Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible

Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse: If Christ is in your heart, God will hear you any place. At home or away from home. In school, office, store, shop, factory, in the hospital, driving along the road. In short, any place. The moment we have admitted that we are creatures by nature and that he is our God. The moment we have admitted that we are sinners and that he is our Savior. In that moment, we have become the children of the Father and the bride of the Lord Jesus Christ.

In that moment, he is very eager to have us grow to know him. He wants to be loved and has planned life in all its details so that we will come to desire him more than earthly things. This is the purpose of the Christian life. God is weaning us from the things of Earth in order that we may turn naturally toward him. It is when we have begun to develop in this process that we can learn the meaning of our text: Continue instant in prayer, be constant in prayer. If I am to teach you what this means to me, I must stress again that what many people call prayer is nonsense to me.

Guest (Male): Over a half a century ago, the late Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse, then pastor of Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia, saw the need to spread God's word beyond the hearing of his local congregation. He started the radio ministry which has become known as Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible. The application of God's word as taught by Dr. Barnhouse is as relevant today as when he first taught over the radio airwaves decades ago.

The message we'll be featuring on today's edition of Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible is entitled The Christian's Prayer Life. If you just throw ingredients into a pot on the stove, you are more likely to make a mess instead of a meal. But if you follow the recipe, you can make a good dinner. Many believers have weak, powerless, and unsatisfactory prayer lives because they do not pray according to the principles set forth in God's word.

But if you know these biblical principles and carefully follow them, you can enjoy a fruitful, effective prayer life. Do you make a mess of your prayer life, or do you enjoy peace, power, and blessing through prayer? The Scripture text for this edition of Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible: Romans chapter 12 and verse 12. Here again is Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse with a message entitled The Christian's Prayer Life.

Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse: Through the Lord Jesus Christ, we come unto thee, our Father and our God, and in the Holy Spirit. Thou art the all-gracious one, and thou art more eager to bless us than we are to be blessed. We ask thee to give us a greater vision of thyself and a greater knowledge of thy glory. This is that which is going to cause us to look at ourselves in proper perspective and see that without thee we can do nothing. This is that which can set us aglow for thee, and all the glory and praise will be to thee in the name and for the sake of our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

Today we consider that clause in the 12th chapter of Romans and the 12th verse which says: continuing in prayer. Of all the doctrines that are a part of the Christian faith, there is none perhaps that has more misconceptions about it than the Christian truth about prayer. This probably arises out of the fact that so few people know God intimately enough to have any concept of what it means to be closely associated with him in the prayer relationship.

When children are brought up in a Christian environment, they hear prayers at table before a meal. And these consist of a moment of the expression of thanksgiving to God for blessings received. Before they're put to bed, the father or the mother comes in for the moment which is called saying prayers. Too often these consist of nothing more than: God bless Papa and Mama, brother and sister, and make me a good boy, forgive me for being naughty and may I be kind and obedient. In some cases, these prayers end with nothing more than amen, and in other cases with: in Jesus' name, amen. In some cases, a child gets acquainted with the idea of prayer through a nursery rhyme: Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep, if I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.

Now, if the child is taken to church, he will get a further distorted idea of prayer in some cases through the fact that the public prayers in many churches are little more than preachments with closed eyes. I've even known of preachers who were afraid to speak out against some of the congregational sins in a public sermon and who got around the difficulty by mentioning the sins in the prayer. I've even known of a minister who forgot an announcement and made it in the prayer, asking the Lord to remind people and asking them not to forget it. Well, as the child grows older, his prayers too often are limited to requests to God to give him things that he wants and that he does not have but is striving to get. In many cases, such prayers are combined with a proposition of some sort of a deal with the Almighty: God, if you'll give me this, then I'll do this.

Now this is a trait that runs through all of human nature. We have it illustrated in the Bible in the vow of Jacob which he made the morning after he had run away from home and had had his awesome night vision of the angels of God ascending and descending the ladder to heaven. Jacob said in Genesis 28: If God will be with me and will keep me in this way that I go and will give me bread to eat and clothing to wear so that I come again to my father's house in peace, then the Lord shall be my God, and this stone which I have set up for a pillar shall be God's house, and of all that thou givest me, I will give the tenth to thee. How noble of him.

When we come right down to it, prayer is nothing more than simply talking to God. It's necessary to know a person if you're going to talk to him easily. You might say some things to almost any person: the weather is sure terrible, what a hot day, that's a home run, look at that fool go through a red light. A sentence like one of these is spoken to anybody. And then there are conversations that you'll have with an acquaintance that cover more personal matters. With a close friend, the talk will be even more intimate. Then when you get inside the house or are seated at the family table, there will be personal matters discussed that would not be mentioned outside. A brother will tell his own brother what he might not tell to anyone else. A husband and wife who love each other will have even closer confidences.

Now when we consider all these relationships, it will immediately become evident that our life of prayer with the Lord God will depend on how well we know him. In an earlier study, we've pointed out that we were able to tell a Buddhist in Japan that all gods in the world are feared and hated except our God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. He alone is loved. Now there may be some who listen to this who are not quite sure whether they love God. If this is so, it is because they have not rightly understood what he has done for them and have not realized that he himself has told us that we love him because he first loved us. If we have learned the truth of this great certainty, we will not find it hard to talk with the Lord. When we have learned to love him more, we will delight to talk with him more.

Now I will admit that what I once called prayer and which many people still call prayer does not make much sense to me now. God is not a distant and terrible judge who must be approached with solemn awe. But he is accessible to us as a father or a brother might be. In fact, it's possible to know and love the Lord even better than we might know anyone in an earthly relationship. God the Father has become our heavenly Father. This is a perfect fatherhood relationship. There are earthly fathers who have not had the hearts of their children. I will never forget the despairing cry of a wife who sat with her husband in my office many years ago and talked about the difficulties in their home life. The man burst out in self-defense, saying: I don't understand. I've given you a good home, a good car, charge accounts at the stores, and he continued with a list of material things. She looked at him in despair and said: John, you've given us everything in the world except yourself.

Now, such a man might well be a poor father and his child might not be too interested with the thought of a close companionship with a heavenly Father who had the qualities of his earthly father. But our God, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, is the perfect father, and all of his relationships with his children are the perfect relationships. If we come to know him as he really is, we find that he is altogether lovely and that he is always thinking of our good. It is true that whom the Lord loves he chastens and whips every son whom he receives. But if we watch children closely, we discover that they love most the parents who are faithful in their discipline.

What is true of the infinite superiority of the heavenly Father over the earthly father is also true of the infinite superiority of Jesus Christ as friend and brother over any earthly friend or brother. The earthly relationships are always mixed with some self-interest. But the Lord's love is so true that it always puts our interest first. The moment we have admitted that we are creatures by nature and that he is our God. The moment we have admitted that we are sinners and that he is our Savior. In that moment, we have become the children of the Father and the bride of the Lord Jesus Christ. In that moment, he is very eager to have us grow to know him.

He wants to be loved and has planned life in all its details so that we will come to desire him more than earthly things. This is the purpose of the Christian life. God is weaning us from the things of Earth in order that we may turn naturally toward him. It is when we have begun to develop in this process that we can learn the meaning of our text: Continue instant in prayer, be constant in prayer. If I am to teach you what this means to me, I must stress again that what many people call prayer is nonsense to me. To think that it's necessary to go into a church building to pray does not make sense to me. God flatly states that he does not live in a building made with men's hands. He dwells in the hearts of a small portion of the human race who have accepted his truth and believed in the word which he has given concerning our redemption and reconciliation.

Recently when we were traveling between meetings, we had occasion to pass by the Grand Canyon of the Colorado as it flows through the state of Arizona. At the South Rim, there is an observation point which overlooks some of the stupendous cliffs and buttes of the canyon. Men have given fantastic names to some of these. There is the Temple to the Sun, the Temple of Buddha, the Temple of Shiva, and others which have taken their names from the pagan gods. How I rejoiced at the thought that it would have been absurd to call an eroding rock by the name of the Temple of Jehovah. My heart cried out with joy as I echoed the words of Solomon: Behold, heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain thee. No, we do not have to be inside a building in order to pray. God will hear you when you're inside a building which men call a church, providing you're a believer because God is no more a respecter of places than he is of persons.

But if Christ is in your heart, God will hear you any place. At home or away from home. In school, office, store, shop, factory, in the hospital, driving along the road. In short, any place. Again, we must realize that prayers are not to be set phrases, memorized clauses for repetition. God the Lord Jesus has told us that we are not heard for our much speaking. Certainly, the chattering of words while the mind is occupied with other things has no true relationship with real prayer.

I suppose that it will be impossible to convey what I have in my mind concerning the inner reality of this subject without relating practically how we live the life of prayer as we believe that it is taught in the Scriptures. We live, my wife and I, as though the Lord were there as a third person. We talk to each other and bring him into the conversation as simply as we would a third visible person. When the alarm clock goes off in the morning, there is the usual slow, sluggish moment of awakening. It has become second nature for me to talk to the Lord and thank him for a good night's rest and for life. Even before my wife and I sing as we do every morning in our family worship: When morning gilds the skies, my heart awaking cries, may Jesus Christ be praised. Alike at work and prayer to Jesus I repair, may Jesus Christ be praised.

Now this has become such a part of our life that we have a private word for it. If we've been awakened by the telephone or one has arisen before the other, we do not say let us have our family worship or let us pray, we say let's gild. It's the verb of our hymn: When morning gilds the skies. Now there are times when we gild before the sun has arisen. And there are times when I have worked half the night or more when our gilding takes place with the sun high in the sky. But the three of us—our family Trinity: husband, wife, and the Lord—all know what we mean. And thus we begin our day.

The nature of my work causes us to travel a great deal. This present message is being written in Texas. In the two previous months, we've driven from coast to coast and a third of the way back east again. We've been in meetings in eight or ten cities. Between meetings, we've driven from 300 to 600 miles through magnificent Southwestern scenery. As we drive along, we've talked to each other and to the Lord. There are times when we may be silent for long miles. There are times when we work and I put out ideas which my wife writes down so that I can have the notes for later typing. And in it all, the Lord is intermixed.

Let me give you an example of what might take place as we drive. It might be 15 or 20 minutes from the beginning sentence to the end of this paragraph with silences in between. But the spoken words would go something as follows: Look at the sunlight on that peak. Isn't it beautiful? My Lord, you sure are an artist. What an imagination you have to have made so many things and all of them different. Make a note that I want to write an editorial on the fact that Jacob knew what God's will was and yet he tried to push it to make it come in his own fashion instead of in the Lord's own way. Lord, we sure are no account in ourselves, always trying to horn in and take some of the credit or steer things in our way. Look at that cliff. Wait till I pass this truck. Isn't that a big truck?

One of us will be reminded of something we've heard a friend say, and in talking about it we will say: Lord, bless that young fellow and show him thy way. And thus the conversation ranges over the scenery and the Lord that made it, our friends and their needs, our loved ones and their needs. The Lord is brought into everything. There may be 10 or 15 minutes at a time when his name will not rise to the top of the conversation, but he's there. And we're in constant communication with him in greater reality than if he were sitting in the seat with us because he's closer to us than a person in the seat. He's in our hearts.

Someone may say that our life is different from that of other people because it is so very varied. I'm not so sure this is true. I know that my wife has to spend much of her time packing, unpacking, washing, and ironing in cramped motel rooms, sewing, and writing letters, taking care of correspondence and all of the thousand and one things that go with the task of keeping me on the road. With the typewriter set up in a proper light, with the 40 or 50 volumes that comprise my traveling library all set up in proper place. And I must be seated at that typewriter with the books beside me, and this must go on for about as many hours each day as a lawyer is at his desk or a carpenter on his job. I suppose that I have stopped 50 times since I began to type this chapter to talk with the Lord about various things.

From beginning to end, the actual typing of this message has gone on from mid-afternoon to almost midnight. There have been interruptions and time out for dinner. Each interruption brought new moments of prayer. There was a heavy mail today, and I read over all the letters and memoranda, filed them away in my mind for further action later. Some of these matters concern problems which have pressed themselves up to the surface of my mind. One item which came to me was that a man whom I love in the Lord has written an article against me. I suppose that his name and image have come before me dozens of times as I've been praying almost urgently: Lord, bless that man. Don't hold it against him that he has been unloving. The poor fellow thinks he has to keep the ark from falling over. Give him to know that the Holy Spirit is not going to let it topple.

And I've been thankful to God that he has blessed me spiritually in this matter so that there's no root of bitterness whatsoever. Because by nature, I have received from my father Adam such a horrible nature and it is so capable of breaking out if it is not kept crucified. Another matter which has been pushing up from my subconscious is a letter from a well-known Christian leader asking for my prayers for a certain phase of his work. He's under a great burden because he has undertaken a conspicuous work for the Lord which brings him into the glare of the world's publicity. His heart is burdened, and mine becomes burdened for him. The Holy Spirit leads us together in this thrust of prayer. There is an undercurrent of prayer for this friend who is a man of God.

When the day is done, there will be another period of united prayer in which we, our own private family Trinity—husband, wife, and the Lord—are together for special prayer in which we will name our loved ones and their need, our church and its need, our work and its workers, remembering every radio listener, every magazine reader, everyone who has looked at the work on television or who has been touched by our work in any way. The Lord will bring to our mind one minister with whom we've had special meetings and we'll ask the Lord to bless him and all the others with whom we have worked. It will be a different name on different occasions as the Holy Spirit brings different men to mind. And then we will remember certain missionaries, certain places we have been and the workers there. And the mind goes sweeping out over the whole world to all those lovely people. Lovely because Christ has redeemed them and the Holy Spirit dwells in them. Then sleep will come, and another night of rest will prepare us for another day of dwelling in the love of God and continuing instant in prayer.

Now you may apply this same principle to your life. If you have not thus applied it, you may be sure that the reason is that you're not at one with the Lord. There is something in you that is making you uncomfortable at the thought of his constant presence. It is this that is keeping him out of your home and pushed down into your subconscious where he waits silently, grieving because he loves you so and wants to be included in all the thoughts and actions of your life. Ask him to speak to you, answer what he bids you say, and he will then make all of your moments his. No other life is really worth anything than this constant abiding in him, continuing in the oneness of prayer. And our God and Father, bless this truth to each heart that thy people may know thee better and love thee more. We ask it in the name and for the sake of our Lord Jesus. Amen.

Guest (Male): You can experience tremendous blessing and power in your prayer life when you understand the full scope of God's teaching about this vital spiritual discipline and spend ample time to draw near to him in earnest, intimate prayer. To listen to more teaching by Dr. Barnhouse, tune in anytime, anywhere around the globe via the internet by visiting us at alliancenet.org. An audio copy of today's teaching is available by calling us toll-free 1-800-488-1888. Today's message again is entitled The Christian's Prayer Life, or simply request message number R12-26. We would also like to make available to you a free copy of our booklet entitled Becoming a Christian. If someone asked you: how can I become a Christian? Would you be able to give a clear, biblically accurate response? Too often the answer to this question is not clearly stated from our pulpits and the average believer is not always able to give a correct explanation. This free booklet clearly outlines the biblical path to becoming a Christian and experiencing the wonderful gift of salvation in Jesus Christ. Ask for your free copy of Becoming a Christian when you call or write.

Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible is a radio ministry of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals headquartered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. We exist to promote a biblical understanding and worldview. Drawing upon the insight and wisdom of Reformation theologians from decades and even centuries gone by, we seek to provide contemporary Christian teaching which will equip believers to understand and meet the challenges and opportunities of our time and place. The Alliance also produces the radio broadcasts The Bible Study Hour with the late James Montgomery Boice and Every Last Word featuring the Bible teaching of Dr. Philip Graham Ryken. For a full list of radio stations carrying our programs, please visit us online at alliancenet.org. Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible comes to you through the generous gifts of our listeners. If you have benefited from the broadcast and would like it to continue, please prayerfully consider a donation to help us keep this ministry on the air. For more information or to make a contribution to help further our work, contact us by calling toll-free 1-800-488-1888. Again, that's 1-800-488-1888. You may also write us at Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, Box 2000, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19103. Visit us online at alliancenet.org. Be sure to ask for a free resource catalog featuring books, audio teachings, commentaries, booklets, videos, and a wealth of other materials from outstanding Reformed teachers and theologians, including Doctors Donald Grey Barnhouse, James Montgomery Boice, Martin Lloyd-Jones, and Philip Graham Ryken. Thanks for listening. Join us again next time for more classic teaching on Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible.