Pray Ye the Lord of the Harvest

Then saith he unto his disciples, The harvest truly is plenteous, but the labourers are few; Pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest, that he will send forth labourers into his harvest. MATTHEW 9:37–38

Bounds was a man of the closet, but his closet had windows that looked out on the whole world. He wrote a chapter on prayer and missions in The Essentials of Prayer, another on prayer born of compassion, and in Purpose in Prayer a chapter called Revivals Are Born in Prayer. Together they show that for him prayer was never a private hobby. It was the engine of the Church’s mission.

Compassion that prays

Bounds began where Jesus began: with compassion. When Jesus saw the crowds, weary and scattered like sheep without a shepherd, He was moved, and His first instruction to His disciples was not Go, but Pray.

Compassion, Bounds wrote, has eyes. It sees the sin and misery of people and is moved by them. It stands at the opposite pole from indifference. And true compassion always turns to prayer. Where it cannot relieve the need itself, it can at least cry to God. Compassion may not always move people, he said, but it always moves towards them, and it can move God towards them.

Brethren, my heart’s desire and prayer to God for Israel is, that they might be saved. ROMANS 10:1

He drew attention to Paul, who carried such sorrow for his own people that he could wish himself cut off for their sake. That, Bounds said, is the root of real intercession: a heart so burdened for others that it must pray.

The key in the home church’s hands

The chapter on missions contains some of his sharpest and most lasting words. “The key of all missionary success is prayer,” he wrote. “That key is in the hands of the home churches.” Money is needed, he admitted, but money without prayer is powerless. The churches of his day, he complained, gave great attention to raising funds and little to raising prayer, as if prayer would follow as a matter of course. The truth, he said, is the reverse. Get the church praying and the giving will follow. “He who enters his closet to God, will also open his purse to God.”

As they ministered to the Lord, and fasted, the Holy Ghost said, Separate me Barnabas and Saul for the work whereunto I have called them. And when they had fasted and prayed, and laid their hands on them, they sent them away. ACTS 13:2–3

He noticed that the first missionary journey began in a praying church at Antioch. God called and sent; the church fasted and prayed. That, he believed, is the pattern: missionaries are called by God in answer to the prayers of His people. He ended the chapter with a longing that a great wave of prayer would sweep through the Church, and with a line from Isaiah that summed up the need.

And he saw that there was no man, and wondered that there was no intercessor: ISAIAH 59:16

“The one great need in the modern missionary movement,” Bounds wrote, “is intercessors.”

Revivals born in prayer

Bounds had seen revival in Methodism, and he read its history eagerly. In Purpose in Prayer he gathered accounts of awakening — the great communion at the Kirk of Shotts in Scotland, the ministry of Whitefield, stories from Charles Finney — and drew one conclusion from them all: every true revival has been born in prayer. God alone can revive His Church, but He does it in answer to the cries of His people.

O LORD, revive thy work in the midst of the years, in the midst of the years make known; in wrath remember mercy. HABAKKUK 3:2

He told, with evident delight, the story of how D. L. Moody preached in a London church on a Sunday morning to no effect, and on the Sunday evening saw hundreds respond. The difference, it later emerged, was that an invalid woman in the congregation had spent the afternoon shut in her room praying for him. The story is one of many that Bounds or his editors gathered, and its details cannot now be checked. But its point is sound, and it is one Scripture makes again and again.

And when they had prayed, the place was shaken where they were assembled together; and they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and they spake the word of God with boldness. ACTS 4:31

Ask of me

Behind all this lay Psalm 2, which Bounds quoted again and again. God says to His Son, Ask of me, and I shall give thee the heathen for thine inheritance. If even the Son is told to ask, Bounds reasoned, how much more must His Church. The advance of Christ’s kingdom is bound up with prayer.

Ask of me, and I shall give thee the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession. PSALM 2:8

Where this must be read with care

Three cautions belong here.

First, Bounds sometimes made the spread of the gospel depend so entirely on human praying that God’s own initiative is obscured. He wrote that if the Church had prayed as it ought, the light of the gospel would long ago have girdled the world, and he quoted with approval the saying that God cannot save the world alone. The concern is right — the Church is indeed called to pray and to go — but Scripture is clear that salvation is of the Lord, and that the Spirit blows where He wills. Our prayers are real means, not the power behind the power.

Second, his language about the heathen, foreign lands and dead churches belongs to his age. The Church he knew was chiefly in the West; today most Christians live in Africa, Asia and Latin America, and many of the prayers for revival now rise from there. We should hear his burden for the unreached without adopting his assumptions about who is sending and who is receiving.

Third, revival cannot be manufactured, even by prayer. Some later teachers turned Bounds’s conviction into a technique: pray in a certain way for a certain length of time, and revival will come. Bounds was closer to the truth when he spoke of God’s sovereign visitation in answer to the cries of a burdened people. We pray, and God comes when He wills.

With these cautions, his challenge stands. The harvest is still plenteous, the labourers still few, and the command still the same: Pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Choose one country or people group where the gospel is little known. Learn a little about it and pray for it every day this week.

2. If you give to missions, give prayer as well: pray regularly by name for at least one missionary or worker you support.

3. Pray Christ’s own prayer, that the Lord of the harvest will send out labourers — and be willing to be one of the answers.

4. Ask God to give you compassion for someone near you who does not know Christ, and pray for them by name.

5. Pray for revival in your own church, beginning with yourself: Lord, revive Your work, and begin in me.

A PRAYER

Lord of the harvest, You looked on the crowds with compassion, and You told us to pray. Give me eyes to see the people around me and across the world as You see them.

Send out labourers into Your harvest. Call men and women, young and old, and equip them by Your Spirit. And if You would send me, make me willing.

Revive Your work in the midst of the years. Do in our day what You have done before, and more.

Let the nations become the inheritance of Your Son, for whom all things were made, and in whose name I ask it. Amen.