Magnificent Prayer #268

I will arise and go to my father, and will say unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and before thee, And am no more worthy to be called thy son: make me as one of thy hired servants. And he arose, and came to his father. But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him.

Luke 15:18–20 KJV

You can at will close your eyes and, in vision, call up before you the men and women whom you love yet know to be lost. Friend after friend has wrought with and entreated them: you yourself would almost be willing to be anathema for them, if so they might be saved: but all has been in vain. Suppose now there came some day a message from the Lord Jesus Christ promising that if you would but ask, He himself would go to these unsaved ones and deal directly with them. What an unheard of privilege would you count it to have Jesus Christ himself deal in person with a soul you loved!

To have Jesus Christ work—not indeed in the body but in the Spirit—in your home, your church, your community; to have Jesus Christ give secret messages to your lost loved ones: to have Jesus Christ speak, woo, and win, as none else could: to have Jesus Christ with all His tact, wisdom, winsomeness, patience, gentleness, and compassion following on with unwearied zeal and tenderest love to bring back to God that soul for whom He had died—what a promise! And yet this is exactly what prayer will accomplish, for He explicitly says, “If ye ask I will do.”

Think a moment of that unsaved loved one for whom all these years you have been doing. You have pleaded, argued, and expostulated in vain. You have preached Christ, you have tried to live Christ. You have exhausted every device and means that love, faith, or hope could conceive. Now that all your doing has failed, how wondrous it would be into that life to bring His doing through your asking.

Hear Him speak: “My child, you know not how to convict of sin, but I, who work as you pray, can bow down that soul in a very agony of conviction. You know not when to woo, and when to reprove, but I, who work as you ask, know just when to pour in the balm of love, and when to let fall the sharp, quick blow of needed judgment. You cannot follow a soul in daily, unbroken pursuit, for you are finite and must eat, rest, and sleep, but I, who do as you ask, follow that soul day and night, with sleepless vigilance, through every second of his existence. Now comforting, now troubling; now giving darkness, now light; now sending prosperity, now adversity, now using the knife, now the healing balm; chastening, troubling; bereaving, blessing; bending, breaking, making, yea, I can do all things needful to be done to bring that wanderer to himself and cause him to cry I will arise and go unto my Father.”

JAMES A. MCCONKEY

It’s possible to move men through God by prayer alone.

J. OSWALD SANDERS