on 19 November 2024
Dear all at IPC,
I am reading the biography of the 19th Century Scottish Minister Alexander Moody Stuart*. He was part of a golden generation of Scottish Ministers which included Robert Murray McCheyne and the Bonar brothers, that did so much good for the gospel. Moody Stuart gave 3 instructions on prayer which I’ve found helpful:
1. Pray till you pray
2. Pray till you are conscious of being heard
3. Pray till you receive an answer.
This is helpful to us because there is a recognition here that prayer is not always easy. Very often it can feel as if we are going through the motions, rattling through a list.
Lists are helpful for prayer. I was once bemoaning them, when my mother said to me, ‘when you go to the shop, do you find a list restrictive?’ It’s a great point that when I go to the shop, I make sure I have a list to remind me what I need. However, the danger in prayer is we go onto autopilot, and we think we’ve prayed by going through our lists.
Moody Stuart recognises that we need to pray until we pray. That is, in prayer we are engaging with God, seeking to bring our utter impotency before him. It is the practical expression of our need, without him we cannot work, we have nothing. There is a reliance and dependence on God which gives expression to prayer. It is a recognition that we need God and God is one who has drawn near, who is able, who does act, who does love and who gives. Our hearts are stirred as we bring before him his character and his nature, and we are reminded of our privilege.
We move from going through our list to realising we are in the presence of God, that his Son is interceding for us. His Spirit bears witness with our spirit that we are Children of God, and it is at that point we can, “pour out our hearts before him” (Psalm 62:8). We need not, nor can we hold anything back from him. We are coming to one to whom all hearts are open, he knows us, he understands us and yet he loves us passionately. He delights to hear us pray.
This takes time. In our human relations, if we are to have important conversations, we know that we must give time to them; put the phone down, get away from the screens. It is no different with God. It is why Jesus tells us to go into our closet (Matthew 6:6).
We need to see how cold our hearts often are. They need to be warmed by God’s love and grace in his Son. It is by engaging with God in his Word and prayer that the ice of our hearts is melted. As our minds and hearts understand the love of God in Christ, our affections are stirred and our wills motivated. We become conscious that our every moment is lived before God by his Spirit.
Moody Stuart’s second instruction is to pray until you are conscious of being heard.
Having prayed until we pray, recognising who God is and what he’s done, understanding his heart for sinners, appropriating his love for his people; we then become conscious that he has heard us.
At times in conversation people will say, ‘I don’t want you to do anything – I just want you to listen’. It’s often a cry of anguish, where someone feels they haven’t been heard. It is a horrible thing for one to feel that their voice is not listened to.
Our daughter Phoebe came home with this poem from school which she has to recite in assembly:
I am not invisible
I have a voice.
I just want to be valued,
And given the choice
To speak freely.
To have a point of view.
Maybe my voice
Will suggest something new
I am not invisible
I won’t disappear
My voice is worthy.
I am right here. (Samantha Rodgers, 2024)
I don’t know the perspective of the author, and it is possible to express those words as an act of rebellion. We certainly don’t express something new to God, but there is also something beautiful about these words too. As we come before God, he hears our voice, there is no one insignificant to God, no one who is invisible. More than that – he loves to hear his children. You can speak freely to him. In Christ your voice is worthy.
It is possible to be in a conversation where you are speaking with people and you become conscious that they are not listening; but that is never the case with God. Moody Stuart instructs us to pray until we are conscious that God has heard us.
His third instruction follows on from this – pray until you receive an answer.
We know he does not always answer, ‘yes’. He sometimes says, ‘no’, and often he says, ‘wait’; but we must get to the point where we are aware he has heard and answered. The call to prayer is a call to perseverance – Jesus tells us to ‘ask, seek, knock (Matthew 7:7-12)’, to keep on asking (Luke 11:8)… and to not give up (Luke 18:1-8).
There are many times when God is asking us to wait, and the temptation for us is to give up. Like you, there are people I have been praying for, for decades. I can think of one non-Christian friend who I think we have prayed for most days over 25 years and yet she has still not trusted Christ. I can often feel ashamed about asking the same thing over and over again, but God encourages me to do that. The longer we have prayed for something the more difficult it is to keep going, but the life of faith is one that says we will not go away, we will keep knocking, we will keep asking. God has given us this right and privilege to come to him – he is not fed up with us. Our asking will get bolder, our seeking will be more intense, our knocking will become louder. Do not give up praying for people.
One last thing it is tempting to read this and privatise it. Private prayer is essential: Jesus commands it, but it would seem that corporate prayer – where the church gathers together to pray – is most prevalent in Acts. These truths of, ‘praying until we pray, pray until we are conscious of being heard and pray till we receive an answer’, are as applicable to our church gatherings for prayer. It speaks of an urgency, perseverance, deliberateness and doggedness in prayer. May that increasingly characterise us as a church.
Your Minister and friend,
Paul
* Alexander Moody Stuart – A Memoir – Kenneth Moody Stuart, Banner of Truth, 2023