VI
ELIJAH--PASSIONATE IN PRAYER
"Lord, teach us to pray."--Luke xi. 1.
"Elias . . . prayed in his prayer."--Jas. v. 17 (Marg.).
ELIJAH towers up like a mountain above all the
other prophets. There is a solitary grandeur about
Elijah that is all his own. There is an unearthliness
and a mysteriousness about Elijah that is all
his own. There is a volcanic suddenness--a volcanic
violence indeed--about almost all Elijah's movements,
and about almost all Elijah's appearances.
"And Elijah the Tishbite, who was of the inhabitants
of Gilead, said unto Ahab, As the Lord God
of Israel liveth, before whom I stand, there shall
not be dew nor rain these years, but according to
my word. . . . And the King of Samaria said unto
them, What manner of man was he which came
up to meet you, and told you these words? And
they answered him, He was an hairy man, and
girt with a girdle of leather about his loins. And
the King said, It is Elijah the Tishbite."
And, then, this is the very last word of the very
last prophet of the Old Testament. "Behold,
saith the Lord, I will send you Elijah the prophet,
before
the coming of the great and dreadful day
of the Lord. And he shall turn the heart of the
fathers to the children, and the heart of the children
to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with
a curse." And, then, in the opening of the New
Testament, we hear our Lord speaking with great
pride of the great austerity, the great solitariness,
the great strength, and the great courage of Elijah.
"
What went ye out into the wilderness to see?
A reed shaken with the wind? But what went ye
out for to see? A man clothed in soft raiment?
Behold, they that wear soft raiment are in kings'
houses. But what went ye out for to see? A
prophet? Yea, I say unto you, and more than a
prophet. . . .
And, if ye will receive it, this is
Elias, which was for to come!"
Elijah had a heavenly name: but he had, to
begin with, an earthly nature. He was a man, to
begin with, "subject to like passions as we are."
Elijah was a man indeed of passions "all compact."
We never see Elijah but he is in a passion, as we
say. In a passion of anger at Ahab. In a passion
of scorn and contempt at the priests of Baal. In
a passion of fury and extermination against all
idolatry, and against all organised uncleanness.
In a passion of prayer and intercession. And, once
--for, after all, Elijah is flesh and blood, and not
stone and iron--once in a passion of despondency
and melancholy under the juniper tree. Elijah was
a great man. There was a great mass of manhood
in Elijah. He was a mountain of a man, with
a whirlwind for a heart. Elijah did nothing by
halves. What he did, he did with all his heart.
And what a heart it was! He, among us, who has
the most heart: he, among us, who has the most
manhood: he, among us, who has the most passion
in his heart--the most love and the most hate; the
most anger and the most meekness; the most
scorn, and the most contempt, and the most
humility, and the most honour; the most fear, and
the most faith; the most melancholy, and the most
sunny spirit; the most agony of prayer, both in
his body and in his soul, and the most victorious
assurance that his prayer is already answered before
it is yet offered--that man is the likest of us all
to Elijah, and that man has Elijah's mantle fallen
upon him.
James, the brother of the Lord, and the author
of this Epistle, was nicknamed "Camel-knees" by
the early Church. James had been so slow of heart
to believe that his brother, Jesus, could possibly be
the Christ, that, after he was brought to believe,
he was never off his knees. And when they came
to coffin him, it was like coffining the knees of a
camel rather than the knees of a man, so hard, so
worn, so stiff were they with prayer, and so unlike
any other dead man's knees they had ever coffined.
The translators tell us that they have preserved
James's intense Hebrew idiom for us in the margin:
and I, for one, am much obliged to them for doing
that. For, if I am saved at last, if I ever learn to
pray, if I ever come to put my passions into my
prayers,--I shall have to say to "Camel-knees,"
and to his excellent editors and translators, that I
am to all eternity in their debt. The apostolic and
prophetic idiom in the margin takes hold of my
imagination. It touches my heart. It speaks to
my conscience. And it must do all that to you
also. For, even after we have, in a way, prayed,
off and on, for many years, in the pulpit, at the
family altar, and on the platform in the prayer-meeting,--how
seldom, if ever, we "pray in our
prayers"! We repeat choice passages of Scripture.
We recite, with sonorous voices, most excellent
evangelical extracts from Isaiah and Ezekiel. We
declaim our petitions in a way that would do credit
to a stage surrounded with spectators. We praise
one man, and we blame another man, in our prayers.
We have an eye, now to this man present, and now
to that man absent. We pronounce appreciations,
and we pass judgments in our prayers. We flatter
the great, and we fall down before Kings. We tell
our people what the Queen said to us, and what
we said to her. We argue, and we debate, and we
reason together, sometimes with men, and sometimes
with God. "
Come, now, and let us reason
together, saith the Lord." Are you old enough to
remember Dr. Candlish's forenoon prayer? We
used to say that his first prayer was enough for the
whole of that day. He so "prayed in that prayer."
He so came and reasoned together with God in
that prayer. Sometimes he would take us to our
knees till we had knees in those days like James the
Just, as he led us through the whole of Paul's
reasoning with God and with man in the Epistle to
the Romans. Sometimes he would argue like Job,
and would not be put down; and then he would
weep like Jeremiah and dance and sing like Isaiah.
That great preacher was an Elijah both in his
passions and in his prayers. He would put all his
passions at one time into an Assembly speech as he
stood before Ahab, and at another time into a great
sermon to his incomparably privileged people: but
I liked his passions best in his half-hour prayer
on a Sabbath morning; he so "prayed in that
prayer."
You have not Elijah's prophetical office, not
James's apostolical inspiration, not Dr. Candlish's
oratorical power: but you have plenty of passion
if you would but make the right use of it. You are
all vicious or virtuous men, prayerful or prayerless
men; and, then, you are effectual or unavailing
men in your prayers--just as your passions are.
You have all quite sufficient variety and amount of
passion to make you mighty men with God and with
men, if only your passions found their proper vent
in your prayers. You have all passion enough--far
too much--in other things. What an ocean of
all kinds of passion your heart is! What depths
of self-love are in your heart! And what a master-passion
is your self-love! Like Aaron's serpent,
your passion of self-love swallows all the rest of the
serpents, of which your heart is full. What hate,
again, you have in your heart, at the persons and
the things you do so hate! What hope also for the
things you so passionately hope for! Oh, if only
you had that passionate hope in your heart, which
maketh not ashamed! "Yea, what clearing of
yourselves" there is in your hearts! "Yea, what
indignation! Yea, what fear! Yea, what vehement
desire! Yea, what zeal! Yea, what revenge!"
Yes: you have passions enough to make
you a saint in heaven, or a devil in hell: and
they are every day making you either the one
or the other. We have all plenty of passion, and
to spare: only, it is all missing the mark. It is all
sound and fury, a tale told, a life laid out and lived,
by an idiot. Our passions, all given us for our
blessedness, are all making us and other people
miserable. Our passions, and their proper objects,
were all committed to us of God to satisfy, and to
delight, and to regale, and to glorify us. But we
have taken our passions and have made them the
instruments and the occasions of our self-destruction.
We are self-blinded, and self-besotted
men: and it is the prostitution of our passions that
has done it. Does the thought of God ever make
your heart swell and beat with holy passion?
Does the Name of Jesus Christ ever make you sing
in the night? Do His words hide in your heart
like the words of your bridegroom? Do you
tremble to offend Him? Do you number the days
till you are to be for ever with Him? And so on--through
all your passions of all kinds in your heart?
No, oh no! Your daily life among these men and
women is full of passion: but your heart in your
religion is as dead as a stone. And you are not
alone to blame for that. Your father and your
mother, your tutor and your governor, taught
you many branches of learning and perfected you
in many accomplishments, as they are called: but
they could not teach you to keep
this passion in
your heart, for they did not know the way. You
never heard them say so much as the word
"passion" in connection with prayer. And your
ministers have not mended matters. They did not
study the passions at college: at least, never in
this light. They graduated in mental philosophy;
but it was falsely so called. Their first-class honours
puffed them up: but they edified them not. And
ever since; their own passions are all in disorder and
death, and how then could they correct or instruct
you? Their own passions are not aflame within
them with God, and with their Saviour Jesus
Christ, and with His Cross, and with His throne of
judgment, and with heaven; and with hell.
The Bible, naturally, shows a preference for men
of "like passions" with itself. The more passionateness
any man puts into his prayer, the more space
and the more praise the Bible gives to that man.
Jacob will come at once to every mind. Now, why
does Jacob come to all our minds at this moment?
Simply because he was a prince in the passionateness
of his great prayer at the Jabbok. What a
tempest of passion broke upon the throne of God
all that night! What a storm of fear and of despair,
and of remorse, and of self-accusation, and of
recollection, and of imagination, and of all that was
within Jacob! Jacob's passions literally tore him
to pieces that terrible night. His thigh-bones were
twisted, and torn out of their sockets: his strongest
sinews snapped under the strain like so many silk
threads. There was not another night like that
for passion in prayer for two thousand years. Esau
also often "halted upon his thigh": but that was
with hunting too hard; that was with running
down venison, and leaping hedges and ditches after
his quarry. Esau wrestled with wild beasts. But
Jacob,--he wrestled with the angel. And take
Hannah as an example to wives and mothers.
What a passionate, heart-broken, half-insane woman
was Hannah! For, how she "prayed in her
prayers"! She was absolutely drunk with her
sorrowful passion. She would have fallen on the
floor of the sanctuary as she reeled in her passion,
had she not caught hold of the horns of the altar.
And Isaiah,--"
Oh, that Thou wouldest rend the
heavens,"--and he rent them as he prayed: "
that
Thou wouldest come down, that the mountains
might flow down at Thy presence. . . .
But we are
all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses
are as filthy rags; and we all do fade as a leaf;
and our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us
away"--and a thousand such passionate passages,
both in preaching and in prayer. What a passion
for holiness had that great Old Testament orator!
And Ezra, who is too little known. "
At the
evening sacrifice I arose up from my heaviness;
and having rent my garment and my mantle, I fell
upon my knees, and spread out my hands unto the
Lord my God, and said, O my God, I am ashamed
and blush to lift up my face to Thee, my God:
for our iniquities are increased over our head, and
our trespass is grown up unto the heavens. . . .
Now when Ezra had prayed, and when he had confessed,
weeping and casting himself down before the
house of God, there assembled unto him out of
Israel a very great congregation of men and women
and children: for the people wept very sore."
There also is passion in prayer for you; and men,
and women, and children, all joining in it!
But time would fail me to tell all the passionate
prayers of the prophets, and the Psalmist, and the
friend at midnight, and the importunate widow,
and all ending in the Garden of Gethsemane. No:
not all ending there--alas, alas! would God that
they did,--for our Lord passionately foretells certain
passionate scenes that we shall all see, if we do not
take a passionate part in them. "For, when once
the Master of the house is risen up, and hath shut
to the door, and ye begin to stand without . . .
saying Lord, Lord, open unto us! there shall be
weeping and gnashing of teeth, when ye shall see
Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, and all the prophets,
in the Kingdom of God, and you yourselves cast
out." There is passion in
that prayer, and in
this:
"Fall on us, and hide us from the face of Him that
sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the
Lamb!"
And, now to sum it all up, and to lay it all to
heart. Let every man here, henceforth "pray in
his prayers" like Elijah and like James. That is
to say, let every man put his passion into his
prayers. And, then, what will take place in every
man and in every man's house who lays up in his
heart, and practises in his life, the lesson of this
great Scripture? This will take place in every
such man, and in every such man's household.
His heart will, by degrees, be drawn off the things
of this deceitful and sinful world: and it will be
directed in upon the great world within him, the
great world before him, and the great world above
him. The heat of his heart will all begin to burn
after heavenly things. And the man will, gradually,
as he continues to pray, become a new man, a new
son, a new lover, a new husband, a new father. His
passions that made him so impossible to live with
will all become subdued, and softened, and sweetened,
till he will be like a little child in your hands. He
was at one time so hard, .and so harsh, and so
impossible to please, and so full of his own ideas
and opinions and prejudices and passions, so loud
and so wilful: but you never hear him now; he
thinks you so much better than himself; he so
despises himself and so respects and honours
you. Patience and meekness and silence, and his
daily cross, are now the only passions of his heart.
Perhaps all that is taking place and going on in
your own house, and you do not see it or aright
understand it. James did not see nor understand
Jesus till Jesus was glorified. But it has been
prayer that has been doing it. Nothing does all
that in any house but prayer. Nothing silences,
and subdues, and sanctifies our passions but prayer:
His Prayer when you were asleep!
His Prayer
with passion, that had to wait for its full utterance
and for its full agony till you were fast asleep!
His Prayer also when you were neglecting Him,
and trampling upon Him!
Oh, I think you should cheer on and encourage
your minister to preach more about prayer! And
about the place of the passions in prayer! You
should buy the best books about prayer! You
know their names, surely. You should send presents
of the best books about prayer! It would soon
repay you! It would soon be returned--into no
bosom so soon as into yours!--if you had even one
in your whole household who "prayed in his
prayers."
