If you spend hours in prayer each day and your prayer life is always amazing, this post probably isn’t for you. But if like me, you sometimes feel like you’re going through the motions or you don’t always connect with God the way you would like, you might want to keep reading about my favorite book on prayer, The Power of Prayer in a Believer’s Life.
The Power of Prayer in a Believer’s Life
by Charles Spurgeon
First, let me say that reading books about prayer cannot be a substitute for prayer itself, but I sometimes find it helpful to read a short portion in a good book on the subject at the start of my prayer time. It helps me get my focus off my upcoming appointments, the post that needs to be written, and the rest of my to-do list.
About Spurgeon
Charles Haddon Spurgeon was born in 1834 and died in 1892. He is still known today as “The Prince of Preachers.” He was called to his ministry in London at the age of 20 and started with a congregation of 232. By 1865 25,000 copies of his sermons were printed and sold each week and were translated into more than twenty languages. Spurgeon built the Metropolitan Tabernacle into a congregation of over 6,000 and added well over 14,000 members during his thirty-eight-year London ministry. It’s estimated that he preached to 10,000,000 people during his lifetime.
According to the editor:
He remains history’s most widely read preacher. There is more available material written by Spurgeon than by any other Christian author, living or dead. His sixty-three volumes of sermons stand as the largest set of books by a single author in the history of Christianity, comprising the equivalent to the twenty-seven volumes of the ninth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica.
Many of his sermons were on the subject of prayer and he was known to implore the people of his congregation to pray for him.
The Power of Prayer in a Believer’s Life has been carefully edited from many of those sermons.
The Reason for His Success
His great success has been attributed to many things:
Much is made of the combination of a beautiful speaking voice, a dramatic flair and style that was captivating, a powerful commitment to a biblical theology, and his ability to speak to the people of his day in a manner that addressed their deepest needs. Undoubtedly, all of these were of major importance. But they don’t explain the most important ingredient.
Spurgeon had a different explanation:
When people would walk through the Metropolitan Tabernacle, Spurgeon would take them to a basement prayer room where people were always on their knees interceding for the church. Then the pastor would declare, “Here is the powerhouse of this church.” Perhaps this best explains the success of Charles Spurgeon.
This book is one of my all-time favorites on prayer. I have read it numerous times and I’m sure this reading won’t be my last. I’d like to leave you with this quote from the Prince of Preachers himself. It’s a little long but should give each of us great encouragement in our own weak and faulty attempts at prayer.
Hope for Our Faulty Prayers
If in prayer I come before a throne of grace, the faults of my prayer will be overlooked. In beginning to pray, you may feel as if you did not pray at all. When you rise from your knees, the groanings of your spirit are such that you think there is nothing in them. What a blotted, blurred, smeared prayer it is. Never mind—you did not come to the throne of justice. God does not perceive the fault in the prayer or spurn it. Your broken words, gaspings, and stammerings come before a throne of grace. When any one of us has presented his best prayer before God, if he saw it as God sees it, there is no doubt he would make great lamentation over it. There is enough sin in the best prayer that was ever prayed to secure its being cast away from God.
But the throne is not a throne of justice, and here is the hope for our lame, limping supplications. Our condescending King does not maintain a stately etiquette in His court like those observed by princes among men, where a little mistake or a flaw would secure the petitioner’s being dismissed. No, He does not severely criticize the faulty cries of His children.
Because of Jesus Christ
The Lord High Chamberlain of the palace above, our Lord Jesus Christ, takes care to alter and amend every prayer before He presents it to His father. He makes the prayer perfect with His perfection and prevalent with His own merits. God looks upon the prayer as presented through Christ and forgives all its own inherent faultiness. How this should encourage any of us who feel ourselves to be feeble, wandering, and unskillful in prayer! If you cannot plead with God as sometimes you did in years gone by, if you feel as if somehow or other you have grown rusty in the work of supplication, never give up. But come still and come oftener, for it is not a throne of severe criticism to which you come.
Inasmuch as it is a throne of grace, the faults of the petitioner himself shall not prevent the success of his prayer. Oh, what faults there are in us! To come before a divine throne with our imperfections—how unfit we are! Dare you think of praying were it not that God’s throne is a throne of grace? If you could, I confess I could not. An absolute God, infinitely holy and just, could not in consistency with His divine nature answer any prayer from such a sinner as I am, were it not that He has arranged a plan by which my prayer comes up no longer to a throne of absolute justice. I come to a throne that is also the mercy seat, the propitiation, the place where God meets sinners through Jesus Christ.
Blessings,
Donna
Quotations taken from:
Spurgeon, Charles. The Power of Prayer in a Believer’s Life (Christian Living Classics). Emerald Books. Kindle Edition.
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Blessings,
Donna
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You can sign up here for the “God’s Word Day by Day” emails.
Blessings,
Donna
I sometimes LINKUP with these blogs.
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