Prayer is tied to ministry. If we want to minister to other Christians, we need to have a close walk with God and prayer is one way we keep that close walk.
Charles Finney wrote regarding prayer and his ministry: “In regard to my own experience, I will say that unless I had the spirit of prayer, I could do nothing. If even for a day or an hour I lost the spirit of grace and supplication, I found myself unable to preach with power and efficiency, or win souls by personal conversation. I found myself having more or less power in preaching, and in personal labors for souls, just in proportion as I had the spirit of prevailing prayer. I have found that unless I kept myself and have been kept in such relations to God as to have daily and hourly access to him in prayer, my efforts to win souls were abortive; but that when I could prevail with God in prayer, I could prevail with man in preaching, exhortation, and conversation.”
“I used to spend a great deal of time in prayer; sometimes, I thought, literally praying “without ceasing.” I also found it very profitable, and felt very much inclined, to hold frequent days of private fasting. On those days I would seek to be entirely alone with God, and would generally wander off into the woods, or get into the meetinghouse, or somewhere away entirely by myself.”
Through a close walk with God by prayer, Finney also wrote: “Some of the most telling sermons that I have ever preached in Oberlin, I have thus received after the bell had rung for church, and I was obliged to go and pour them off from my full heart, without jotting down more than the briefest possible skeleton. They were not mine, but from the Holy Spirit in me. And let no man say that this is claiming a higher inspiration than is promised to ministers, or than ministers have a right to expect. For I believe that all ministers, called by Christ to preach the Gospel, ought to be, and may be, in such a sense inspired, as to “preach the Gospel with the Holy Spirit sent down from heaven” (I Pet. 1:12).
(By Josh Wilcox)
