The Conditions of Effectual Prayer

If ye abide in me, and my words abide in you, ye shall ask what ye will, and it shall be done unto you. JOHN 15:7

Nothing, Catherine Booth said, was more constantly said to her by professing Christians than this: I have prayed a long time, and I get no answers. She was not inclined to be gentle about it. She thought it a deeply God-dishonouring state of affairs, and she said that if she never got answers to prayer she would probably give up praying. She remembered the years when revival was sweeping Ireland and America, and the churches of England held united prayer meetings all over the land for it to come, and it did not come; and the sceptics mocked in their newspapers. Her cheeks burned. She was sure the fault was not in God. Her sermon The Conditions of Effectual Prayer, in Godliness, was her answer.

The promises have conditions

Her starting point was that the great promises about prayer are made to particular people. They are not blank cheques for anyone who happens to say a prayer. The promise of John 15 begins with an if. The promise of James is made to the righteous. If the conditions are ignored, she said, we may pray ourselves blue in the face, and God will not move to meet us.

The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much. JAMES 5:16

She set out the conditions as “a four-linked chain,” connecting the soul with the heart of God, and warned that if any one link was missing the chain would not hold.

The four links

The first is fellowship with Christ. The promise is to those who abide in Him. It is not enough, she said, to have once been joined to Christ; many backsliders pray constantly and wonder why nothing happens, when they have long since let go of the union from which answered prayer flows.

The second is obedience to the light. Walking in the light, she said, is like walking in the sun — not dodging behind a pillar here and a tree there to keep out of it. The one who wants his prayers answered must want to know God’s will, even if it condemns his habits, his companions or his business, and must do it when he knows it. She thought confidence and obedience could not be separated.

Beloved, if our heart condemn us not, then have we confidence toward God. And whatsoever we ask, we receive of him, because we keep his commandments. 1 JOHN 3:21–22

The third is the intercession of the Spirit. We do not know what to pray for as we ought, and much of our praying, she said, is simply selfishness dressed in religious language. Here she was at her most searching. Mothers told her they had prayed for their children for years and not one had been converted. She asked what they had been praying for. Too often, she found, it was that the children would be respectable, safe and a comfort to their parents — religious enough to avoid disgrace, and not so devoted as to give everything to Christ. Wives prayed for their husbands’ conversion so that they would stay at home more and waste less money. God, she said, will not answer such prayers. We must see the person as His, with a soul to be saved and a life to be given to His kingdom, and pray on that ground.

Likewise the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities: for we know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered. ROMANS 8:26

Ye ask, and receive not, because ye ask amiss, that ye may consume it upon your lusts. JAMES 4:3

The fourth link is faith. No one, she said, can exercise faith for something the Spirit has not led them to. But those who abide in Christ, walk in the light, and pray under the Spirit’s burden find faith comes naturally. They know they are asking according to God’s mind, and they can wrestle, if need be, like the Syrophenician woman, until the answer comes.

Therefore I say unto you, What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them. MARK 11:24

Faith for the impossible

She was bold about what such faith could do. To those who said the age of miracles was past, she answered that the age of that kind of faith was past, and that miracles would return when it did. God, she said, would sooner set aside a law of nature than a law of grace. She was not naive about it. She knew God tests faith and does not always answer at once. But she had seen enough, in the Army’s early years, of rough halls quietened and hardened men broken, to believe that God does what He has promised for those who meet Him on His terms.

Agony of soul

What prayer meant to her is clear from one of her descriptions. “Prayer is agony of soul — wrestling of the Spirit,” she wrote. It is what people do when they are in desperate earnest for something to happen. She told of rowdy crowds in the galleries of great halls, on the edge of open disturbance, and of a little woman stretching out her hands over them and saying, Now, let us pray, and the whole mass of rough men falling quiet. And she confessed, with evident pain, that one of the ways she had grieved the Spirit in her early years was that she would not let Him make her the woman of prayer He wanted her to be.

In How to Work for God with Success she recalled a prominent Christian leader who stopped in the middle of a hymn about watching with Jesus and admitted that he did not think he had ever watched one consecutive hour with Jesus in his life. Her cheeks burned again. If these are the leaders, she thought, we need not wonder at the people.

What, could ye not watch with me one hour? MATTHEW 26:40

Weighing it

There is a real danger in any teaching about conditions for answered prayer, and it should be named. It can become a machine: meet the conditions, and the answer must come; no answer, and the fault must be yours. Scripture does not allow that. Paul, who met every condition she named, asked three times for his thorn to be removed and was told no (2 Corinthians 12:8–9). The Lord Himself prayed in Gethsemane, Nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt (Matthew 26:39). A believer whose child remains unconverted, or whose illness is not healed, must not be told that it is certainly his fault. She did not always leave room for that mystery.

But the substance of her teaching stands. God is not indifferent to the state of the one who prays. Unconfessed sin, disobedience to known light and selfish motives do hinder prayer, and Scripture says so plainly. The remedy she offered is the right one: not to pray less, but to come closer.

If I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not hear me. PSALM 66:18

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Think of one long-unanswered prayer. Test it against her four links — fellowship, obedience, the Spirit’s leading, faith — and ask God to show you honestly if anything is missing.

2. Examine your prayers for the people you love. Are you asking for their comfort and respectability, or for their souls and their surrender to Christ?

3. Is there light you have received and not obeyed? You will find prayer hard until you do.

4. Try to watch one consecutive hour with Christ this week, in whatever form you can manage.

5. Where a prayer remains unanswered after you have searched your heart, rest in Gethsemane’s words: not as I will, but as Thou wilt.

A PRAYER

Lord, teach me to pray. I have asked much and received little, and I have blamed You when the fault may have been mine.

Keep me abiding in You. Make me willing to walk in all the light You give, and to obey it before I ask for anything more.

Take the selfishness out of my praying. Let Your Spirit lay on my heart the people and the things that are on Yours.

Give me faith to ask and wait, and grace to accept Your answer, whatever it is. Amen.