Prayer - (With The Invasion Story)

By: Z. B. Duncan

            Today I would like to speak to you about Prayer.  Jesus our Lord was a man of prayer.  We find in Matthew 14:23, "And when he had sent the multitudes away, he went up into a mountain apart to pray."  In Mark 1:35 we read, "And in the morning, rising up a great while before day, he went out and departed into a solitary place and there prayed."  In Luke 5:16, "And he withdrew himself into the wilderness and prayed."  Before his arrest he took with him Peter and the two sons of Zebedee and began to be sorrowful and very heavy.  Then saith he unto them, "My soul is exceeding sorrowful even unto death.  Tarry ye here and watch with me."  And he went a little farther and fell on his face and prayed, saying, "O my father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me; Nevertheless not as I will but as thou will."  This he did three times.  Now many people today feel that their prayers are in vain.  They feel they have lost contact with God.  When God Is Dead hit the headlines they could almost say "Amen" because they had lost communication with God.  What is prayer?  We find that prayer was, prayer is, to petition, to entreat grace, to make supplication, to judge one's self, to ask or wish for, to bend or to bow, to interrogate, to meditate, to pour out.  With so many meanings and so many different words translated pray and prayer perhaps we just do not know how to communicate with God.  I Corinthians 14:15, "What is it then," Paul asks.  "I will pray with the spirit, and I will pray with the understanding."  For prayer to be effective man has to pray in the spirit and in understanding.  We might ask ourselves how can one get into the spirit of prayer.  First of all, there is a depth to prayer.  If we skim the outer surface and never go down into the depth of our hearts until we are in the dimension of spiritual power we cannot communicate with God.  Let me give you an example.  One night during World War II, I found myself with army pack and rifle all ready for the invasion.  We were to land in the third wave.  Having been briefed by our commanding officers we were told some of the things to expect.  Now I had had a taste of bombing and submarine attacks, but never had I come face to face with the enemy on the battlefield.  That evening as I watched the great convoy move along I watched the sun set in all of its beauty and I thought, this may be the last sunset I will ever see.  After the darkness had settled I went down into the compartment of the ship to await the "H" hour.  As I had all my pack and rifle and everything in readiness I hit the sack, but sleep did not come.  Many things come to your mind at a time like this.  You can look forward to the battle, you can think what is going to happen, will I get it?  Is my time up?  Will I be killed?  I think perhaps most of all you look not toward the battle at times like this, but back.  You think of Dad and Mom and the brothers and sisters and how you once felt so secure in the old home place.  You remember the church where you used to go and worship God.  You remember the school and schoolmates across the years.  Perhaps you never did really appreciate them before, but now in the wee hours just before the great invasion they really become a treasure.  In this stillness you can hear your buddies next to you breathing hard.  You wonder if they are asleep or if they are like you…thinking…thinking.  Cannot sleep… Then you begin to pray.  Dear God, bless my parents, bless my wife, bless my brothers and sisters, bless my country, bless the church, Lord, and bless all of my school teachers and all my schoolmates, and Lord, I am facing the greatest battle in my life, and Lord I'm scared.  Lord, I am scared stiff, and Lord, I need you, Lord.  I need you more right now than I ever have.  Lord, I am begging.  Lord, I am pleading.   Lord, I promise you that if you will take me through this I will serve you.  Now, beloved, I know what prayer is.  For that night I learned to pray not for 15 minutes, not for one hour, but as the hours wore on to the hour of our embarking and going over the side in cargo nets into the small boats I prayed.  Not from the top surface of my heart.  Oh, I may have started on the top, but I began to go deeper until at the last I had come to the point I was calling to God with all my heart.  From the depths of my heart, soul, and spirit.  My whole being was in communication with God.  This is what I mean by prayer that moves heaven.  When I saw the horrors of battle and the enemy I was afraid, but with a calmness because that communication with God had given me an inward strength that surpassed all of my physical ability.  There are many dimensions of prayer, Beloved, and we are answered according to the dimension we pray in.  There can be very little and small results with the first dimension when you just pray with your mind in a wish and perhaps express it with your lips.   There is a greater depth when you go a little farther and truly pray from the top of your heart and express it in your mind and your lips and sort of hope that God will hear and answer.  Then there is still the greater dimension, when you pray from the middle of your heart and with sincerity and with a feeling of the spirit beginning to vibrate and you can feel the warmth of His spirit and his power and you express it with your mind and lips.  But you have not more than reached a dimension of starting a fire in your communication.  You are talking with God.  You then speak from 3/4 of the depth of your heart and you really begin to understand and the fire of the spirit burns a little brighter, and when you begin to ask, beseech, and meditate that begins to be fruitful.  You almost can understand that God is close by.  You almost feel you have perfect contact, but you have not gone deep enough.  Only perhaps in some great crisis or tragedy do we ever drop to the depths of our soul, of our mind, of our heart, and of our spirit and search the bottom of our entire life, and pray with all our strength, body, mind, soul, and spirit out to God.  Such prayers bring us into a last dimension where we pray with the spirit burning brightly, and with a heat to it that ignites our understanding.  And the communication with God becomes one perfectly fixed so that we not only feel and know that God hears, but that he is answering us back by impression of the Holy Spirit.  His strength is coming into our being.  We do not have to believe.  We can know.  Perhaps the greatest sin of the church is, and has always been, laziness.  We have always dreaded to dig a little deeper or work down into the last dimension.  But if you want this kind of experience and communication with God it is this dimension which counts the most and moves mountains.  Jesus said in Matthew 6:6, "But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy father which is in secret and thy father which seeeth in secret shall reward thee openly."   How often I have prayed for just a few minutes of time knowing that I had to do something else very shortly.  It reminds me of the lady who attended prayer meeting and said, "Let's get this thing over with.  The movie I want to see begins at 9:00 and I don't want to miss the beginning."  This is why Jesus said, "Shut thy door."  You cannot pray with the spirit and the understanding unless you shut the door of your life to the outside world all about you.  The things of this life and activities must take a backseat until you have your battery charged.  Otherwise you will come out of the closet no better than when you went in.  You must not leave the door open, either.  This lady had left the door open when she came to prayer meeting.  She came, but did not shut the door outside.  It was a movie which had her spirit, attention, and heart.  Prayer and communication with God was impossible, and so when they said God Is Dead she could say, "I certainly believe it."  He never hears my prayers.  Why?  God's hand is not shortened that he cannot save.  Neither is his ear heavy that he cannot hear, but your iniquities have separated, come between you and your God were the words of the prophet.  Men today cannot talk with God because when they begin their prayer, or when families have their devotions, they must hurry through so they can get done in time to see the late TV show.  Thus they have not shut the door, and consequently no communication and no answer.  If you worked for your employer and worked like you pray how long would you keep your job?  A Christian is a prayerful person who digs in and keeps digging until he has reached the depth of communication with God, even if it takes all night.  Two hours of prayer is nothing for a Christian.  You say whoever heard of such?  If someone would give you everything you could wish for and you had two hours to tell and wish for all you wanted, I suspect very few would ask for one or two minutes.  I expect we would fill up the entire two hours of just naming the things we desire.  After all, we make petition that takes a while and supplications, then we entreat his grace, and then we judge ourselves in his sight, and then we ask, pouring out our wishes, and then for an overall result we pour out our heart, soul, mind and all we are to the Lord in the spirit.  It takes some time to get into fervent prayer.  I read about James, speaking in James 5:16 he said, "The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much."  Now what is fervent effectual prayer?  Well he gave us an example.  Elias was a man subject to like passions as we are and he prayed earnestly that it might not rain and it rained not on the earth by the space of three years and six months.  And he prayed again and the heaven gave rains and the earth brought forth fruit.  But do you know what I discovered?  When Elias prayed for rain he prayed in the first dimension and his servant went to see, but saw nothing.  He prayed in the second dimension, his servant saw nothing.  This continued until he reached the seventh dimension and then the rain came.  He had communicated with God, but it took the seventh prayer, the seventh depth, the complete outpouring of heart, soul and mind in the spirit.  Had he stopped after the first prayer he, too, could have felt that God was dead.  Prayer is something which Paul said, "Pray always."  Prayer is something of which Jesus said, "Watch and pray that ye enter not into temptation."  A depth in prayer will produce Christian fruit in your life and deliver you from the temptation of the pitfalls of sin, in Christ Jesus.

(Amen)