CHAPTER SEVEN
CHASTITY THROUGH PRAYER
One day when Martin Luther found himself burdened with a particularly pressing responsibility, he rose early in the morning with the resolution; "Today I have so much to do I need to spend three hours in prayer." Would to God that young people today would pause in the heat of their battle against the treachery of lust and fortify themselves with purifying prayer! When youth has learned to employ the resources of soul energy stored in the reservoirs of prayer, it has discovered the divine power before which the legions of lust must fall prostrate.
While God comes to us in the Word and in the Sacraments, we come to Him in prayer and, taking Him at His promise: "All things, whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive" (Matt. 21:22), we find that our earnest pleas for strength to resist temptation are answered by His love. To disregard prayer and fight the insidious forces of the flesh without its reinforcement; to be so preoccupied that prayer degenerates into hurried formalism or empty word-making; to stunt our spiritual life by limiting our petitions to childhood rimes, never experiencing a spontaneous Outpouring of the heart to our Father above, — this sacrifice of Heaven's promised help means surrender and defeat.
As every other part of our Christian hope, this conviction that God answers prayers has been subjected to bitter ridicule. Psychologists claim that what we call prayer is only a superstitious label for autosuggestion and that whatever value may be in prayer — and little it is, they assure us — lies in the energetic, aggressive mentality it may create. The young man who persistently pleads for a pure heart, a pure mind, a pure life begins to apply, they tell us, every day, in every way, better and better psychology. He focuses all his energies on this consuming objective; by oral repetition or mental fixation he convinces himself that he can acquire the victory over vice; and before long he has overcome his temptation and conquered impurity.
This reduction of prayer to the principles of the Coué formula is contradicted by the heaped experiences in every Christian life. In the battle between the soul and the body the spirit is often willing, but the flesh is weak. No psychological innovation can ever remove this basic human weakness. Let the unhappy wayfarer trapped in the treacherous bed of quicksand pull himself out by his own bootstraps if he will; let the becalmed mariner, locked in the doldrums of the breathless Saragossa Sea, set his ship into motion by blowing against the sail; but do not ever make the mistake of believing that you can save yourself from the clutches of sinful desires only by a program of high resolve and strong-willed intention.
Quite modern, too, is the rejection of prayer under the charge that the habit of asking God for blessings robs the individual of his own assurance. The wife of an Eastern professor protested against an illustration in a juvenile book depicting a little boy and girl at their bedside in prayer. She insisted: "To introduce a small child to the idea of an omnipotent Father may easily rob him of his self-dependence. He may form the habit of leaning on some person or power instead of growing up in the belief that he alone must meet and solve his problems. One might jeopardize the whole future happiness of a child by telling him that he is accountable to God for what he does."
At first glance we are tempted to explain away this unnatural criticism by assuming that it comes from a deranged mentality. We are told, however, that the publishers were deluged with so many letters from parents and librarians, likewise averse to the possibility of having little ones exposed to thoughts of prayer, that the book was published without the picture.
This startling attitude is of course nothing more than a modem American version of Nietzsche's superman complex, the echo of Henley's overbearing Invictus:
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.
As all other philosophies of life that eliminate God and prayer, this doctrine of self-dependence, too, falls into the fatal error of inflating human strength to false proportions. Van Loon's picture of the earth's total population, 2,000,000,000, stored in a huge packing-box coffin, only one half mile in each dimension, should symbolize the frailty of all flesh. The rebukes of an uncontrollable destiny should illustrate how impotent this atheism is that idealizes youth, with a "bleeding head but unbowed," sullenly raising its clenched fist toward the high heavens and challenging God to prove His existence with a stab of swift lightning. Harrowing tales of disaster, eye-witness accounts of sudden catastrophes, death-bed records, and dying-hour good-bys to life, — all show graphically the utter futility of every effort to emancipate mankind from God and to live victoriously without prayer. As long as young people feel-the relentless assaults of sin; as long as they realize by personal and painful experience that they can gain the permanent ascendancy over animal desires by no endeavor of their own, as intense as it may be; as long as they see that in spite of high-souled resolve the pure life continually slips beyond their grasp, Christian young men and women will be impressed with the unalterable force of Jesus' ultimatum: “Without Me ye can do nothing" (John 15:5). Instead of branding prayer the effeminate resort of a weakling, they will everlastingly thank God for the privilege of securing heavenly support for their earthly problems through their personal communion with Him.
Other objections to prayer are often repeated. Skeptical science insists that many prayers would require God to break the laws of nature; and the very thought of God interrupting His own ordinances to intervene in the private-affairs of an individual is frowned upon as preposterous. Summarizing this attitude. Sir J. Arthur Thomson, British biologist, in his book Science and Religion (p. 20), avers: "A well-educated, modern man has the conception of the Order of Nature, from which any providential interference for his own sake is excluded.... We do not any longer pray for rain." Applying this position to prayer as a personal purity aid, we are assured with smiling condescension that no young person, however earnestly and persistently he may pray for a clean life, can ever trust in the efficacy of these petitions. For instance, they insist that a prayer for purity requests God to push aside all temptations, to eliminate contact with treacherous friends, immoral entertainment, sexy literature, sordid environment, and to direct in detail the more intimate affairs of the petitioner's life. All this is utterly unthinkable in their fatalistic philosophy, which makes man an accidental cosmic blotch or a chance combination of atoms, and God either a vague, impersonal force or a benign, patriarchal spirit, hopelessly remote from the weal and woe of an individual life.
Every Christian knows with a deep-rooted conviction that he is descended from no haphazard blob of primeval protoplasm; that life is no puppet-show in which men like marionettes are jerked about by the whims of fate; that God, far from being unconcerned about our individual problems, is able to intervene in answer to our personal prayers. He who created the unmeasured universe and made man as His masterpiece can effectually deliver the creations of His love, if necessary even by suspending natural forces.
Would our holy God command us to pray and promise us His attention and answer if prayer were but a vain gesture, an empty ritual, a deceptive superstition? Read sacred pledges like these that come not from the vacillating claims of men but from God's own Word of Truth:
"The Lord is nigh unto all them that call upon Him, to all that call upon Him in truth. He will fulfill the desire of them that fear Him: He also will hear their cry and will save them" (Ps.145:18,19).
"What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them" (Mark 11:24).
"All things, whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive" (Matt.21:22).
As you study the full content of these passages, selected at random from scores of similar promises, you are driven to the conclusion that, if prayer be anything less than that which our Bible and our Savior repeatedly assure us it is, we may surrender forever any and all other Scriptural pledges of our Lord. But because God has commanded us to pray; because Christ has taught us how to pray; because the divine Word promises an answer when we pray; because every young Christian who has been a faithful student in the prayer school knows from personal experience the benefits of this intimate communion with the Father, our chief concern lies not in the endeavor to explain prayer, to analyze it, to defend it, but to believe it and employ it with all our hearts.
Infidel taunts persist in challenging: "How can you prove that prayer is answered?" "How can you show that petitions for purity and decency will be actually granted?" For decades proposals have been advanced suggesting that the power of prayer be put to a statistical test and subjected to practical experimentation. The British scientist Tyndale, for example, proposes a prayer clinic. Two hospital wards are to be chosen, with the same number of patients in each. A group of collaborators will pray very earnestly for the recovery of the patients in the one ward and remain completely silent concerning those in the other. The specifications of recovery are to be noted in each ward, and scientific deductions made from the data. A different test has been outlined by Dr. David E. Brinton, American anthropologist. He asks that a group of infants afflicted with admittedly incurable diseases be made the object of prayer. If a number of babies recover, the improvement can be attributed to these petitions.
While the force of prayer cannot be measured by laboratory tests, we remember that God has accepted challenges to answer supplication. Once on the summit of Mount Carmel, when the rote of pagan pleas to the Baalim remained unanswered, Jehovah sent fire from heaven in response to the brief petition of His prophet. Today, too, for those who have eyes to see, there are wide-spread demonstrations of the same power. Reviewing his thirty years' pastorate at the temple in Philadelphia, Russell H. Conwell presented this convincing testimony to the blessings attendant upon prayer for marital happiness: "Through those thirty years of the record-keeping there was an average of sixteen marriages a month, or 5,100 in thirty years. The same pastor who officiated at the marriage of the parents in many cases officiated at the weddings also of the children. Not one case of divorce can be discovered and only two cases of estrangement. The records of many praying churches probably show the same conditions." (Effective Prayer, p. 55.)
The assurance that God will grant the entreaties of His young people for purity and chastity, is shown in individual experience. Those who have found self-discipline or psychological approach disappointing or even futile as aids to chastity and have taken this problem to their God in prayer, know beyond all argument that our heavenly Father hears the petitions of His children for the purifying of their souls.
God must answer prayer, for His Word abounds with repeated holy pledges like these:
"If ye abide in Me and My words abide in you, ye shall ask what ye will, and it shall be done unto you" (John 15:7).
Verily, verily I say unto you. Whatsoever ye shall ask the Father in My name He will give it you" (John 16:23).
"Whatsoever ye shall ask in My name, that will I do that the Father may be glorified in the Son" (John 14:13).
"If two of you shall agree on earth as touching anything that they shall ask, it shall be done for them of My Father which is in heaven" (Matt. 18:19).
"If ye shall ask anything in My name, I will do it" (John 14:14).
These promises come from the lips of our Lord and Savior and are as unchangeable as His divine love. Together with the hosts of other prayer texts from the Old Covenant and combined with the large company of witnesses in the New Testament, these hundreds of verses constitute the arsenal of divine weapons with which we can rebuke puny skeptics and repel/the assaults of impurity.
Yes, God answers prayer, and particularly the sincerity of those appeals that beg for strength in maintaining morality. Those who have tried prayer and felt its refining power will agree with this conviction penned by B. R. Haydon to his friend Keats: "Trust in God with all your might, my dear Keats. From my soul I declare to you that I never applied for help or for consolation or for strength but I found it. I always rose up from my knees with a refreshed fury, an iron-clenched firmness, a crystal piety of feeling, that sent me streaming on with a repulsive power against the troubles of life." (Correspondence, Vol. II, p. 2.)
In his Autobiography (p. 520) H. M. Stanley relates how the answers to his petitions sustained him during the perils of the African-jungle search for Livingstone. He recalls: "On all my expeditions, prayer made me stronger, morally and mentally, than my non-praying companions. It did not blind my eyes or dull my mind or close my ears, but, on the contrary, it gave me confidence. It did more; it gave me joy and pride in my work and lifted me hopefully over the one thousand five hundred miles of forest tracks, eager to face the day's perils and fatigues. You may know when prayer is answered by that glow of content which fills one who has flung his cause before God as he rises to his feet." And in the journey through the lurking jungles of life young explorers forging steadily ahead in their great adventure will similarly discover the uplifting force of constant prayer. They will be able to say with Luther: "I see plainly that God answers prayer. The whole world proclaims the fact.... Whatever aspect matters may assume, we can achieve all through prayer. ... Therewith we can accomplish everything and thus maintain what already exists, amend what is defective, patiently put up with the inevitable, overcome what is evil, and preserve all that is good." (Letters of Martin Luther, ed. by M. A. Currie, pp. 231,384.)
In addition to its answer, unflagging prayer brings marked blessings. The concentration of one’s thought on God, the contact with His love, His purity, His holiness; the protest true prayer directs against everything evil, — all this cooperates to strengthen the Christian morale. Well does Sir Walter Scott comment on the prayer of his heroine in The Heart of Midlothian (chapter XIV): "One thing is plain; namely, that the person who lays open his doubts and distresses in prayer with feeling and sincerity must necessarily, in the act of doing so, purify his mind from the dross of worldly passions and interests and bring it into that state when the resolutions adopted are likely to be selected rather from a sense of duty than from any inferior motive." Those who have prayed best have lived best.
If these miracles are wrought through prayer, why is its molding force neglected? Why does the reservoir of this divine energy remain untapped? If a scientist develops a new form of electric or atomic energy, immediately men seek to commercialize the discovery. Yet the energizing resources of prayer often lie unused, with the depressing consequence indicated in the divine rebuke "Ye have not because ye ask not" (Jas.4:2). Let any faddist break upon the world with a program of mental sanitation that is based on exotic diet, that speculates on the fantastic symbols of Rosicrucianism, or that thrives on the psychical, and he will be acclaimed by regiments of enthusiastic followers. But when in prayer God’s own antidote to immorality is offered without enrolment fees, correspondence courses, or Oxford house parties, its soul-strengthening power is often dishonored by neglect, or cast away with scornful disdain.
What prevents young people from acquiring this spiritual subsidy for the purity of their soul? We hardly require the professional opinion of Arthur Holmes, professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, who offers this diagnosis of the first cause: "In this busy age we have no time." It is doubly distressing that in the greatest age of leisure the nation has ever known there seems to be less time for prayer than in the ten-hour work-days and the six-day week of the last generation. An Eastern organization advertises publications offering "700 ways to kill time.” Yet in spite of this lavish time excess, prayer often remains restricted to a few conventionalized phrases, quickly spoken and hastily, sometimes thoughtlessly, flung before the almighty God, as though there were some magic power of incantation in the mere recitation of empty syllables.
Still do we not find time for many whims that appeal to shallow, unworthy interests? There is no time for prayer in many modern lives because often there is no desire for prayer, no consciousness of its necessity. Spiritual indifference always breeds a stubborn disregard of prayer. The drone of dynamos, the whirl of our efficient machines, the slogans of competitive marketing, the siren song of pleasure, the crashing cymbals of men's favorite follies, combine to muffle Christ’s solicitous plea "Come unto Me" and His gracious promise "I will give you rest."
There are other hindrances to prayer. John Bunyan writes: "Prayer will make a man cease from sin, as sin will entice a man to cease from prayer" (Works, Vol.1, p. 65); and it is simply the unwillingness to tear entirely away from the lust of the flesh and the desire for its gratification that drives many young people away from prayers for purity. Because the very act of petitioning the almighty God for a clean heart implies the protest against unclean desires, those who are enticed by sin either refuse to pray or speak half-hearted petitions. In his Confessions (Book 7:2), in which he writes of his unregenerate life, Augustine admits: "I had said, “Give me chastity and self-control, but not just yet.” For I was afraid that that should assail me in a moment and in a moment heal that disease of lust which I wanted to be faded, not eradicated." In prayer the pure gold of faith shines forth from the impure dross of an impoverished Christian life. Since the litany of an anxious soul beseeching God for cleanness demands a disavowal of uncleanness, we often hesitate to approach God for the removal of the sin we wish to retain.
Petitions with the promise of blessing must of course be the free and sincere outpouring of believing hearts. It is true, we start the day and close it with praise and appeal to our heavenly Father, but we need have no canonical hours in which the angelus summons us to prayer. Scores of times during each busy day our thoughts should fly heavenward, and particularly when we feel temptation, we should remember the apostle's emphasis on perpetual prayer: "Praying always with all prayer" (Eph. 6:18).
Our petitions should not be limited to the reading of printed intercessions. Human problems are never exactly the same in two lives, and in the exclusive use of prayer-books there is a danger that we sacrifice some of the personal elements of prevailing prayer. In his protest against book prayer, Luther went as far as to say: "You will never pray anything good out of a [prayer-] book. You may indeed read it and learn how you are to pray and what you are to ask and be urged on; but prayer must come spontaneously from the heart, without any printed and prescribed word. It must find its own expressions in accord with the burning desires of the heart." (Vol. XII, p. 346.)
That Luther did not brand the use of printed prayer with unqualified disapproval is clearly evident from his other writings. In his impulsive way he spurned stereotyped prayer to emphasize the confidential communion with God that is as essential to a pure, abundant Christian life as the free course of warm blood is to physical welfare. One of the reasons many of the prayers for a clean heart fail to bring down a full answer from the Almighty is that voiced in the language of others, with subject-matter and wording distant from the personal questions of the present day, they are not actually the prayers for the problems of the petitioner. Lost power, miniature ideals, dwarfed achievements, are often to be traced to the diminutive faith that remains inarticulate before God and can only read what others have prayed in situations which may be fundamentally different.
Nor can the mighty rush of prayer that overcomes a hell filled with temptations be found in the swift, smooth, repetition of merely formal prayers. We should certainly never forget our childhood prayers, these full-confident appeals to our Father in heaven which we learned to lisp at our mothers breast. They must be the inalienable treasures which age and advance cannot destroy. For the battles of life, for that personal wrestling with our own baser selves and an enticing world, we must, however, grow in prayer, learning to speak to our God in phrases of our own individual experience and particular needs.
Altogether, then, our prayer for purity must be an evidence of that free access to the Father granted us through the Saviors reconciliation. It must be an echo of the heroic prayer we find in the lives of God's mightiest men, the prayer restricted to no particular place, time, manner, or ceremony, but which, like the confident requests addressed by children to their father, pushes its way to the mercy throne, there to be blessed by answer.
Vitus Dietrich gives this account of Luther’s fervor in prayer: "Once I happened to hear him in prayer.... What spirit and what faith is there in his expression! He petitions God with as much reverence as if he were in the divine presence and yet with as firm a hope and confidence as though he were addressing a father or a friend.... While I was listening to Luther praying in this manner at a distance, my soul seemed on fire within me to hear the man address God so like a friend, yet with so much gravity and reverence, and also to hear him in the course of his prayer insisting on the promises contained in the Psalms, as if he were sure his petitions would be granted." (E. M. Bounds, Purpose in Prayer, page 37.)
When our heart pleas for purifying grace are marked by undaunted assurance of divine answer, we, too, can face the ridicule of chastity and with the triumphant challenge of the great Reformer advance as he did — on bended knees.