Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible

Announcer (Male): The Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals presents the timeless teaching of Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse.

Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse: Let everyone who reads these lines ask himself if he is eager to have others pray for him. Have you ever asked others to pray for you? Or are you in the spiritual state where you say that things have not yet come to that bad a condition? And if you have asked for prayer, have you asked it for selfish, personal reasons? If so, you are not in the apostolic succession. Prayer was to be made for Paul, and it is only in this sense that I would ask your prayers for me for the sake of the cause of Jesus Christ.

Choir: God's word is good for all he gave, to teach, rebuke, correct and train. Equip mind, we can know the truth, the word God has for us to do. God's word is all the Christian needs to grow in grace and truth and peace.

Announcer (Male): Over a half a century ago, the late Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse, then pastor of 10th 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 will be featuring on today's edition of Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible is entitled Praying for One Another. If you saw a friend struggling with a heavy load, you would probably go and help carry some of the weight. God's people often face trials and hardships and we may feel burdened beyond what we can bear.

We must learn to help bear the burdens of fellow believers in prayer and lift each other up in earnest intercession before the throne of grace. The scripture text for today's edition of Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible, Romans chapter 15. We're looking at verses 30 through 32.

Here once again is Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse with a message entitled Praying for One Another.

Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse: Through the Lord Jesus Christ, we come to thee our Father and our God and in the Holy Spirit. We thank thee for thy love which has brought us all things in Christ. We thank thee for thy grace, which stooped to redeem us and to make it possible for us to be reconciled to thee.

In this hour, we pray thee that thou wilt give us some truth from thy word which will cause us to grow in thy grace and in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. Be with all who have spiritual need, and help each one to understand that all need may be met in Jesus Christ, through whom we give thee all praise and glory forever. Amen.

Our text is in Romans 15, verses 30 to 33. Where Paul speaks to the Romans, "I appeal to you, brethren, by our Lord Jesus Christ, and by the love of the Spirit, to strive together with me in your prayers to God on my behalf, that I may be delivered from the unbelievers in Judea, and that my service for Jerusalem may be acceptable to the saints. So that by God's will, I may come to you with joy and be refreshed in your company. The God of peace be with you all. Amen."

Prayer is a subject much talked about and much misunderstood, but which goes deep beyond probing. Let me sketch for you the place of prayer in my own life. We rise in the morning and we have family worship during the first few minutes of the day.

We talk about the Lord and his goodness. We remember before him those who are near and dear to us, and then we ask the Spirit to bring to our minds those for whom he wishes us to intercede. Among the several thousand missionaries and ministers we have worked with or spoken to, the Lord often brings to mind one for whom we are to bear a definite burden.

Just recently, for example, we could not get away from praying for a certain missionary in South America. After days of this, we met someone who had recently come from his country, and who told us that this particular missionary had been ill, very ill, and had been taken to the hospital about the time that our burden was heaviest.

Well, having begun the day with prayer, I settled down generally to a desk with typewriter in front of me, Bible beside me, and the other books nearby. While I read and write and work, there is constant prayer. Perhaps never more than a minute or two goes by without being aware of my need of the Lord for illumination, clarity of expression, and strength to live and work.

When I am to speak at a mid-morning meeting, I have prayer aloud with my wife as we prepare to go again, and again when we arrive. And always I go to the pulpit with her faithful reminder, preach in love and humility. Now, in the pulpit, I pray many times. This may seem strange to those who listen, but it is nevertheless true.

There are prayers for help and strength, shut up between sentences. Prayers for clearness of expression and choice of material, since there is always twice as much truth as there is time. Prayers that remind God of battles which he has won in my life, so that all the glory goes to him.

And so on through the study or through the sermon. Afterward, I pray as I talk with individuals. I am so eager not to hurt anyone's feelings, and I have been told so often that I have done just this, that I am almost overeager to give time and attention to the simplest child or to the older person who comes with the most cantankerous question and spirit.

And I always pray, "Lord, may I give of myself by giving of thee to this person." Now, this same process goes on through the hours of study, of ministry, of meeting, and of meeting people. But the deepest experiences of my life have come for the most part with the open Bible, listening to the Holy Spirit teaching me as I talk to him and read his words.

I once kept a prayer list and I added names to it until it became so long that it began to cut into the hours allotted for Bible study. To solve the problem of laying it aside and returning to the this one thing I do of being a Bible teacher, I adopted the plan of asking the Lord to lay on my heart the burden for those for whom he wished me to pray.

Many thousands of times I have asked others to pray for me. And I have concluded many a week of Bible teaching by telling the audience that if they ever remembered anything that I had taught, or were blessed by lessons they had learned through me, that they were thereby in debt to pray for me. It is impossible to convey my deep and eager desire that others should pray for me.

And therefore I can understand Paul and his desire that the church pray for him. He probably knew that when Peter was in prison, as we read in Acts 12, earnest prayer for him was made to God by the church. In his earliest epistles, Paul asked the Thessalonians to pray for him, that the word of the Lord might speed on and triumph, and that he might be delivered from wicked and evil men.

To the Corinthians, even in a passage of high praise for God's deliverance in the past, in the present, and in the future, he adds, "You also must help us by prayer, so that many will give thanks on our behalf for the blessing granted us in answer to many prayers." To the Ephesians, he gives the great exhortation about the whole armor of God and adds, "Pray at all times in the Spirit, with all prayer and supplication for all the saints and also for me. That utterance may be given me in opening my mouth boldly, to proclaim the mystery of the gospel."

He asks the Colossians the same thing, "Continue steadfastly in prayer, being watchful in it with thanksgiving, and pray for us also, that God may open to us a door for the word, to declare the mystery of Christ, on account of which I am in prison, that I may make it clear as I ought to speak." And he also instructs Timothy how to teach the churches to pray.

Now with this same earnestness, Paul commands the Romans to pray for him. I say command because this is what the Greek says. It should be noted that the Greek word rendered beseech in the King James Version is a strong military term, stronger even than appeal as it is in the revision. It is the equivalent of "I summon you" or "I draft you," "I call you to my side." It carries the urgency of an SOS.

Now, two reasons are given for the use of such strong language. For the Lord Jesus Christ's sake, and for the love of the Spirit. The glory of Christ is to be the end and the aim of all that we do or think. Paul was not asking them to give of their time, that so very precious commodity, to pray for him for some selfish reason.

He was not asking them to pray that things might go smoothly for his own comfort. He was requesting prayer for himself in behalf, in the interests of our Lord Jesus Christ. Further, he incorporates in his reasons for commanding their prayer the love of the Holy Spirit.

He, the Holy Spirit, is the one who indwells us. May he in this moment search our souls to see if we are aware with a fresh awareness of all the members of the body of Christ. Those who are in jungle tribes, those who are in high places, those who are in a position of advanced knowledge of the truth. Those who are bound by ignorance or superstition in churches that are in danger of putting organization before Christ.

The Holy Spirit must stir our hearts to prayer. He must arouse us and draw us to Christ, thereby drawing us closer to one another. This is the life of true prayer. Think who the Holy Spirit is and what he has done in us.

He has been the agent of God in the Trinity to make us alive in Christ. He has begotten us from the dead. He has identified us with and into the body of Christ. He has taken up his dwelling in our bodies, making them his temples. He has sealed us into the safety that is ours in the Lord.

He is the down payment of God, guaranteeing our eternal oneness in Christ's mystical body, the true church. He witnesses with our spirits that we are the children of God, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ. And so, for the sake of the Lord Jesus Christ and on the ground of the loving work of the Holy Spirit, the Christians in Rome were summoned to pray for Paul.

They were not to fulfill this admonition by a casual, "God bless Paul." They were to strive together with him. Since this Greek word is found in no other place in the New Testament, it deserves special notice. Strive. It is sunagonizomai. It is not difficult to note that the prefix sun, "with," is followed by the word agonize.

In ancient Greece, the agon was an athletic contest. And the word was used for any struggle or fight, especially under a great strain or in the face of great opposition. The verb agonizomai was found on the lips of Christ when he said, "My kingdom is not of this world, else would my servants fight." Both noun and verb are used by Paul in his famous valedictory, "I have fought a good fight. I have agonized a good agony."

At this point in my exposition, I stop and seek something more from God. Earlier in my Christian life, I knew prayer as a great fight. During my late teens, I spent entire nights with other young men committing ourselves to God for power and life. I spent such a night on Mount Wilson just northeast of Los Angeles, and another such night on top of a building which was in process of construction.

A day and a night, and part of another day were thus spent in the forest of Fontainebleau in France, a great epoch in my spiritual development. I recall scores of such times of wrestling, which lasted for many hours, and hundreds that lasted for shorter periods, but which were nonetheless intense.

But there came a time when in a totally new way, I understood Ephesians 2:6, "He hath raised us up together with Christ and made us sit together in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus." I used to think this meant that we had been raised up from death to life with Christ in his resurrection. And then I saw that the resurrection was in the preceding verse. So, the sixth verse meant being raised from earth to heaven in Christ's ascension.

I saw that the believer's true place right now is on the throne of God with the Lord Jesus Christ. And I came to the great wrestling of the last chapter of Ephesians, and learned what it was to put on the whole armor of God in order that I might go in and out to find pasture, into heaven and out to my sphere of labor on the earth, at whatever particular moment I was praying. It has become almost second nature for me to remind the Lord of these great experiences, and to cry out in the silence of my soul, "To the heavenlies, to the heavenlies!"

And then his armor covers me, and I pass through Satan's territory to the place of all blessing. Since acquiring this understanding of Ephesians 2:6, my life has become a protected haven, where even the fiercest onslaughts of the enemy have been tossed back without touching me. We were driving at more than 60 miles an hour on a highway in the southwest, in the rain, when a great truck approached us, hitting a puddle of muddy water and flinging gallons of it in front of us.

Our windshield took it. It seemed that not an atom of it escaped the blow, and we flinched by sheer reflex action. As I cautiously applied the brakes, the wiper and the fresh rain worked together to clear the windshield and to restore visibility. At no moment were we endangered by the muddy bath that was flung at us.

Now, this is an example of how spiritual onslaughts have been wiped away by the power of the Holy Spirit, who maintains us in the heavenly places in Christ. I have learned to enter into the secret place, where no weapon that is formed against you shall prosper, and you shall confute every tongue that rises against you in judgment.

"This is the heritage of the servants of the Lord, and their vindication from me," says the Lord. In reaching this quietness in God, there have been one or two experiences where I thought that life would depart. But now I rest in that quietness. When I come to a verse like our present text, I try to get disturbed about it, but I cannot.

I do not know at what moment the Lord may send me into the conflict that beset Job. But at present, it seems that I have no other course than to live in the blessing of Benjamin, which we read in Deuteronomy 33, "The beloved of the Lord, he dwells in safety by him. He encompasses him all the day long and makes his dwelling between his shoulders."

Now we return to Paul's request for prayer. He asked the believers to pray for three things. First, that he might be delivered from the unbelievers in Judea. Second, that the believers in Jerusalem would receive the gift which he had for them. And third, that he might soon come to Rome and be spiritually refreshed with them.

It is interesting to note that the first of these prayers was definitely not answered according to Paul's desire. Of the second, we can only infer that his reception at Jerusalem was not what he wished. And the third was answered in a manner completely unforeseen or even imagined by Paul. These three prayers, and the varied ways in which God answered, can teach us much.

First, a great many of our prayers must be offered in a spirit of willingness to be refused if that should be God's answer. Oh, let us put this against a great revelation on prayer in John's first epistle. For we read in 1 John 5, 14 and 15, "And this is the confidence which we have in him," John says, "that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us. And if we know that he hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have obtained the requests made of him."

In other words, to use a figure from baseball, the believer's praying average should be 1,000. But we do not have all wisdom, and therefore, we are prone to desire some things that are not according to the will of God. This is a part of our natural heritage from Adam. Even though we have been born again, and are partakers of the divine nature, we possess the old nature that seeks its portion, no matter how often we deliver it over to be crucified with Christ.

And for this reason, we must append the qualifying clause to some, not all of our prayers, "If it be thy will." Oh, thank God that as we walk closer to him, we are enabled better to understand his word so that we know beyond any shadow of a doubt that it is his will to do certain things for us and in us. For example, in 1 Thessalonians 4:3, we read, "This is the will of God, even your sanctification."

In the face of such a declaration, we may call upon God to make us holy, and we may be absolutely sure that he will work in us to that end. But when we do not find specific instructions in the divine revelation, we must walk with great care, asking the Lord to keep us in his way, that we may not turn to our own way. And that if we do ask for anything that is our own way, that he will refuse it for his glory and our good.

Second, there are some prayers whose answers may be blocked by the pride of others. If Paul's offering was not received with eager joy by the Jerusalem believers, it was because they hated the message of pure grace. They did not want their legalism to be washed away by the truth. Paul had to expect this, for he had written to the Galatians, "Now we, brethren, like Isaac, are children of promise. But as at that time, he who was born according to the flesh persecuted him who was born according to the Spirit, so it is now."

The preacher of salvation by grace through faith alone, plus nothing, must always expect to be opposed by those who cling to legalism, whether from the despotism of highly organized churchianity or the anarchy of that form of fundamentalism which holds that a believer can lose his salvation. And he who preaches holiness of life must always expect opposition from those who are loose in faith or morals.

Finally, we must see that some prayers may be answered in ways that are completely outside our thought patterns at the time we offer them. Little did Paul think that his third request would be answered by a riot, an arrest, a trial, imprisonment, shipwreck, and confinement in the guard room of Caesar's palace. But that was how God answered his request to see the Roman believers.

We should note that this prayer also carried with it the desire to be refreshed in their company. When he first arrived in Rome, a few believers came to meet him, but many were afraid to make themselves known because of the chain which bound him to the ever-present Roman guard. In his very last epistle, Paul expresses the fear and timidity, not to say the cowardice of some of the believers.

For he says, "You are aware that all who are in Asia turned away from me. May the Lord grant mercy to the household of Onesiphorus, for he often refreshed me. He was not ashamed of my chains. But when he arrived in Rome, he searched for me eagerly and found me. May the Lord grant him to find mercy from the Lord on that day." Oh, how brightly brave Onesiphorus shines out above the others.

So Paul was refreshed in Rome, but he was in chains, and his refreshment came from a man who traveled from Asia, sought him out, and was not ashamed to walk with him and his guard. Oh, beloved, you who listen today, let us pray for one another. As far as your circle of Christian friends reaches, remember them whenever the Spirit brings them to your mind. And as far as your missionary reading can take you, remember the whole body of Christ.

The Lord is not bound, and in him we are not bound. We can range the world and roam the continents. We can go into the throne of God and come back laden with treasure that we may distribute to all with whom we come in contact. And men, seeing our lives and knowing the power of our prayer-answering God will glorify him through us. And we pray thee our God for all thy church throughout the world, that thou wilt give to all, to each, the spirit of prayer one for the other for Jesus' sake and for the love of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Announcer (Male): The love of Jesus Christ and the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit compel God's people to lift each other up in heartfelt prayer and intercession. We hope you have benefited from today's message entitled Praying for One Another. To listen to more Bible teaching by Dr. Barnhouse, visit us online 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 Praying for One Another, or simply request message number R15-31. We would also like to make available to you a free copy of our booklet entitled The Names of God.

Most of us have a first, last, and middle name and perhaps a nickname or two. But scripture records more than 400 names of God that reveal fresh and profound insights about his character and attributes. This free four-chapter booklet will show you how an in-depth look at the names of God can help you discover a wealth of riches in the knowledge of him.

Ask for your free copy of The Names of God 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. We also produce the radio broadcast The Bible Study Hour, featuring the teachings of the late Dr. James Montgomery Boice, and Every Last Word, featuring the Bible teaching of Dr. Philip Graham Ryken.

Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible comes to you through the generous gifts of 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. That's 1-800-488-1888.

Visit us online at Alliancenet.org, or write Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, Box 2000, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19103. 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, Martyn Lloyd-Jones, and Philip Graham Ryken. Thank you for listening. Join us again next time for more classic teaching on Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible.

Choir: The Bible has come and it quells to do the saving work for us. It draws our souls from death to life and rescues us from the despites. Amazing gifts, wonders so hard, the life-imparting word of God.