The Epistle of James, in its five chapters, has more direct teaching upon the causes of failure in prayer than any other single book in the New Testament. It has three references to prayer—in the first, fourth, and fifth chapters.
Causes of Failure in Prayer
In the first chapter we have a hint of two causes of the lack of power in prayer—the lack of faith and the lack of patience. In the fourth chapter we find two additional causes—selfishness in motive, and worldly alliance. In the fifth chapter we have likewise two causes of failure, found in the lack of importunity or persistence, and in not maintaining the level of faith in waiting for answers. This is very comprehensive, but all we can do is to outline the subject as presented in this Epistle. These are no theoretical matters that we meditate upon, but the most intense business that the child of God can engage in, for the secret of prevailing power in prayer lies at the bottom of everything else in the Christian life. There is no subduing of sin and no relief from darkness without it.
Lack of Faith and of Patience
In James 1 we find two difficulties in the line of profitless prayer to which reference is made: “If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God…. But let him ask in faith, nothing wavering: for he who wavers is like a wave of the sea, driven with the wind and tossed. For let not that man think that he shall receive anything of the Lord. A double-minded man is unstable in all his ways” (Jas. 1:5-8). Here are the two difficulties—a lack of faith and a lack of patience.
Lack of faith is virtually making God a liar. Let us look at the fact exactly as it is. If God promises to the praying soul, in unequivocal terms and in a multitude of forms, absolutely sure answers, then to doubt God’s promises is to make Him a liar; no blessing can come to any man that impugns the veracity of God. But the faith must be a patient faith that knows how to wait. Here is one of the most remarkable similes in Scripture: “He who wavers is like a wave [or literally surge] of the sea,” the foam on the top of the wave, “driven with the wind, and tossed.” At the seashore when the wind is blowing, we see two motions: one to-and-fro that is called “fluctuation,” and one up-and-down that is called “undulation.” The apostle James refers to both motions. “Driven with the wind” is fluctuation; “tossed” is undulation. The peculiarity of a wave is that it cannot stay anywhere; wherever it goes it falls back. If it gets ahead it recedes and we call it a receding wave; if it gets up it goes down and we call it a falling wave. A double-minded man is exactly like it—mere foam, for foam is most easily moved up-and-down, and to-and-fro, of anything about the water.
The difficulty is that if a man who has no proper faith is propelled ahead, back he goes to his other and former standards. Or if he is lifted up in ecstasy and exaltation, he cannot stay there and down he goes. He is in the trough of the sea five minutes afterwards, just like the surge of the sea, fluctuating and undulating, with no power to hold on. There can be no prevailing prayer without this power to hold on. Hundreds go and commit a thing to God one minute and take it back the next. They are afraid that God cannot take care of it for any length of time; they must give God their aid.
Abraham
When God revealed to Abraham that in his old age, when Sarah was past bearing, they should have a son of promise born to them, we are told that “he believed in the LORD, and He counted it to him for righteousness” (Gen. 15:6). This was a great triumph of faith! But look in the beginning of chapter 16 and see how long the triumph lasted. Abraham made an iniquitous connection with Hagar, an Egyptian maid, and the child born to him was one of the greatest curses that ever came on the earth. Why could not he have left it sublimely where faith committed it, to the miracle-working God? Even the father of the faithful failed at the time of crisis.
David
In the crisis of David’s kingdom, when Ahithophel was counselor, and he and other conspirators went over to the side of Absalom in the rebellion, David had no man to cope with Ahithophel, and he prayed: “O Lord, I pray Thee, turn the counsel of Ahithophel into foolishness” (2 Sam. 15:31). Why did he not leave it there? Read on. As David was going up he met Hushai, the Archite, and said, in essence, “You pretend to be a traitor, and go over to Absalom’s side, and make believe you are faithful to him, and watch and see what Ahithophel says, that you may defeat the counsel of Ahithophel” (see 15:34). That is the trouble with us: we commit a thing to God in a sublime act of faith one moment, and the next moment we take it out of God’s hand, and put it in man’s hand, or try ourselves to take care of it—just like the surge of the sea, up-and-down, to-and-fro, never staying anywhere.
Selfishness
In the fourth chapter of James we see two other obstacles put before us. “You ask and receive not, because you ask amiss, that you may consume it upon your lusts” (verse 3). Lusts there do not necessarily mean vicious, sensual, abominable desires, but simply the carnal desires of self-indulgence, as when a man asks for money because he wants the gratification money brings; or for pleasures of the appetite, because he wants his stomach to be satisfied; or for rewards of ambition, because he wants to have power and influence over men. How many things we forfeit because we ask for them in a wrong spirit, because self is at the bottom instead of God being the object in all. You can even ask for spiritual gifts and blessings, for the anointing of the Spirit, in order that people may say, “See how holy that man or woman is,” or “What remarkable power goes with this or that person!” You never get the anointing when it is sought in that way.
Let us observe that if God gave us some things that we asked for, they would be a great curse to us and not a blessing. Remember Kibroth-hattaavah in Numbers 11. The people, complaining and murmuring about having to eat the disgusting manna every day, asked for God to give them flesh to eat (verse 13). God said: “[I] will give you flesh, and you shall eat … until it comes out at your nostrils” (verses 18-20). Then “before [the flesh] was chewed, the wrath of the LORD was kindled against the people, and the LORD smote the people with a very great plague” (verse 33). “He gave them their request, but sent leanness into their soul” (Psa. 106:15).
Do you want God to send leanness into your soul in sending fatness to your body, feeding your carnal and starving your spiritual nature? If that is not what you want, be careful that you do not ask from selfish, lustful motives. Agrippina, the mother of Nero, asked of her gods that they would set her son upon the throne, and the first thing he did when set upon the throne was to plan the death of his own mother. Hezekiah, when told that he should die and not live, turned his face to the wall, and began reciting his good deeds before the LORD, and pleaded for life, and the LORD spared him fifteen years (Isa. 38:1-5). But they were years of disgrace. He foolishly showed the Babylonian officials all of the treasures of his house, incurring a prophecy of judgment against his house (2 Ki. 20:13-18), and he lived long enough to beget Manasseh, who was the greatest curse that Judah ever had. He was the Ahab of Judah, and the afflictions and captivity of Judah were mainly due to the sins of Manasseh. How much better if Hezekiah had died when the LORD gave him notice—better for him, for Judah, and for the whole world! Look out for selfishness of motive in your praying. That is one reason why God keeps you waiting until He refines away your carnality, and gets you up on the high spiritual level in which you can pray in the Holy Spirit.
Worldliness
“You adulterers and adulteresses, know you not that the friendship of the world is enmity with God? whosoever therefore will he a friend of the world is the enemy of God” (Jas. 4:4). Think of a woman, married to an honorable, upright, and holy man, walking through the streets in broad daylight, arm in arm with one who is attempting to supplant him, and then going to her husband for a special favor! When God sees you walking arm in arm with the world that crucified Jesus, and identified with the world before men, how can He hear your prayer? Your prayers are an insult. All alliance with the world implies the predominance of the carnal, and the carnal can never pray acceptably. All power in prayer depends on a vision of the Eternal, on communion with the Eternal, on the atmosphere of the Eternal, and, if you are engrossed and absorbed in the temporal, how can you breathe the atmosphere or have a vision of the Eternal? how can you lay hold upon the powers of the age to come? There is no difficulty in accounting for failure in ten thousand cases, because the prayers are those of essentially worldly people who know almost nothing of coming into real touch with the Eternal Spirit of God.
Lack of Persistence
In James 5, additional lessons are taught with regard to the secrets of prevailing power in prayer and of the lack of it. “Elijah was a man subject to like passions as we are” (verse 17). Thank God for that! He got under a juniper tree, as you and I have often done; he complained and murmured, as we have often done; was unbelieving, as we have often been. But that was not the case when he really got into touch with God. Though “a man of like passions as we are,” “he prayed earnestly.” He kept on praying. “He prayed earnestly that it might not rain; and it rained not on the earth by the space of three years and six months. “And he prayed again, and the heaven gave rain, and the earth brought forth her fruit” (verse 18).
What is the lesson here? You must keep praying. Come up on the top of Mount Carmel and see that remarkable parable of faith and sight. It was not the descent of the fire that now was necessary, but the descent of rain; the man who can command the fire can command the rain by the same means and methods. We are told that he bowed himself to the ground with his face between his knees—that is, shutting out all sights and sounds (1 Ki. 18:42). He was putting himself in a position where, beneath his mantle, he could neither see nor hear what was going forward. He said to his servant, “Go up now, look toward the sea.” He went, and came back, and said one word—“Nothing!” What do we do under such circumstances? We say, “It is just as I expected!” and we give up praying. Did Elijah? No he said, “Go again.” Again, “Nothing!” Seven times this was repeated. By and by the servant came back and said, “Behold, there arises a little cloud out of the sea, like a man’s hand.” A man’s hand had been raised in supplication, and had left its shadow on the heavens, and presently down came the rain. Ahab had not time to get back to the gate of Samaria with all his fast steeds.
That is a parable of faith and sight—faith shutting itself up with God; sight taking observations, and seeing nothing; faith going right on, and praying earnestly, with utterly hopeless reports from sight. Do you know how to pray that way, how to pray prevailingly? Let sight give as discouraging reports as it may, but pay no attention to these. The living God is still in the heavens, and He has done whatsoever He has pleased. Even to delay is a part of His goodness.
Not Maintaining a High
Level of Faith
Look still further. Elijah kept on the height of the mountain till he got the answer to his prayer. Do you know what it is to maintain the high plane and level of faith till the answer comes? What great mistakes are made! When the Lord lifts us up to a high level of faith and expectancy, we offer prayer on that level; but we hasten to get down to the carnal level, as if we supposed that answers could be given to the prayer of faith on any other than the plane of faith! I have had no idea impressed on my mind from the Word of God in connection with prevailing prayer more inspiring and rebuking than this: Answers to the prayer of faith can only be received and recognized on the plane of faith. Get up into the heavenly levels to talk with God; He is not coming down to the carnal level to talk with you; He wants you to stay there till He has given you His answer. Hence the typical significance of Elijah staying up on the mountain, sight taking observations over and over again until the answer of God had come. It is a great thing to keep praying, and to continue in a frame of holy expectation until the blessing comes.
Monica, the mother of Augustine, besought God for many years that Augustine might not go to Rome, because Rome was then, as now, the center of all the iniquity of the Continent. Augustine was a profligate, and she felt that his going to Rome would ensure his rapid ruin, and she besought God not to let him go. He did go to Rome. Did she give up? Not at all. She said, “If the Lord does not grant me what I ask, He will grant me something better.” His going to Rome was the means of his coming into contact with Ambrose of Milan, and that was the means of his becoming converted, and afterwards a great leader and defender of the faith, one of the fathers of the early Church. So God, in refusing the literal request of Monica, fulfilled her heart’s great desire.
What a great blessing my late friend, Dr. William Moon of Brighton (England) has been—the developer of the well-known Moon system of embossed letters to help the blind to read the Word of God, the best of its kind ever devised. When 23 years of age, he was struck with total blindness. He besought God when the symptoms were coming on, that He would deliver him from this calamity. He was an educated, cultivated man, at the beginning of his true service for God and man. But the blindness continued. What did he do? He looked up to God, and said, “My heavenly Father, I thank Thee for the talent of blindness. May I so invest that talent that at the coming of the Lord Jesus He may receive His own with usury.” Is not that sublimely heavenly? The Lord soon taught him that He had permitted the blindness that he might minister to the millions of blind people in the world; and Dr. Moon used his inventive faculties and devised this system, containing only a very few characters in combination. According to recent accounts that system has been utilized in nearly 500 languages and dialects. So that, when this man went to heaven a few years ago (this account was written in 1907), he must have found thousands who had gone to heaven through reading the raised characters by which he made it possible to commune with the Word of God. By taking blindness as a talent from God, and using it for God, he accomplished far more for God and man than he ever could have done if he had followed the devices and desires of his own heart.
The love of God quite as often withholds as grants. Hence the necessity of trusting God to do His own way. He always gives what we ask, or something better. He consults our needs, not our wishes, like a wise and loving Father. His delays are not denials. Delay may discipline faith, teach us patience, and fit us for blessing. Moreover, there are blessed indirect answers to prayer. Prayer is answered most emphatically when God keeps you praying, when God keeps you in a tender state, when He leads you to trust Him absolutely in the absence of all outward signs of answer. The most sublime triumph of prayer is to trust God absolutely when you do not get any sensible answer whatever. There is no other triumph of prayer so great as that. We should all like to live by faith and sight together; but somehow they are incompatible.
Twelve Levels of Prayer
and Answer
May I sum up what I conceive to be the teachings of the Word of God, by what I call the twelve levels of prayer and answer. The first four levels are the levels of vain praying; the next four, the levels of prevailing prayer, and the next four the levels of divine answer.
Vain Praying
Level 1. Down at the very bottom is the level of known sin. “If I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not hear me” (Psa. 66:18). When sin is enthroned and enshrined in the heart, prayers are worse than vain.
Level 2. The second level is selfishness, when you are asking for reasons of self-indulgence, self-gratification, something terminating upon yourself, and not the glory of God.
Level 3. This is the level of form. “This people draw nigh to Me with their mouth, and honor Me with their lips, but their heart is far from Me” (Matt. 15:8). God does not care one bit for prayers that have no heart in them. The mere externals of worship, He says, “I cannot away with; it is iniquity … they are a trouble unto Me; I am weary to bear them” (Isa. 1:13,14).
Level 4. This is the level of unbelief, where there is no expectation of receiving, no faith in God as the Giver.
Prevailing Prayer
Level 5. Above those levels we rise to those of prevailing prayer, and the lowest is that of spiritual desire. You want something, and it is right that you should, and you ask simply from the impulse of a strong yearning. Perfectly right! “Ask and it shall be given unto you, seek and you shall find, knock and it shall be opened unto you” (Matt. 7:7).
Level 6. A higher level is that where you appreciate the Fatherhood of God and your relation as His child, and set up a child’s claim to a Father’s blessing. The desire is emphasized by your conscious relation to God as His child.
Level 7. The third level of prevailing prayer is that in which you appreciate your position as a disciple in Christ, and claim in the name of Jesus Christ what you dare not claim in your own name. You have felt desire and you have added to it a consciousness of filial relation. In addition, you have the consciousness of the disciple’s relationship to Christ, unknown except as we touch John 14—the first time that Christ ever spoke about praying in His name, and repeated seven times between chapters 14 and 16. “Hitherto have you asked nothing in My name” (John 16:24). Up to that time no Old Testament saint or New Testament saint had ever prayed in His name.
Level 8. The final level in this section is where the Holy Spirit working in you unhindered, groans after God. This is the highest level of prayer, indicated in Romans 8, where we are told that the Spirit Himself groans within us unutterably (verse 26). No words will express it, but God hears and cares far more for that than for any words, however well framed.
Divine Answer
Level 9. We come now to the levels of answer. The lowest is where you get what you ask in the way that you ask, like Eliezer, who made the specific request that the maiden who should give the camels drink might be the one appointed for Isaac, while he was praying, Rebekah came and did what he asked, and he did not seem to have been surprised, which is a delightful feature (Gen. 24:14-21). He did not say: “It is a wonderful answer!” Rather let us wonder that God should not do what we ask or as we ask.
Level 10. The next level of prayer is where the answer does not come at the time, or in the way, perhaps, that we expect, or is both delayed and disguised. In the case of Elijah on Mount Carmel it was delayed. The most marked instance in the New Testament is the Syrophenician woman. She was under the ban of the curse; she did not belong even to the “lost sheep of the house of Israel”; she had not a promise to take hold of. “He answered her not a word.” Then, when He did speak, He refused, and reproached her with the only apparently reproachful term He ever used. But look at the logic and wit of her importunity! She said, essentially, “You call me a little dog, and make that a reason why I should not have the children’s bread. I make that a reason why I should have it, for the little dogs under the table do get the crumbs” (Matt. 15:27). Of course, in response to such a wise and humble response, He had to give her the blessing. She made His argument against it a reason for it, and it is a most remarkable case. He seems to have gone all the way from the Sea of Galilee to the shores of the Mediterranean, and back, just for the sake of that woman, for there is no record of any other act performed on the way to and fro. He went to meet this woman whom He treated with silence, then with refusal, and then apparent reproach; but He gave her what she asked, and it is not irreverent to say He could not help it.
Level 11. Notice, again, that sometimes the answer is denied, and here is yet a higher level. But compensation comes with the denial, just as in the instances of Monica and Dr. Moon. The apostle Paul prayed about what is described as a “thorn,” but Paul would not have made such a fuss over a thorn: it was a “stake in the flesh,” and he prayed to God that it might be taken out of the way (2 Cor. 12:7,8). Probably he thought it was affecting his usefulness to men. The Lord distinctly denied the request, but more than made up for the denial with overwhelming grace, saying, “My strength is made perfect in weakness” (verse 9). It was not merely, “Your weakness shall be made an opportunity for the display of My strength,” but, more than all, the only way to make God’s strength perfect is for us to get into a condition of absolute destitution of soul.
Level 12. The last and highest of all the levels of answer is where the answer is not only delayed, not only disguised, not only apparently denied for a time, but after your praying, God seems to preserve an absolute and obstinate silence. No answer comes, you live and, perhaps, die, and never get an answer; but you have not a doubt of the prayer-hearing God. I asked Mr. George Muller a short time before he died if he had asked anything of God that had not been granted, and he told me he had prayed over 62 years for two men to be converted, neither of whom was converted, and there were no signs of it. I said: “Do you expect God to convert them?” ”Certainly. Do you suppose that God would put upon His child for 62 years the burden of two souls if He had no purpose of their salvation? I shall meet them in heaven certainly.” Shortly afterwards he died, and I was preaching in Bristol and referred to this occurrence. As I was going out a lady said: “One of those men was my uncle, and he was converted, and died a few weeks ago.”
I have read of a most godly man who spent 40 years in one church, and agonized in prayer for worldly people in his congregation, who resisted all his efforts to bring them to Christ. He not only prayed for them, and preached the Gospel to them, but lived before them in a remarkable way. He was a saintly man, moving up and down in the community with the fragrance of God upon him. But he died without his prayers being answered; there was not a man of them all brought to Christ during his ministry. But when he died, and his body lay in the coffin, and the funeral service was being held, those men were brought to Christ in the presence of that dead body—a remarkable instance of God answering prayer in a wonderful way, after it was impossible for the suppliant soul to see on earth the triumphs of prayer.
Our spiritual sight is good for nothing. Sometimes we are too far-sighted, sometimes too near-sighted, and never accurate. Let God judge for you. Bring your cause and commit it to Him, leave it in His hand, go away from the throne of grace with absolute repose in the fidelity of a prayer-hearing God. Do not let unbelieving disciples, and that father of liars, the devil, rob you of your confidence that God is true. Believe Him, trust Him, reckon upon Him, rest in Him; and if you do not see the answer, believe that He will show you the answer, though it may be after many days.
(From A Spiritual Clinique, Gospel Publishing House, New York, New York, 1907.)