Deep calls unto deep. Welcome back to the Hackberry House, a daily podcast devoted to the word of God and the persecuted church of North Korea. I'm Bob, and this is podcast number 219. It is July 17, 2015. Today, new ways of prayer contrasted with the old ways from Raven Hill's revival praying. It's chapter five, deep calleth unto deep. Prayer, protracted prayer, groaning prayer, fasting prayer, weeping prayer, speechless prayer, belongs to those initiated into a spirit of prayer, that is, into praying in the Holy Spirit. To the uninstructed, terms like these mean works. But praying friend, faint not. Such critics may yet learn. In the language of Horatius Boni, it may be said of protracted, groaning, speechless prayer, it is the way the master went, should not the servant tread it still. Dr. Tozer sets forth the new approach and mediation of modern evangelism in a brilliant article called The Old Cross and the New. I think he could well have added a spicy chapter on our new ways of praying. Isn't it pitiable, regrettable, and indefensible that we try to operate almost all our churches on one sweet hour of prayer? Yet in actuality, that sweet hour is much taken up with Bible study. There certainly has to be Scripture read so that faith may be generated, and we may have God's promise as a foundation for prayer, but after all, the prayer meeting is a prayer meeting. The fact that far too many churches are combining the prayer meeting with a Bible study is the church's self-acknowledged prayer weakness. In short, the church is saying it cannot hold out in prayer, so it fills in the time with Bible study. Yet no church these days can operate on one hour of prayer a week, let alone on the half hour we're giving collectively to intercession. To those who have never developed a prayer life, the demand for time spent in prayer makes all the more strange the description of true prayer mentioned at the beginning of this chapter. I believe most of us will need the tears wiped from our eyes when the books are opened at the judgment bar of God and our personal prayer record is read. By a strange paradox, those who pray most feel they pray little. This much is sure, no man who prays struts. Prayer is a two-way operation, man talking to God and God talking to man. Solomon was wise when he requested a listening heart. To many, prayer is dry because they do all the talking. I remember chatting one day with a teenager and asking him, what's your trouble? I'm a backslider, he replied with, with some heat. How do you know you are backslidden? I countered. He looked me straight in the eye and said, because God doesn't talk to me anymore. Friend, how about you? Does God talk back to you? After the resurrection, Jesus had been seen by over 500 brethren at once and thousands of others had been born of God at and subsequent to Pentecost. Then why, I wonder, was Ananias the Lord's choice of a man to visit a seeking Jew and to go into the street called Straight to inquire in the house of Judas for one called Saul of Tarsus? Was it that Ananias had stayed to listen to God and to get directions from the Lord for the day's operations? What Saul of Tarsus do you and I miss contacting because in morning devotions we pray for help just to get through the day and fail to pray for specific guidance in testimony? Without prayer, we cannot live the Christian life. Prayer means power. More prayer means more power. Recently a racing motorist came within an ace of winning one of the world's greatest motor races. But because he risked going the last lap without checking his gas tank, he failed. Within a few hundred yards of the winning flag, he was stalled. As the competitor, who had chased him so long, flashed past him to gain the coveted award, the near winner was chagrined. The place where the Christian stops to refuel is prayer. Yet it is prayer far beyond refueling that engages us now. In his masterly epistle to the Romans, Paul talks of the witness of the spirit. We Christians have isolated this passage to one single interpretation, the spirit bearing witness to our justification. But in the Christian's life, the spirit also bears witness to our praying as well as to everything else. As a Christian, our advocate is truly with the Father, and we talk to the Father through the Son. Yet the Father talks to us through the Spirit. Jesus is our advocate, but the Spirit is the advocate of God the Father. The Spirit bore witness to Paul that he had the true burden and spirit of prayer, for Paul says, my conscience bearing me witness in the Holy Ghost. How often, that's Romans 9, 1, how often, if ever, do we stop to see whether the Holy Ghost bears witness to our praying. Prayer is, I think, the language of heaven. A sage of old spoke of prayer as thinking God's thoughts after him. But in spirit-born prayer, I believe we pray God's burden into and through our hearts. With God, we share in prayer. Prayer is no magic transformation of words into heavenly language just because we close our eyes. Words are not prayer because we utter them on our knees, nor because we say them in the pulpit, nor yet because they are breathed within the confines of a church. Concerning our praying today, a phrase from Shakespeare often comes into my mind. What do you read, my lord? Polonius asked Hamlet. And to this, the melancholy man replied, words, words, words. Likewise in prayer, what do we often say? Words, words, words. We can use words without praying, and we can pray without using words. We can also pray when words are used, but there's a language of the spirit beyond words, groanings that cannot be articulated. that defy language, that are above language, that are beyond language, that are the yearnings of the heart of God, committed to those who seek to know His will and to care for a lost world and a feeble church. There is no stagnation in the Holy Ghost, for holy men of God spoke as they were moved by the Holy Ghost. The Spirit moves. In the beginning, when this old world was like a slab of ice, lifeless and locked in the black womb of the universe, the spirit moved and the earth came forth. Years later, the spirit moved over the matrix of the Virgin Mary and brought the sun into being. When that sun was laid dead in the tomb, the spirit came and wrought the mighty resurrection. In the upper room, the spirit brooded over the men then the world felt the impact of that spirit operation. The mighty Roman Empire knew spirit-filled men were around. The temple crowd, in their great authority, knew the spirit had come on the upper room men. Even now, the world still feels the tremor from that spirit-baptized group who waited for the promise of the Father. The spirit moved on those upper room men and they in turn moved out to the lost multitudes. These multitudes were in turn moved upon by the Holy Ghost moving through them. Has the blessed spirit toned down his operations? With reverence we ask, did God close down his production lines after the spirit had come upon Wesley, upon Finney, and such men? Were those leaders spiritual freaks? oddities of grace, eccentrics who were a little bit off in their spiritual operations. These days we are spiritually so subnormal that to be just normal according to the New Testament pattern seems to make us abnormal. Despite the psychologists, the Freud and Jung followers of the gleaming star of human knowledge, we still have to admit that the human body is a mystery, and that the human mind is complicated and ambiguous. And so there are depths in man that only the Spirit knows. Yet, if the Holy Spirit is power, we need to learn how to operate the throttle. And if the Holy Spirit is a person, and He is, then we really need to learn how to let Him operate us. I admit to being resentful when some soul who is uninstructed in the Spirit suddenly closes a prayer meeting that very obviously the Spirit has in control. How can shrinking flesh be so stupid? We cannot turn the Holy Spirit on and off with the lights of the sanctuary. If President Kennedy invited us to hear him give a speech, would we dare leave his presence on any given impulse? We often presume upon Christ's promise connected with two or three gathered together in his name because if we were gathered in his name, then we would be gathered by his spirit. I feel deeply that we trifle with the Holy Ghost, even in prayer. What a trivial sound and round of petitions we get in the average prayer meeting. In prayer we need holy men, for holy men are bold, reaching out in the spirit and feeling the tug of divine yearnings. Like their master, Holy men also know strong cryings and tears. Would to God, our Bible schools would give a special period each year to training men in prayer. Satan fears prayer and offsets it at every angle. At every opportunity, he stalls the impulse to take part in it, for he has felt the smart of men who pray in the Holy Ghost. Again and again, hell has shuddered because of the onslaughts of men who have taken the kingdom of heaven by violence. In the book of Acts, we read that demons cried, Jesus I know and Paul I know. Because Paul knew how to pray in the Holy Ghost, hell rocked in fury. Bloody Mary is said to have feared the prayers of John Knox more than the tramping feet of armies. Has the devil less intelligence than that queen? Ah, brethren, in this kind of praying, most of us feel like worms. A blessed experience, if it is not mock humility. Years ago in Dundee, Scotland, I stood reverently and read the great inscription on the cornerstone of the Church of St. Peter, where Robert Murray McShane used to minister. McShane knew Hebrew well enough to converse with learned European Jews. His scholarly taste gave him appetite for finer poets of the Greek classics. He kept his diary from prying eyes by writing in Latin. He was no mean musician. As a hymn writer, his great hymns, like Jehovah Sidkenu and When This Passing World Is Done, gave him a place with the immortals. He also painted fine pictures, but Robert Murray McShane excelled in a greater art than any of these or all of them combined, for McShane is remembered as a man of prayer. Churches larger than his offered a rich price tag for his ministry, but with grace he refused them all. He was contented with his lot because no church could offer him more time for prayer. How real God is, he once said to himself, God is the only person I can talk to. After this saintly pastor's death, a visitor went to see the great church The sexton showed him around. Some of McShane's books were still there. Sit down here, said the canny sexton, leading the young visitor to the chair where McShane used to sit. Now put your elbows on the table. The visitor obeyed. Now put your face in your hands. The visitor again obeyed. Now let the tears flow. That was the way Mr. McShane used to do. Then the amazed visitor was led into the very pulpit where the impassioned McShane had once poured out his soul to God and poured out God's message to the people. Put your elbows on the pulpit, instructed the old sexton. The elbows were put in place. Put your face in your hands, the young man obeyed. Now let the tears flow. That was the way Mr. McShane used to do. To be much for God, we must be much with God. Jesus, that lone figure fasting in the wilderness, knew strong crying along with tears. Can one be moved with compassion and not know tears? Jeremiah was a sobbing saint. Jesus wept, so did Paul, so did John. Mr. Bounds says, there are tears that are only the surface slush on the iceberg. Such tears are bursts of emotion, but there are tears that are as blood from the heart. Oh, brethren in the ministry, I pray that you and I might covet something of this holy art of intercession. As I see it, there are two things for a minister to do, pray and preach. The mighty men of the early church gave themselves to prayer and the word and left to the elders the serving of tables and visiting of the sick. Even so, the elders were men of faith and of the Holy Ghost. Yet in our day, the qualifications for an elder seem to be that he has a bit more cash than the other members. How we need Bible elders as well as Bible preachers. Not long ago I went to speak at a church where a fine man had resigned as an elder. I am not ruling my house as I should, he said, and therefore I am biblically disqualified from holding that office. There is an honest soul. The early church prayed. Every revival church has prayed. Every participant in revival prayer has known travail. Though there are some tearful intercessors behind the scenes, I grant you that to our modern Christianity, praying is foreign. At a Bible conference in England, I met a fine-built man who was laboring deep in the bowels of the earth as a coal miner. In a quiet talk, he told me that he knew a little about a burden for revival. Because of this prayer burden, he said that for 21 days he had labored in the oppressive heat of the coal mine without food and with as little water as possible. From that prayer period, he emerged spiritually renewed and without physical harm. He had learned to pray in the Holy Ghost. May it be so for all God's people. Tomorrow, a message from the 19th century about that ill-fated son of David known as Absalom. I hope you'll be there. Remember Psalm 42, verse 7 today, deep calls unto deep.