God is once more calling His people loudly to a revival of faith in the divine efficacy of prayer. Will you and I respond to His call? That we may know what such a response may involve, may we let the Holy Spirit reveal to us the condition of our prayer life, and empower us to determine what it should be:
* Has my prayer life been powerless because of some besetting sin?
* Has my prayer life been hindered by haste, irregularity, lack of definiteness, lack of system, unbelief, lack of communion with God through the study of His Word?
* Has my prayer life been fruitless? Have I had definite answers to prayer week by week?
* Has my prayer life been restricted to certain stated seasons each day, or have I come to know from experience what it is to pray “without ceasing”?
* Has my prayer life been limited to my own life? To my own particular kind of work? To my own mission field? Am I truly an intercessor after God’s own heart?
* Has my prayer life been starved, or have I devoted even one month of my daily Bible study to letting the Lord teach me to pray from His own example, His precepts, commands, and promises about prayer?
* Has my prayer life been joyless? Has prayer been more a duty than a privilege? Do I love to pray? Surely I must love the One who hears and answers my prayers.
* Has my prayer life been growing? Am I learning more of the meaning, efficacy, and power of prayer?
* Has my prayer life been sacrificial? Has it cost me anything in time, strength, vitality, love? Yet whatever it costs me, how worthwhile to have access to God’s throne and answers from God’s throne.
Deeper than the need of men; deeper far than the need for money; deeper down at the bottom of our spiritless life is the need for the forgotten secret of prevailing world-prayer. Considering the fearful consequences of it all, something like criminal negligence has for years marked the attitude of the Church toward the matchless power of prayer for the world.
“For the eyes of the Lord are over the righteous, and His ears are open unto their prayers” (1 Pet. 3:12).