PRAYER & SPIRITUAL WARFARE

E. M. Bounds
Chapter 4

Prayer and Desire

There are those who will mock me and tell me to stick to my trade as a cobbler. They will tell me to 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 desire and an intense longing for accomplishment. In the realm of spiritual affairs, it is an important addition to prayer. It is so important that one could almost say desire is an absolute essential of prayer. Desire precedes and accompanies prayer. Desire goes before prayer and is created and intensified by it. 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. The deeper the desire, the stronger the prayer. Without desire, prayer is a meaningless mumble of words. Such uninterested, formal praying, with no heart, feeling, or real desire accompanying it, is to be avoided like a plague. Its exercise is a waste of precious time, and no real blessing results from it.

Yet, even if it is discovered that desire is honestly absent, we should pray anyway. We ought to pray. The ought come in, in order for desire and expression to be produced. God’s word commands it. Our judgment tells us we ought to pray — whether we feel like it or not — and not allow our feelings to determine our prayer habits. In such circumstances, we ought to pray for the desire to pray. This desire is God-given and heaven-born. We should pray for desire. Then, when desire has been given, we should pray according to its principles. the lack of spiritual desire should grieve us and lead us to mourn its absence. We should earnestly seek for its prize so that our praying would be an expression of “the soul’s sincere desire.”

A sense of need creates, or should create, earnest desire. The stronger the need before God, the greater the desire and the more earnest the prayer should be. The “poor in spirit” (Matt 5:3) are highly competent to pray.

Hunger is an active sense of physical need. It prompts the request for food. In like manner, the inward awareness of spiritual need creates desire, and desire creates prayer. Desire is an inward longing for desire creates prayer. Desire is an inward longing for something that we do not possess and need it. It is something that God has promised and that can be secured by earnest prayer at 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” (1 Pet 2:2).

The absence of this holy desire in the heart is proof that there has been a decline in spiritual joy or that the new birth has never taken place. “Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled” (Matt 5:6).

These heaven-given appetites are proof of a renewed heart and the evidence of a stirring spiritual life. Physical appetites are the characteristics of a living body, not a corpse. Spiritual desires belong to a soul made alive to God. As the renewed soul hungers and thirsts after righteousness, these holy, inward desires break out into earnest, petitioning prayer.

In prayer we are dependent on the name and power of Jesus Christ, our great High Priest. Searching the accompanying conditions and forces in prayer, we find its vital basis, which is seated in the human heart. It is not simply our need; it is the heart’s desire for what we need and for what we feel urged to pray about. Desire is the will in action. It is a strong, conscious longing that is excited in the inner man for some great good. Desire exalts the object of its longing and sets the mind on it. It has choice, attitude, and fire in it. Prayer based on these, is genuine and specific. It knows its need, feels and sees the thing that will meet it, and hurries to acquire it.

Holy desire is helped by devout study. Meditation on our spiritual need and on God’s readiness and ability to correct it helps desire to grow. Serious thought practiced before praying increases desire. It makes prayer more insistent and tends to save us from the danger of private prayer — wandering thuoght. We fail much more in desire than in its outward expression. We keep the form while the inner life fades and almost dies.

One might ask whether the feebleness of our desire for God the Father, the Holy Spirit, and all the fullness of Christ is the cause of our lack of prayer. Do we really feel this inward hunger and desire for heavenly treasures? Do the inborn groaning of desire stir our souls to mighty wrestling? Oh, the fire burns entirely too low. The flaming heat of the soul has been toned down to a lukewarmness. This, we should remember, was the major causes of the sad, desperate condition of the Laodicean Christians. Because of this condition, the awful condemnation is written about them: “[Your are] rich, and increased with goods, and have need of nothing; and knowest not that thou art wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked” (Rev 3:17, emphasis added).

Again, we might ask, do we have that desire that presses us into close communion with God? Do we have the desire that is filled with silent pain that keeps us there through the agony of an intense, soul-stirred prayer? Our hearts need to be worked over, not only to get the evil out of them, but to get the good unto them. They need to be worked over so that the foundation and inspiration to the incoming good is strong, moving desire. This holy, fervent flame in the soul awakens the interest of heaven, attracts God’s attention, and places the inexhaustible riches of divine grace at the disposal of those who exercise it.

The dampening of the flame of holy desire is destructive to the vital, aggressive forces in church life. God expects to be represented by a fiery church or He is not, in any proper sense, represented at all. God Himself is all fire, and His church, if it is to be like Him, must also be like white heat. The only things that His church can afford to be on fire about are the great, eternal interests of heaven-born, God-given faith.

Yet, holy desire does not have to be fussy in order to be consuming. Our Lord was the incarnate opposite of nervous excitability, the absolute opposite of intolerant or noisy speech. Still, the zeal of God’s house consumed Him. And the world is still feeling the glow of His fierce, consuming flame. They are responding to it with an ever increasing readiness and so even larger response.

A lack of passion in prayer is a sure sign of the lack of depth and the intensity of desire. The absence of intense desire is a sure sign of God’s absence from the heart! To reduce fervor is to retire from God. He can and does tolerate in His children many things in the areas of weakness and mistakes. He can and will pardon sin when the repentant one prays.

But two things are intolerable to Him — insincerity and lukewarmness. Lack of heart and heat are two things He hates. He said to the Laodiceans, in 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” (Rev 3:15-16)

This was God’s precise judgment on the lack of fire in one of the seven churches. It is His accusation against individual Christians for the fatal lack of sacred zeal. Fire is the motivating power in prayer. Religious principles that do not come out of fire have neither force nor effect. Fire is the wing on which faith ascends. Passion is the soul of prayer. It is the “effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man [that] availeth much” (James 5:16). Love is kindled in a flame, and zeal is its life. Flame is the air that true Christian experience breathes. It feeds on fire. It can withstand anything except a weak flame. It dies, chilled and starved.

True prayer must be aflame. The Christian life and character need to be on fire. Lack of spiritual heat creates more unbelief than lack of faith does. If man is not wholly interested in the things of heaven, he is not interested in them at all. The fiery souls are those who conquer in the day of battle. They are those from whom the kingdom of heaven suffers violence and who take it by force (Matt 11:12). The stronghold of God is taken only by those who storm it in worshipful earnestness and besiege it with fiery, unshakable zeal.

Nothing short of being red-hot for God can keep the glow of heaven in our hearts during these chilly days. The early Methodists had no heating in their churches. They said that the flame in the pew and the fire in the pulpit must be sufficient to keep them warm. And we, today, need to have the live coals from God’s altar and the consuming flame from heaven glowing in our hearts. This flame is not mental power or fleshly energy. It is divine, intense, dross-consuming fire in the soul. It is the very being of the Spirit of God.

No scholarship, pure speech, breadth of mental outlook, fluent language, or elegance can make up for the lack of fire. Prayer ascends by fire. Flame gives prayer access as well as wings. It gives prayer 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 tendency, but a strong yearning — an unquenchable desire that permeates, glows, burns, and fixes the heart. It is the flame of a present and active principle ascending up to God. It is ardor propelled by desire that burns its way to the throne of mercy and gets its request. It is the determination of desire that gives victory in a great struggle of prayer. It is the burden of a weighty desire that sobers, makes restless, reduces to quietness the soul that emerged from its mighty wrestlings. It is the inclusive character of desire that arms prayer with a thousand requests. It clothes it with an indestructible courage and an all-conquering power.

The Syrophenician woman is an object lesson of desire. The demanding widow represents desire gaining its end, overcoming obstacles that would be insurmountable to weaker instincts.

Prayer is not the rehearsal of a mere performance. It is not an indefinite, widespread demand. Desire, while it ignites the soul, holds it to the object sought. Prayer is a necessary phrase of spiritual habit, but it ceases to be prayer when it is carried on by habit alone. Depth and strength of spiritual desire give intensity and depth to prayer. the should cannot be unconcerned when some great desire heats and inflames it. The urgency of our desire heats and inflames it. The urgency of our desire holds us to the thing desired with a courage that refuses to be lessened or loosened. It says, pleads, persists, and refuses to let go until the blessing has been given.

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 cowardice, the lack of demanding, and the scarcity of courage and strengthen in prayer lie in the weakness of spiritual desire. The failure of prayer is the fearful evidence of that desire having ceased to live. That soul whose desire for Him no longer pushes into the inner room, has turned from God. There is no successful prayer without consuming desire. Of course, there can be much seeming to pray, without desire of any kind.

Many things may be listed and much ground covered. But does desire make up the list? Does desire map out the region to be covered? The answer hangs on the issue of whether our petitioning is babbling or prayer. Desire is intense but narrow. It cannot spread itself over a wide area. It wants a few things and wants them badly. It wants them so badly that nothing but God’s willingness to answer can bring it ease or contentment.

Desire shoots at its objective. There may be many things that are desired, but they are specifically and individually felt and expressed. David did not yearn for everything. He did not 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 inquire in His temple.

It is this singleness of desire, this definite yearning, that counts in praying and drives prayer directly to the core and center of supply.

In the Beatitudes, Jesus voiced the words that bear directly upon the inborn desires of a renewed soul with the promise that they will be granted, “Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness; for they shall be filled” (Matt 5:6).

This, then, is the basis of prayer that expects an answer. It is that strong, inward desire that has entered the spiritual appetite and demands to be satisfied. For us, it is entirely true and frequent that our prayers operate in the dry area of a mere wish or to the lifeless area of a memorized prayer. Sometimes our prayers are merely stereotyped expressions of set phrases and standardized dimensions. The freshness and life has gone out long ago.

Without desire, there is no burden of the soul, no sense of need, no enthusiasm, no vision, no strength, and no glow of faith. There is no strong pressure, no holding on to GOd with a deathless, despairing grasp — “I will not let thee go, except thou bless me” (Gen 32:26). There is no total surrender as there was with Moses. Lost in the agony of a desperate, stubborn, and all-consuming request, he cried, “Yet now, if thou wilt forgive their sin –; and if not, blot me, I pray thee, out of thy book which thou hast written” (Ex 32:32). Or, there was also John Knox when he pleaded, “Give me Scotland, or may I die!”

God draws very close to the praying soul. To see God, know God, and live for God — these form the objective of all true praying. So, praying is, after all, inspired to seek after God. Prayer desire is ignited to see God and have a clearer, fuller, sweeter, and richer revelation of God. To those who pray this way, the Bible becomes a new Bible and Christ a new Savior by the light and revelation of the prayer closet.

We affirm and reaffirm that burning desire because the best and most powerful gifts and graces of the Spirit of God are the real heritage of true praying. Self and service cannot be divorced. They cannot possibly be separated. More than that, desire must be made intensely personal. It must be centered on God with an insatiable hungering and thirsting after Him and His righteousness. “My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God” (Ps 42:2). The essential prerequisite for all true praying is a deep-seated desire that seeks after God Himself. It remains unsatisfied until the choice gifts in heaven have been richly and abundantly given.