and Appropriate Prayer Requests

Now about prayer, intimate things that we ought not to pray about in public. I'd like to pass that little word on. Here's a pastor of about 43 years. I have that there are some things you just don't talk about in public.

You don't bring it in. We should talk those over to God. There isn't a thing, not one lonely, tiny little thing that God isn't interested that that's that affects you. He's interested in everything concerning you.

John Wesley prayed for his horse and it got well and he rode off to his next appointment. The Lord will hear your prayer for almost anything that is not selfish. He loves everything about you and he loves all around you and belief and above you.

And you move around in a glow of God's love. If you're his child and everything that touches you touches God. But there are things that ought to be talked over between you and God and not be brought into the Wednesday night prayer meeting.

I've seen many a prayer meeting bogged down by personal details that never should have been brought there at all. I'm being in a prayer meeting and a dear old brother, a godly old scholarly looking sweet old man by the name of Brother Adams.

He was leading it. He's long been in heaven, but he was leading the meeting. And he said, now we'll have prayer requests. After another was made and one little old lady said, Brother Adams, would you pray for my twitching eyelid?

It's bothering me. And he solemnly took time out to pray for her twitching eyelid. Well, now, if I'd been leading the meeting, I'd have said, honey, rub it. The best way to handle a twitching eyelid. Don't waste God's time near my time, near the time of this company of assembled saints praying for a twitching eyelid.

It'll rub it. It'll get all right. And we just ought not to waste prayer meeting time bringing in personal things. We ought to pray for the great big things. I'm going to tell you what they are shortly here.

Corporate Prayer for the Whole Church

But then there is a second kind of prayer. And that is what we call corporate prayer. That's the kind of prayer that should have an aim that affects the whole Church of Christ, not only the Christian Missionary Alliance, but the whole Church of Christ.

That should be what I call strategic prayer. Do you remember once a group of people in the New Testament met and prayed for a man? And it was rather a personal deal because Peter was in prison and his brother James had been killed with a sword.

No, James, one of the other men, had been killed with a sword, and Peter was in prison waiting also to get the sword. So they went to God about Peter. Now, that affected Peter, but, oh, it affected everybody else.

Peter's job wasn't done yet. Peter was so important. Peter wasn't the first Pope, but Peter was so vastly important to the Church of Christ at that time that he was indispensable for a moment, and they couldn't give him up.

So they met and prayed, Oh, God, here, this affects all the Church and the Church for all the centuries to come. Get Peter out of prison. Peter got out of prison and they didn't believe it, do you remember?

Because some of them had prayed with, the ones that had believed, but the ones that had just been going along for the ride, they didn't believe it. And when they saw Peter, they had been mumbling, but they hadn't been believing.

And when they saw Peter, they said, it's his ghost. They said, he's dead and this is his ghost. They've already beheaded him and here he comes with just his ghost. But that was strategic praying, my friends.

They were praying strategically. They were doing something that would not only affect a man and particularly a man's twitching eyelid, but that would affect the whole Church of Christ. And I believe that corporate prayer, the prayer of the body, prayer of people when they meet, ought not to be wasted on details, but that it ought to be given over.

For instance, our Congo situation, it's so tragic now and so, so critical. When we meet to pray, we ought not to pray that my foot will stop hurting and any stifles. We ought to pray, Oh God, have your way in the Congo.

That's praying. We ought to pray strategically. Then we must pray in harmony with our work. That is, we can't, as William Law has said, we ought not to pray one way and live another. But we ought to pray in harmony with the way we live and in harmony with what we're doing.

And then we ought to bring our doing in harmony with our prayers and our living in harmony with our prayers. Pray according to the will of God and then bring what you're doing and the way you're living into harmony with your prayers.

Praying for the Restoration of God's Glory

Now there are two desires that should burn in the children of God. I want to give you these two desires. These are prayer requests that can be made in private, and God knows that I for one try often and much and earnestly to pray these two prayers in private, but they are legitimate prayers for the corporate body, the Saints, when they meet, the company, the assembly of God's redeemed people, when they meet, ought to keep praying these two, these two great kind of prayers, these two great prayers.

One is a restoration of the vision of the Most High God. A fanatic can go out on a limb and sit out there and for my time, there are too many of the Lord's dear people, when they get along a little, they get out on one thing and they're sitting twing twang and they think it's a whole symphony and it's just one little note, twing twang.

Well now I don't want to do that and I don't think I'm doing it. I believe that I have surveyed the whole Church of God and I know something of Church history and the developments of the work of God through the years and I believe I know something of the scripture and I am in a position, I think, wisely to tell you these two things.

One of them is, I've said, the restoration of the vision of the Most High God. You see, we have too low a view of God now and that is why the Church has such a low place. The Church rises or falls altogether depending upon if she takes a high view of God, her people are inclined to be reverent and worshipful and solemn.

If she takes a low view of God, they become funny and flippant and foolish and live worldly lives and give up to the flesh. If she takes a high view of God, she simplifies her church services immediately.

If she takes a low view of God, she has to drag in every kind of theatrical cut in order to keep her people coming. It depends upon her view of God. The old Presbyterians used to have such a high and noble view of God.

What is the chief end of man? To glorify God and enjoy him forever. Many of that school of thought held high views of God. Brethren, do you know the result of that? The result of that is that generation after generation following generation, they stayed true to the faith.

But as soon as we take a low view of God and get to thinking of God cheaply as they think of him now, cheaply, that God is a pal or that he's my partner or that he's the big Joe upstairs or that he's, call him by some other name, Olivia Knoll, one girl said he was.

Well now, as long as we think about God like that, we've never seen God. Imagine Moses tumbling in the fire and smoke on Mount Sinai, referring to God in any other way than in awful solemn terms. What we need in the United States, of what the philosopher called the mysterium tremendum, the tremendous mystery, and what the Bible calls Jehovah, high and lifted up.

And I there saw him with his train filling the temple. The trouble with you, dear young people, and God knows I love you as I've told you before. I do. I love young people. I love the twinkle in their eye.

I love their little giggles. And I love everything about kids. I love youth. And I don't like the word youth at all, but I love young people. Cheated in this awful hour in which we live, they've never seen God.

And they've never seen very many people that have. And so you poor kids are victims of an elder generation that never saw God. And so they've had to teach you to crash and drag in every kind of clap-clap to try to keep you happy.

And if you tell me the truth, you don't respect them for it. You go along with it, but you don't respect them for it. My brethren, the glory of God and the return of that glory, this is an imperative.

And anything else is secondary to it. It's more important that God be glorified than that men be saved. It's more important that God be glorified than that his work be carried on. It's more important that God be honored in his universe than that I be saved.

The wonder of wonders has so arranged it that the more he is honored, the more people will be saved. So that it isn't an either-or. I either win souls or I glorify God. The more I glorify God, the more souls will be saved.

And if a baptism of clear seeing were to come to the Church of Christ in America, sinners would come, and you wouldn't have to talk like them in order to win them. You wouldn't have to go out on that false philosophical boat with holes in it that will sink one of these days, that I've got to come down and be like them in order to win them.

I don't have to do anything of the sort. Paul made himself all things to all men, but all he meant by that in the wide world was that he'd so tense or he'd go anywhere, he never meant that he was going to cheapen himself and come down to the level of cheap sinners in order to win those sinners.

The Church dwelt on Solomon's porch and no man dare join himself to them. Nobody on Solomon's porch was running out and learning to talk like a beatnik in order to win a beatnik. On Solomon's porch they were there in a glow of glory so that people were afraid to come near them.

They said, look, God is on those people, and they fell on their faces and said, God's in this place. God again, and by a vision of God I do not mean anything to the visible eye. Anything you see with your visible eye you can safely ignore, because that's merely matter.

Matter, talking about the inner eye inside of you, and with that you are to gaze upon the holy face of God. And you know that in the sinful world is more important than anything else. It's more important than Canby.

It's more important than any church on the continent. It's more important than any school or any project that we're doing, that the name of God be glorified. But the beauty of it all is that if we're to see God and think of him big, and call him, if there are his projects, we'll work with Canby or I must glorify God.

No, glorify God and watch Canby grow. Glorify God and watch the Alliance grow. Glorify God and watch your church grow. But we try to make it grow and forget God. God isn't in half of the things. A fellow told me the other day about being with a certain man.

He was one of the Christian businessmen, brethren. I worked with him a lot and loved him, and certainly this isn't true of very many, but there was true of this one. A doctor, and this doctor went to him and tried to talk with him.

He had printed some tract or other that's supposed to reflect on this man, and hadn't, but he said it did. And he came to see him, this Christian, and he said, now I'll sue unless something is done. And this doctor said, well now brother, he said, we're brethren.

He said, surely God's job, leave God. This evangelical, this man who bellows about being born again, he wants to leave God out of it. He must be in it. Jesus said, Jesus, through this organization and no need, nothing is valid till the glory of God has been restored to mankind.

Until we think of him reverently, until we think of him high and lifted up, until we understand that he is the great God Almighty and Jesus Christ is the Lord, reduced and reduced and brought down and brought, but he fears the Lord Jesus anymore.

He is simply a big brother, easy to get along with, without very high standards. And we can live in the flesh and go along with the world. And then when we're in trouble, run whimpering to our big brother and he'll help us.

Sick of the devil, to get people to live like the world and the devil, and then think they can run to the Lord when they're in trouble. Why the Lord isn't a garage you go into when you've had a fender dinged.

He isn't a hospital you go to when you've had a heart attack. He is the Lord. God hath made this man both Lord and Christ and has set him at his own right hand and there he has all. When John saw him, he fell at his feet as if he was dead and took the hand of Jesus to raise him back from the dead again.

Deliverance of the Church from Babylonian Captivity

Bondingly, how desperately we need to see the church brought back again. And that brings us now to our second thought, that the second great desire should be a deliverance of the church. Now, again, I do not want to be nostalgic.

I never knew better times than I know now. So I'm not looking back on any departed glory. So far that I remember Finney and Augustine, by any means. Judging the scripture, judging the church, our church.

You say, what church, Brother Tozer? You're referring to the liberals? No. What are you referring to? I'm referring to us evangelicals. We're all tied with the same stick or blessed with the same grace and hold the same doctrines.

The church now, when I say the church, in captivity. For the church is in Babylonian captivity, as Israel was in Babylon. She stayed there 70 years and there came along a man by the name of Ezra and Nehemiah and some others, and they took them back into the land again, built the temple, dedicated it and started again to live as they should have been living all the time.

This was a parenthesis, 70 years out of the land. I believe the church of Christ now, the church, the evangelical church, the fundamentalist church and the borderline church that doesn't know whether it's liberal or evangelical.

I believe the church is in Babylonian captivity. But the Lord didn't desert Israel while she was in Babylon. He kept her there. He blessed her. He had her whole. So she came back. The covenant held. She wasn't lost.

She was still God's covenant people, but she was out of the land. And being out of the land, she was away from the place of power and away from the flame and away from the sacrifice and away from worship.

She was scattered through Babylon. Then when they brought her back, she built her temple and went to worshiping again. I believe the church now needs to be delivered from her Babylonian captivity, her disgraceful fornication with the world, and brought back into the place where the church should have been all the time.

Some people call that a revival. I don't talk much about revival. I used to when I didn't know anything about revivals, preach about them. I'd read Finney and then preach on revival. But I've got humbler since that day, I hope.

And I don't preach on revival, but I do believe that it would bring revival to the church of Christ. The church would be revived if she was brought back again to the place she should be, back to her New Testament position, back to living her morals in line with the New Testament teaching, back to the methods of the New Testament, and back to the objectives of the New Testament.

Nobody has any right to institute any program that is a New Testament in its origin. And then nobody has any right, having instituted a program, ever to carry it on by any other methods except those given us out of the New Testament.

Methodology that doesn't originate in the New Testament is a deadly thing, and you ought to get away from it as far as you can. Methodology that is a cause of psychology and salesmanship and all the rest, it's a poor cheap substitute for the Holy Ghost, and we ought to reject it.

I tell you, until this is accomplished, until the church has been restored, until we've been brought back again to the place where we can live as New Testament Saints, a good deal of our work is lost.

Evangelism Reproduces the Spiritual Condition of the Church

Evangelism is simply an extension of the kind of religion you now have. The evangelist can only reproduce himself. There's a law in the Bible, after he's kind, everything produces after it's kind. And the evangelist goes into a neighborhood, he can only make converts in his own image.

That's all he can do. And so evangelism is simply extending the degenerate Christianity that's now everywhere abroad. Now, by degenerate, I don't mean there's not some life in it. There was life in Israel when she was in Babylon, but she was out of the land.

There is life in the evangelical church. If there wasn't, I'd leave it. There's life here. There's life here, it can be. I trust there's life right here in this among you people of God. This is not to talk you down and unchurch you.

It's only to say we're not where we ought to be. We're taking, we're judging each other by each other and ourselves by the rest, and we have adopted a low dead level by comparing each other with each other, and we haven't seen samples in recent time of holy men and women.

I saw the other day, scrapbook given me by Mrs. McGarvey, or lent to me to look over, and there were the old saints there, way back to the beginning. Hess, and Brother Richard's father, and Dr. Simpson, and those were men of outstanding, they were head and shoulders above the average.

There were giants in the earth in those times. They pushed themselves, slid in bed. Evangelism only reproduces and turns out a great mass of people there just like us. The children that were born to Israel in Babylon were born in Babylon.

They were born and there was some life there, but they were born in Babylon. And then somebody else says, well, then what we need to do is to get busy on missions. But I have to say this anyhow, that, and he agrees with it, I'm quite sure, I'm only kidding.

The notion abroad that if you got an old dead church, sheep, you got goats, having saints, no good livers and all the rest, if you just start a missionary program, boom, up you go immediately. That missions is the panacea for all backslidden churches.

And if you'll just start a missionary program, you'll have a revival immediately. My dear brother, that just isn't in the New Testament to teach that. And dear Reverend brother, if you've tried that in your church and it hasn't worked, because it wasn't so.

And if you have instituted a spiritual program for missions in your church and the church has been blessed, then that still doesn't prove it works. It proves that the same yearning after God that led you to institute the missionary program in your church also led you to God.

One is not the cause of the other, but the both are the cause of a deeper, or the result of a deeper cause. Missions, I don't, I never knew whether to say was or were. I don't know whether singular, plural, whichever it is anyhow, missions.

It's simply going to another country than your own and preaching the gospel. And a missionary is an evangelist who's gone abroad. Evangelist is a missionary who's preaching at home. A degenerate church, they will carry their own concept of Christianity to, what did I say, Cambodia or Timbuktu.

And the church there will be what they made it. They'll carry that same secondary concept over there. I've been disappointed to the point of being disgusted. You tell me what excuse in the wide world of IQ of six and seven eights, what he, what excuse he would have of going to Cambodia or Loyola or Song from the United States to that country when we have a whole bushel basket full of things that they could translate into the languages over there and teach them theology while they're singing.

That's only one sample. Praise that God will raise up missionaries of such a superior spiritual quality that when they go over there, they'll produce converts of a superior spiritual quality. But somebody says, Mr. Tolga, now wait a minute.

You mean to say there's a difference when you're born again? Aren't you born again? And isn't every Christian like every other Christian? How foolish can you get? There's such a thing as being stillborn.

We had seven and they were all live born, but there's such a thing as having a stillborn baby. There's such a thing as having a baby that lasts a few minutes. A dear lady told me on this, that she was in her forties before she had her first baby and then had died.

Well, now that's too bad. And I'm sorry for that. That baby lived just a little while. It's in heaven now, thank God, but it just lived a little while. Well, there it is. We, we, there are babies born healthy.

There are babies born not healthy. We had a baby born, it weighed 10 pounds and 14 ounces. Well, now that boy, he came into the world bouncing, bouncing. But my younger brother was born to my mother when she was in middle life and he was quite a long, several weeks old before they could take him off a pillow.

They carried him about on a pillow. He couldn't, couldn't, his head was all pulled off on one side. He is, he came into the world a sickly baby, healthy 10 pounder. Christians can be born into the kingdom of God and there are different kinds of Christians.

Pray it through and repent and change all their ways and leave the world. Die to their flesh, believe on Christ and take him as their Lord. Man, they're big Christians in no time at all. Others come in under poor auspices.

They come in, we're weaklings after them. In our schools and our magazines and our editorials and our sermons. And with the kind of Christians we are. If we're poor Christians, second rate Christians, third rate Christians, weaklings.

And our printing presses and all the rest will be second rate weaklings. Rest upon our foreheads. And if we have said goodbye to the world and decided to follow Jesus Christ and follow the lamb, whether so wherever he goeth.

Religious Activity Without Spiritual Life

I'm going to get you down. I suppose some people wish I hadn't said I'd come back next year. And I have seen certain activities. Activities, so-called Christian are just the working of bacteria in a decaying church.

There never was a time when there was more activity than there is right now. There's something religious going on all the time. We're incorporating some new religious thing. Every time the clock says tick, we incorporate.

And every time it says talk, we incorporate. We got them all over the continent. And boy, the money they're taking. The overhead, the offices, the presence, you know. It's easy to become a president of something that you have founded.

And so we have presidents of this and presidents of that. And the money it's taking and the time. Religious activity, there's plenty of it. Working of bacteria in a decaying church. We need to hear a voice say, Lazarus, come forth.

We need to hear a voice say, come out of Babylon to change the figure and go into the land that I will show thee. And then when the church stands straight upright, bring her back in her cloud of glory back, then she'll go to work and she'll be active.

But her activity will have in it eternity. It will have in it the eternal qualities that will make it live while the ages roll. The church is back where we ought to be. I read this morning this text. I thought I'd leave it with you now in closing.

As the morning, fair as the moon, clear as the sun, and terrible as an army with banners. There's the church. There's a picture of the church. She looketh forth as the morning, the sun, with banners. The most pitiful organization in the world today is a church.

And anybody that wants something put over, he sells it to the pastor and the pastor sells it to his poor fleeced sheep. And pretty soon the church is back as something that may never have been of God at all.

But when the church looks forth clear as the morning, fair as the sun, the church restored until the company of God's saints were not looked upon as being what they are, saints of God. I'd like to see that, wouldn't you?

I'd like to see the church brought back made clear as the moon, and bright as the sun, and make her again terrible as an army with banners. I'd like to see pastors that were anointed with the Holy Ghost and with authority that would dare to stand surrounded by enemies and say, thus saith the Lord.

Instead of sneaking up and giving a little essay he learned at some Bible school where he got out of a book and then rushed off somewhere afraid somebody didn't like it. What's the difference whether they like it or not?

Dear brother and sister, I've made a career of preaching what I believe God wants me to preach, whether anybody likes it or not. And the odd thing about it is the people like it. To preach here, two years in now, and you want me back.

That proves maybe that you're a little further from Babylon than I thought. But there's still room for a good journey yet before you get the temple built. Shall we not pray that God will restore his whole church, including us?

Pray first and above all that he shall show himself once more to his people, high and lifted up with his train filling the temple, so that instead of flippancy and nonsense and play, we'll have sobriety and gravity and love.