Lifting Up Holy Hands

I will therefore that men pray every where, lifting up holy hands, without wrath and doubting. 1 TIMOTHY 2:8

Bounds never allowed prayer to float free of life. In The Necessity of Prayer he gave three chapters to prayer and character, conduct and obedience, and in Purpose in Prayer he returned to the theme under the blunt title Prayerless Praying. His conviction was simple: the way we live and the way we pray cannot be separated. “We pray feebly because we live feebly,” he wrote. “The stream of prayer cannot rise higher than the fountain of living.”

Character and conduct

Bounds began with a distinction. Conduct is what we do; character is what we are. Conduct is the fruit, character the root. And prayer, he said, has to do with both. It helps to form character and fashion conduct, and both depend on prayer to keep going.

Who shall ascend into the hill of the LORD? or who shall stand in his holy place? He that hath clean hands, and a pure heart; who hath not lifted up his soul unto vanity, nor sworn deceitfully. PSALM 24:3–4

He was convinced that the chief business of the Church is not to gather numbers or raise money but to produce righteous men and women, and that prayer is the means by which God does it. “Prayer and sinning cannot keep company with each other,” he wrote. One or the other must stop. Get people praying, and they will begin to hate sin; let them stop praying, and sin will soon feel at home.

The prayer of the obedient

For Bounds, the clearest statement of the link between prayer and life was a single verse from John.

And whatsoever we ask, we receive of him, because we keep his commandments, and do those things that are pleasing in his sight. 1 JOHN 3:22

He loved the confidence it describes. The obedient child, he said, comes to his father boldly; the disobedient one comes timidly, or not at all. Obedience does not earn answers, but it removes the barriers that make us hesitant and ashamed. “The difficulty in prayer is not with faith,” he wrote, “but with obedience, which is faith’s foundation.” Where the will is surrendered to God, faith comes almost of itself.

He had a sharp word for those who wanted to pray for great things while living carelessly. The penitent sinner may come to God with tears and be heard, he said; that is the prayer of repentance, and God delights in it. But the ongoing life of prayer belongs to those who are walking with God. “We must live for God out of the closet if we would meet God in the closet.”

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

A holy life and a praying life

In Purpose in Prayer Bounds put the relationship in a sentence that is worth memorising: “A holy life does not live in the closet, but it cannot live without the closet.” Holiness is lived out in the home, the workplace and the street. But it is sustained in secret. Cut off prayer and holiness dies; keep up prayer while living carelessly and prayer becomes a sham.

He applied this ruthlessly to himself and his readers. Beautiful theories, he said, are marred by ugly lives. Many would pray better if they lived better. So much of our time in prayer is spent settling old accounts — confessing the same sins, repairing the same damage — that we have little left for intercession. He had a vivid picture for it: our closets are too often like a shop with a sign in the window saying Closed for Repairs.

Behold, the LORD’s hand is not shortened, that it cannot save; neither his ear heavy, that it cannot hear: But your iniquities have separated between you and your God, and your sins have hid his face from you, that he will not hear. ISAIAH 59:1–2

Prayer as the way to holiness

It would be a misreading of Bounds to think he wanted people to clean up their lives before they dared to pray. He was clear that prayer is also the means of becoming holy. “Prayer promotes righteous living,” he wrote, and it is the great aid to uprightness of heart and life. The fruit of real praying is right living. We do not become holy and then pray; we pray, and God makes us holy.

Watch and pray, that ye enter not into temptation: the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak. MATTHEW 26:41

This is the gospel order. The tax collector who could only cry God be merciful to me a sinner went home justified. Prayer begins in need, not in achievement.

Where this must be read with care

Bounds belonged to the Methodist tradition, with its strong teaching on holiness, and some of his statements need careful weighing.

He argued in The Necessity of Prayer that God never commands what we cannot perform, and that the regenerate person, enabled by grace, can keep all of God’s commandments and please Him in everything. There is great encouragement in this: God does not mock us with impossible demands, and grace is real power, not only pardon. But Scripture also teaches that sin remains in the believer, that we all stumble in many things, and that the best of saints still pray Forgive us our trespasses every day. A reader who takes Bounds too literally may conclude either that he is not a Christian at all because he still sins, or that he has reached a perfection he has not. Both are dangerous.

My little children, these things write I unto you, that ye sin not. And if any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous: 1 JOHN 2:1

He also wrote at one point that a person who does not pray cannot be called a Christian at all. As a description of the healthy Christian life this is true; prayer is the breath of the soul. But as a test to apply to a struggling believer it is too severe. Many true Christians go through seasons when they can scarcely pray, and the Spirit Himself intercedes for them with groanings that cannot be uttered.

The balance is this. Take seriously Bounds’s insistence that life and prayer belong together, and let it search you. But when it exposes your failure, run to your Advocate, not away from Him. The holy hands we lift are not hands that have never been dirty. They are hands that have been washed.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Ask God to show you one area of disobedience that is making you hesitant or ashamed in prayer. Confess it, and take one concrete step to put it right.

2. Read 1 John 3:18–22 and ask what it would mean for your heart not to condemn you when you pray.

3. Consider whether your prayers are spent mostly on repairs. Ask God for grace to live in a way that frees you for intercession.

4. Think of one relationship where you are harbouring anger. Remember Paul’s words, without wrath, and seek to be reconciled.

5. When you fail this week, go straight to Christ your Advocate rather than avoiding prayer out of shame.

A PRAYER

Holy Father, You have told us to lift up holy hands when we pray. I confess that my hands are often soiled, and my life often contradicts my prayers.

Search me and show me what stands between us. Give me grace to obey You, not to earn Your favour but because I love You.

Let my praying make me holy, and let my holiness make my praying honest.

And when I fall, keep me from running away. Bring me to Jesus Christ the righteous, my Advocate with You, in whose name I pray. Amen.