Our Relationships With Other Christians Affects Our Praying
By Elmer G. Klassen
If you will travel about to visit other evangelical church as well as churches in your neighborhood you will soon discover as maybe you have already discovered in your church why God has not yet heard our prayers for a nationwide revival. You will learn that all across our land there are evangelical Christians who cannot respect their brothers and sisters in Christ in other denominations.
It is not a language barrier or a lack of understanding the truth of the Gospel, but the refusal to love Christians in other churches that hinders our prayers for revival. Worldwide evangelism and the return of Christ is not so much hindered by not enough praying for our own benefits as the unwillingness to accept and love other evangelicals who love and honor Jesus Christ, want to obey Him, love the Bible as God’s inspired Word of God and claim salvation through the blood of Christ just as we do.
Modern missions began in the 18th century when the fighting and quarrelling Lutheran, Calvinist and Anabapist Christians had a love feast on the estate of Count van Zinzendorf. These Christians were tearing themselves apart with criticisms and doctrinal differences until there was repentance and acceptance of each other. This then started a 100-year continuous prayer meeting and sent missionaries into all the world converting prominent and common people to the church, within the church and to the Anabaptists..
The final missionary thrust in church history will also come when evangelical Christians will confess their sins of hate and of condemning one another and will unite in all-out effort to bring in the end-time harvest as our Lord commanded us to do before His ascension to heaven.
Prayer meetings for revival with an unforgiving spirit toward other evangelicals will be of no avail until we as evangelicals confess our lack of love toward each other. God will not tolerate hate toward born-again Calvinists, Arminians, Baptists, Methodists, Mennonites, Pentecostals, Charismatics, Orthodox, Catholics, African-Americans, Anglo-Saxons, Hispanics, Promise Keepers, Christians who read other translations of the Scriptures, etc., etc. The apple of God’s eye are the people who trust in Jesus for their salvation. We can have the right doctrine, have zeal for evangelism and give much to missions, have the gift of prophecy and have faith to remove mountains, yet if we have not love for other Christians it profits us nothing (I Cor. 13; I John 1:7; 2:3,4,9; 3:10, 15,16; 4:7,11,20,21; 5:16).
In his book, “Prayer’s Deeper Secrets,” F. J. Huegel helps us overcome this hindrance to revival. In chapter five, “The Law of Right Relations,” he writes on the importance of good relationships for effective revival praying.
“Nothing so affects the Christian’s prayer life as his relations with others. Here is where prayer founders; here is where the great short circuit is found through which the prayers of the Church run aground and lose their efficacy. Jesus our Lord with His customary incisiveness flashes the matter upon the consciences of His followers I this fashion: ‘When ye stand praying, forgive.’ He had just said: “What things soever ye desire when ye pray believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them.’ But He goes on to say however, it is not as simply as that. Look well to your relations with your fellows. Have you quarreled with anyone? Go seek your brother and be reconciled. Has someone wronged you? Then you must forgive. Then comes the terrible judgment which might well cause us to tremble: “But if you do not forgive, neither will your Father which is in heaven forgive your trespasses.’
“It is indeed strange that in books on prayer this matter, in the main, is passed over. Perhaps it is because it is painful. Yet we dare not close our eyes to this aspect of our theme, that is, if we would really learn to pray and release for suffering, despairing mankind the untold riches which God in His great mercy is so eager to bestow. The world’s greatest need is for great intercessors that the power and goodness of Almighty God might be brought to bear upon benighted souls as when a great river invades a parched desert land. But great intercessors such as Jacob and Moses and Isaiah and Paul and George Muller and Praying Hyde of India must pay a great price. Nothing costs like prayer. It demands among other things right relations. It costs forgiveness like that wrought on Calvary. I must forgive my brother if I would approach Him who bore all my sins in His body on the Tree that I might be forgiven. In the face of God’s forgiveness so freely offered to all men however great their crimes and offenses as regards His love and law, through the Crucified One who was made sin (yea, a curse) that men might be freed from the curse of sin, all petty human bitterness and all unwillingness to forgive become infinite incongruities. Nothing will so get you out of step with God, and so at cross-purposes, as a lack of forgiveness. Though it may hurt like the pulling of all your teeth, you must forgive, or give up the hope of becoming an effective intercessor.
“Missionary labors have taken me to many lands and associated me with almost all the types that make up God’s great family today. There is a general conviction that the greatest need is life from heaven, revival; the sort of thing that inflamed hearts and revolutionized lives on Pentecost. Here and there we find life such as that which characterized the Church after Pentecost. False fire, too, of a spurious kind is not wanting.
“Oh, the longings for genuine revival. And what earnest prayers that God would rend the heavens and come down, that the mountains might melt at His presence, as we read in Isaiah--but the revival does not come. And when one searches into the cause, one is driven to the conclusion that it lies in ourselves. Oh, our divisions, our ill will toward groups of a different ecclesiastical genuflection, our denominational pride, our unwillingness to recognize and aim at the unity of the body with Christ as Head, our zeal for our own particular group with its distinguishing tradition and emphasis, our narrow bigotry, our passionate labors whose end, we say, is Christ but at whose roots there lies the uncrucified flesh. Romans six would, if applied, take care of it all and remove the hindrances as when a prairie fire sweeps the land clear of every vile growth. ‘Knowing that our old man was crucified together with Christ.’ Fail to enter into the experience of Romans six and you raise the greatest hindrance to the efficacy of prayer than can be found in the entire brook of obstacles.
“I can only pray for revival as I stand on universal ground. I must by faith stand on the oneness of the body of Christ. I must say amen to prayers of all the saints. I must in spirit embrace all God’s children regardless of color. I must be delighted over the growth of some other denomination slightly different from my own—just so souls are brought in true faith to Christ. I must be willing to die, knowing that we who live are always committed unto death for Jesus’ sake that the life also of Jesus may be made manifest in our mortal flesh (2 Cor. 4:10). My pride and disdain for a brother in the faith whose color makes him obnoxious, will as certainly and effectively close the door of heaven against my prayers as open sin of a heinous nature.”
United prayer will be and is effective! The three most organized forces against the Church are Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam. Evangelicals are uniting in global prayer against these enemies of Christ and are crushing Satan under their feet as millions of believers agree to destroy by prayer his strongholds. This is happening locally and universally. No power can or will triumph over the praying Church of Jesus Christ. The enemies of the Gospel are noticeably recognizing this. That is why there is so much demonic activity in heaven and on earth. We are seeing our victory being won on our knees! God listens to the prayers of His people who agree in prayer.
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