IV. PRAYER AND DESIRE

     "There are those who will mock me, and tell me to stick to my 
trade as a cobbler, and not trouble my mind with philosophy and 
theology. But the truth of God did so burn in my bones, that I 
took my pen in hand and began to set down what I had seen." -- 
Jacob Behmen.


DESIRE is not merely a simple wish; it is a deep seated craving; 
an intense longing, for attainment. In the realm of spiritual 
affairs, it is an important adjunct to prayer. So important is it, 
that one might say, almost, that desire is an absolute essential 
of prayer. Desire precedes prayer, accompanies it, is followed by 
it. Desire goes before prayer, and by it, created and intensified. 
Prayer is the oral expression of desire. If prayer is asking God 
for something, then prayer must be expressed. Prayer comes out 
into the open. Desire is silent. Prayer is heard; desire, unheard. 
The deeper the desire, the stronger the prayer. Without desire, 
prayer is a meaningless mumble of words. Such perfunctory, formal 
praying, with no heart, no feeling, no real desire accompanying 
it, is to be shunned like a pestilence. Its exercise is a waste of 
precious time, and from it, no real blessing accrues.
     And yet even if it be discovered that desire is honestly 
absent, we should pray, anyway. We ought to pray. The "ought" 
comes in, in order that both desire and expression be cultivated. 
God's Word commands it. Our judgment tells us we ought to pray -- 
to pray whether we feel like it or not -- and not to allow our 
feelings to determine our habits of prayer. In such circumstance, 
we ought to pray for the desire to pray; for such a desire is God-
given and heaven-born. We should pray for desire; then, when 
desire has been given, we should pray according to its dictates. 
Lack of spiritual desire should grieve us, and lead us to lament 
its absence, to seek earnestly for its bestowal, so that our 
praying, henceforth, should be an expression of "the soul's 
sincere desire."
     A sense of need creates or should create, earnest desire. The 
stronger the sense of need, before God, the greater should be the 
desire, the more earnest the praying. The "poor in spirit" are 
eminently competent to pray.
     Hunger is an active sense of physical need. It prompts the 
request for bread. In like manner, the inward consciousness of 
spiritual need creates desire, and desire breaks forth in prayer. 
Desire is an inward longing for something of which we are not 
possessed, of which we stand in need -- something which God has 
promised, and which may be secured by an earnest supplication of 
His throne of grace.
     Spiritual desire, carried to a higher degree, is the evidence 
of the new birth. It is born in the renewed soul:
     "As newborn babes, desire the sincere milk of the word, that 
ye may grow thereby."
     The absence of this holy desire in the heart is presumptive 
proof, either of a decline in spiritual ecstasy, or, that the new 
birth has never taken place.
     "Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after 
righteousness: for they shall be filled."
     These heaven-given appetites are the proof of a renewed 
heart, the evidence of a stirring spiritual life. Physical 
appetites are the attributes of a living body, not of a corpse, 
and spiritual desires belong to a soul made alive to God. And as 
the renewed soul hungers and thirsts after righteousness, these 
holy inward desires break out into earnest, supplicating prayer.
     In prayer, we are shut up to the Name, merit and intercessory 
virtue of Jesus Christ, our great High Priest. Probing down, below 
the accompanying conditions and forces in prayer, we come to its 
vital basis, which is seated in the human heart. It is not simply 
our need; it is the heart's yearning for what we need, and for 
which we feel impelled to pray. Desire is the will in action; a 
strong, conscious longing, excited in the inner nature, for some 
great good. Desire exalts the object of its longing, and fixes the 
mind on it. It has choice, and fixedness, and flame in it, and 
prayer, based thereon, is explicit and specific. It knows its 
need, feels and sees the thing that will meet it, and hastens to 
acquire it.
     Holy desire is much helped by devout contemplation. 
Meditation on our spiritual need, and on God's readiness and 
ability to correct it, aids desire to grow. Serious thought 
engaged in before praying, increases desire, makes it more 
insistent, and tends to save us from the menace of private prayer 
-- wandering thought. We fail much more in desire, than in its 
outward expression. We retain the form, while the inner life fades 
and almost dies.
     One might well ask, whether the feebleness of our desires for 
God, the Holy Spirit, and for all the fulness of Christ, is not 
the cause of our so little praying, and of our languishing in the 
exercise of prayer? Do we really feel these inward pantings of 
desire after heavenly treasures? Do the inbred groanings of desire 
stir our souls to mighty wrestlings? Alas for us! The fire burns 
altogether too low. The flaming heat of soul has been tempered 
down to a tepid lukewarmness. This, it should be remembered, was 
the central cause of the sad and desperate condition of the 
Laodicean Christians, of whom the awful condemnation is written 
that they were "rich, and increased in goods and had need of 
nothing," and knew not that they "were wretched, and miserable, 
and poor, and blind."
     Again: we might well inquire -- have we that desire which 
presses us to close communion with God, which is filled with 
unutterable burnings, and holds us there through the agony of an 
intense and soul-stirred supplication? Our hearts need much to be 
worked over, not only to get the evil out of them, but to get the 
good into them. And the foundation and inspiration to the incoming 
good, is strong, propelling desire. This holy and fervid flame in 
the soul awakens the interest of heaven, attracts the attention of 
God, and places at the disposal of those who exercise it, the 
exhaustless riches of Divine grace.
     The dampening of the flame of holy desire, is destructive of 
the vital and aggressive forces in church life. God requires to be 
represented by a fiery Church, or He is not in any proper sense, 
represented at all. God, Himself, is all on fire, and His Church, 
if it is to be like Him, must also be at white heat. The great and 
eternal interests of heaven-born, God-given religion are the only 
things about which His Church can afford to be on fire. Yet holy 
zeal need not to be fussy in order to be consuming. Our Lord was 
the incarnate antithesis of nervous excitability, the absolute 
opposite of intolerant or clamorous declamation, yet the zeal of 
God's house consumed Him; and the world is still feeling the glow 
of His fierce, consuming flame and responding to it, with an ever-
increasing readiness and an ever-enlarging response.
     A lack of ardour in prayer, is the sure sign of a lack of 
depth and of intensity of desire; and the absence of intense 
desire is a sure sign of God's absence from the heart! To abate 
fervour is to retire from God. He can, and does, tolerate many 
things in the way of infirmity and error in His children. He can, 
and will pardon sin when the penitent prays, but two things are 
intolerable to Him -- insincerity and lukewarmness. Lack of heart 
and lack of heat are two things He loathes, and to the Laodiceans 
He said, in terms of unmistakable severity and condemnation:
     "I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art 
lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of My 
mouth."
     This was God's expressed judgment on the lack of fire in one 
of the Seven Churches, and it is His indictment against individual 
Christians for the fatal want of sacred zeal. In prayer, fire is 
the motive power. Religious principles which do not emerge in 
flame, have neither force nor effect. Flame is the wing on which 
faith ascends; fervency is the soul of prayer. It was the 
"fervent, effectual prayer" which availed much. Love is kindled in 
a flame, and ardency is its life. Flame is the air which true 
Christian experience breathes. It feeds on fire; it can withstand 
anything, rather than a feeble flame; and it dies, chilled and 
starved to its vitals, when the surrounding atmosphere is frigid 
or lukewarm.
     True prayer, must be aflame. Christian life and character 
need to be all on fire. Lack of spiritual heat creates more 
infidelity than lack of faith. Not to be consumingly interested 
about the things of heaven, is not to be interested in them at 
all. The fiery souls are those who conquer in the day of battle, 
from whom the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and who take 
it by force. The citadel of God is taken only by those, who storm 
it in dreadful earnestness, who besiege it, with fiery, unabated 
zeal.
     Nothing short of being red hot for God, can keep the glow of 
heaven in our hearts, these chilly days. The early Methodists had 
no heating apparatus in their churches. They declared that the 
flame in the pew and the fire in the pulpit must suffice to keep 
them warm. And we, of this hour, have need to have the live coal 
from God's altar and the consuming flame from heaven glowing in 
our hearts. This flame is not mental vehemence nor fleshy energy. 
It is Divine fire in the soul, intense, dross-consuming -- the 
very essence of the Spirit of God.
     No erudition, no purity of diction, no width of mental 
outlook, no flowers of eloquence, no grace of person, can atone 
for lack of fire. Prayer ascends by fire. Flame gives prayer 
access as well as wings, acceptance as well as energy. There is no 
incense without fire; no prayer without flame.
     Ardent desire is the basis of unceasing prayer. It is not a 
shallow, fickle inclination, but a strong yearning, an 
unquenchable ardour, which impregnates, glows, burns and fixes the 
heart. It is the flame of a present and active principle mounting 
up to God. It is ardour propelled by desire, that burns its way to 
the Throne of mercy, and gains its plea. It is the pertinacity of 
desire that gives triumph to the conflict, in a great struggle of 
prayer. It is the burden of a weighty desire that sobers, makes 
restless, and reduces to quietness the soul just emerged from its 
mighty wrestlings. It is the embracing character of desire which 
arms prayer with a thousand pleas, and robes it with an invincible 
courage and an all-conquering power.
     The Syrophenician woman is an object lesson of desire, 
settled to its consistency, but invulnerable in its intensity and 
pertinacious boldness. The importunate widow represents desire 
gaining its end, through obstacles insuperable to feebler 
impulses.
     Prayer is not the rehearsal of a mere performance; nor is it 
an indefinite, widespread clamour. Desire, while it kindles the 
soul, holds it to the object sought. Prayer is an indispensable 
phase of spiritual habit, but it ceases to be prayer when carried 
on by habit alone. It is depth and intensity of spiritual desire 
which give intensity and depth to prayer. The soul cannot be 
listless when some great desire fires and inflames it. The urgency 
of our desire holds us to the thing desired with a tenacity which 
refuses to be lessened or loosened; it stays and pleads and 
persists, and refuses to let go until the blessing has been 
vouchsafed.

     "Lord, I cannot let Thee go,
     Till a blessing Thou bestow;
     Do not turn away Thy face;
     Mine's an urgent, pressing case."

     The secret of faint heartedness, lack of importunity, want of 
courage and strength in prayer, lies in the weakness of spiritual 
desire, while the non-observance of prayer is the fearful token of 
that desire having ceased to live. That soul has turned from God 
whose desire after Him no longer presses it to the inner chamber. 
There can be no successful praying without consuming desire. Of 
course there can be much seeming to pray, without desire of any 
kind.
     Many things may be catalogued and much ground covered. But 
does desire compile the catalogue? Does desire map out the region 
to be covered? On the answer, hangs the issue of whether our 
petitioning be prating or prayer. Desire is intense, but narrow; 
it cannot spread itself over a wide area. It wants a few things, 
and wants them badly, so badly, that nothing but God's willingness 
to answer, can bring it easement or content.
     Desire single-shots at its objective. There may be many 
things desired, but they are specifically and individually felt 
and expressed. David did not yearn for everything; nor did he 
allow his desires to spread out everywhere and hit nothing. Here 
is the way his desires ran and found expression:
     "One thing have I desired of the Lord, that will I seek 
after; that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of 
my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord, and to enquire in His 
temple."
     It is this singleness of desire, this definiteness of 
yearning, which counts in praying, and which drives prayer 
directly to core and centre of supply.
     In the Beatitudes Jesus voiced the words which directly bear 
upon the innate desires of a renewed soul, and the promise that 
they will be granted: "Blessed are they that do hunger and thirst 
after righteousness, for they shall be filled."
     This, then, is the basis of prayer which compels an answer -- 
that strong inward desire has entered into the spiritual appetite, 
and clamours to be satisfied. Alas for us! It is altogether too 
true and frequent, that our prayers operate in the arid region of 
a mere wish, or in the leafless area of a memorized prayer. 
Sometimes, indeed, our prayers are merely stereotyped expressions 
of set phrases, and conventional proportions, the freshness and 
life of which have departed long years ago.
     Without desire, there is no burden of soul, no sense of need, 
no ardency, no vision, no strength, no glow of faith. There is no 
mighty pressure, no holding on to God, with a deathless, 
despairing grasp -- "I will not let Thee go, except Thou bless 
me." There is no utter self-abandonment, as there was with Moses, 
when, lost in the throes of a desperate, pertinacious, and all-
consuming plea he cried: "Yet now, if Thou wilt forgive their sin; 
if not, blot me, I pray Thee, out of Thy book." Or, as there was 
with John Knox when he pleaded: "Give me Scotland, or I die!"
     God draws mightily near to the praying soul. To see God, to 
know God, and to live for God -- these form the objective of all 
true praying. Thus praying is, after all, inspired to seek after 
God. Prayer-desire is inflamed to see God, to have clearer, 
fuller, sweeter and richer revelation of God. So to those who thus 
pray, the Bible becomes a new Bible, and Christ a new Saviour, by 
the light and revelation of the inner chamber.
     We iterate and reiterate that burning desire -- enlarged and 
ever enlarging -- for the best, and most powerful gifts and graces 
of the Spirit of God, is the legitimate heritage of true and 
effectual praying. Self and service cannot be divorced -- cannot, 
possibly, be separated. More than that: desire must be made 
intensely personal, must be centered on God with an insatiable 
hungering and thirsting after Him and His righteousness. "My soul 
thirsteth for God, the living God." The indispensable requisite 
for all true praying is a deeply seated desire which seeks after 
God Himself, and remains unappeased, until the choicest gifts in 
heaven's bestowal, have been richly and abundantly vouchsafed.