A Humble Attempt

Yea, many people and strong nations shall come to seek the Lord of hosts in Jerusalem, and to pray before the Lord. ZECHARIAH 8:22

The last of Edwards’s teachings to consider is the one with the longest reach, and it began as a proposal from Scotland. In 1744 a group of Scottish ministers agreed to set aside regular times to pray together for the revival of religion and the spread of the gospel, and invited others to join. Edwards took up the idea and in 1747 published a book to promote it, with a title as long as its argument was simple: An Humble Attempt to Promote Explicit Agreement and Visible Union of God’s People in Extraordinary Prayer for the Revival of Religion and the Advancement of Christ’s Kingdom on Earth.

The concert of prayer

The proposal itself was modest. Christians in different places and different denominations would agree to pray at the same appointed times — a quarterly day, and part of each week — for the same object: that God would pour out His Spirit and advance the gospel through the whole earth. Edwards’s argument for it rested on three things. Scripture promises a great advance. He took texts like Zechariah 8 and Isaiah’s visions of the nations streaming in as descriptions of something God actually intends to do in history, not merely poetry.

For the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea. HABAKKUK 2:14

Scripture commands us to ask for it, persistently and without discouragement. He leaned on the parable of the importunate widow, and on Isaiah’s watchmen who are told to give God no rest until He establishes His purpose.

Ye that make mention of the Lord, keep not silence, and give him no rest, till he establish, and till he make Jerusalem a praise in the earth. ISAIAH 62:6–7

And union in prayer has a particular promise attached to it.

If two of you shall agree on earth as touching any thing that they shall ask, it shall be done for them of my Father which is in heaven. MATTHEW 18:19

Where the timetable was wrong

Honesty requires a note, because Edwards attached to this book a good deal of speculation about prophetic chronology — attempts to locate the present moment in the scheme of Revelation and to estimate how near the promised outpouring might be. He was mistaken, as everyone who has attempted such calculations has been mistaken, and the sections of the book devoted to them are the least valuable. It is worth noting that his own Master declined to supply this information (Acts 1:7), and that no one since has improved on that silence. Take the burden and leave the arithmetic. The command to pray persistently for the advance of the gospel does not depend on knowing when the answer arrives.

What it produced

The postscript to this book is remarkable, and Edwards did not live to see any of it. An Humble Attempt was read a generation later by a group of Baptist ministers in Northamptonshire, who in 1784 issued a call to united monthly prayer for the conversion of the nations. Among those who took it up was a young cobbler named William Carey. Carey went to India in 1793, and the modern Protestant missionary movement is usually dated from there. A book about prayer, written by a dismissed pastor on a frontier settlement, helped set in motion the largest missionary expansion in Christian history — after its author was dead.

This is the right place to end, because it gathers everything. Edwards began with the glory of God as the end for which the world was made. He spent his life on how that glory is seen, loved and lived. And he finished by asking Christians to pray, together and persistently, that the knowledge of that glory would fill the earth. He never saw the answer. He was dismissed by his congregation, exiled to the frontier, and died at fifty-four after five weeks in a post he had not wanted. By any ordinary measure his career ended in failure. The knowledge of the glory of the Lord is still spreading. He asked for that, and he is not here to see it, and it is happening anyway. That is generally how it works.

Be ye stedfast, unmoveable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labour is not in vain in the Lord. 1 CORINTHIANS 15:58

One work, from beginning to end

Behind Edwards’s confidence in prayer lay a particular way of reading history, which he set out in a series of sermons preached at Northampton in 1739 and published afterwards as A History of the Work of Redemption. His thesis was that everything which has happened since the fall — every empire, every war, every migration, every obscure life — belongs to a single project, which is the redemption of a people for God through Christ. History is not a sequence of unrelated events with a religious thread running through part of it. The redemption is the plot, and everything else is the setting.

That in the dispensation of the fulness of times he might gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven, and which are on earth. EPHESIANS 1:10

He traced the work from the promise in Eden, through the flood, the calling of Abraham, the exodus, the monarchy, the exile, the prophets, to the incarnation — which he treated as the centre of the whole — and then onward through the spread of the gospel, to a consummation still ahead. The practical effect of reading history this way is considerable, and it is why this chapter belongs at the end of the book. It means that no faithful labour is isolated. The believer teaching six children in a village, the translator working through a difficult language, the congregation praying for a country closed to the gospel — each is contributing to a work that has been running for millennia and will certainly be completed. He is not starting something; he is joining something.

Being confident of this very thing, that he which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ. PHILIPPIANS 1:6

It also supplies patience. Edwards’s own vantage point was a frontier village of a few hundred people, in a colony on the edge of the known world, at a moment when the gospel had reached a fraction of the earth. From there he wrote confidently about the knowledge of God filling the whole earth — not because the evidence around him warranted it, but because he had read what God said He would do.

So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please. ISAIAH 55:11

That is the ground of the concert of prayer. We are not asking God to attempt something. We are asking Him to hasten what He has already undertaken.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Join or begin a regular gathering whose explicit purpose is praying for revival and the spread of the gospel. Set a time and keep it. 2. Pray with believers outside your own tradition. Edwards’s proposal was deliberately across denominational lines. 3. Ask for something so large that you will not see it answered in your lifetime. Then keep asking. 4. Stop calculating timetables. Spend the energy on intercession instead. 5. Consider that the most fruitful thing you ever do may bear fruit after you are gone, and that you will probably not know. Work anyway.

A PRAYER

Lord of hosts, You have promised that the earth will be filled with the knowledge of Your glory as the waters cover the sea, and I have prayed as though You promised nothing of the kind.

Forgive the smallness of my asking.

Unite Your people in prayer across every line we have drawn between ourselves. Pour out Your Spirit. Advance Your kingdom in places I will never see, among people I will never meet.

I may not live to see the answer. Let me ask for it anyway, and labour, knowing that in You no labour is wasted. Amen.