Came across the following quote (which is lengthy) in the book The Key to the Missionary Problem by Andrew Murray.
To give a bit of background, Murray wrote the book as a response to a large missionary conference (which included the Student Volunteer Movement, D.L. Moody, and Hudson Taylor, among others) in New York in 1900. Murray had been invited to attend, but was unable to due to situations at home in South Africa at the time. When he saw the conference proceedings, he was moved to write the book, because he felt that the one burning question had not been sufficiently addressed - that is, "How can we lead the whole Church to make herself available to the Lord for the work to which He has destined her and depends on her?" Or as he put it elsewhere - "the missionary problem is a personal problem." The issue is our devotion to Christ. If only a tiny fraction of the Church is obeying or taking seriously His command to evangelize the nations, what does that say about the Church?
Or put most simply of all, "What's wrong with the Church?"
He presents a number of pieces of an answer, looking at the stories of the Moravians, the Keswick conventions in England, Hudson Taylor and the founding of CIM, and the early Church in the book of Acts. All of the chapters were insightful and challenging I think, but I was blown away by the chapter on the early church, from which I quote the following.
Remember that Murray was writing this in 1900. There was no Pentecostal denomination in his time, so when he refers to the "Pentecostal Church" he's referring to the Church in the book of Acts.
From The Key to the Missionary Problem by Andrew Murray, pp. 83-88:
The first coming of the Holy Spirit in power was to a prepared people. For the Church in our day to receive the Spirit in pentecostal power, we need the same preparation. This involves giving up and forsaking all that hinders, an emptying and a cleansing of ourselves and a thirsting, waiting, and entire surrender to Christ. Then the blessing of the Spirit's power surely comes.
What were the chief elements of that that training? There was, first of all, a calling out and separation from the ordinary interests and claims of daily life. The principle that underlies the life of all God's great servants in previous ages-Abraham and Joseph, Moses and Joshua, David and Elijah-is taking them out of and setting them apart from their ordinary environment. Often this happened through persecution and suffering, that they might be brought into solitude with God alone, and be released from what is otherwise innocent or lawful on earth. Thus free, they can listen to the divine voice, receive the divine revelation, be changed and fitted by the divine power for their work. Even so Christ called His disciples to forsake all, to deny themselves of what others might consider perfectly legitimate, and to share with Him His cross and all it may involve. For three years He had them in His training-by dialogue with them, by letting them watch what He did, by His reproofs and instructions. He was preparing them to be the recipients and channels of the Holy Spirit, who would come to take the place of His earthly presence and open within them His abiding indwelling.
In a sinful world, sacrifice is the law of life and love. The men whom Christ had fitted to become the leaders of the pentecostal Church, and to embody in their lives the mind and life of the Spirit, learned to give up everything for Christ. As their Lord could not give Himself for them without sacrificing all, they, too, had learned, in giving themselves to part with all for the sake of His service and kingdom. In that entire self-abandonment to one purpose the pentecotal Church had struck its roots deep.
When there is no persecution, when money, comfort and Christian civilization surround us, when it appears to cost little to be a Christian, many find it difficult to know where the forsaking all to become a disciple comes in, or what shape it will assume. The answer is the second great element in Christ's training of His disciples: They had an intense personal attachment to Christ.
When Christ first called them, there was something in Him that attracted them and made that call irresistible. As Christ drew them without their knowing how and why, so He led them by a way and to a goal they did not know. They began by believing in Him as the Messiah: He led them on to know Him as the Song of God, as Friend, as Master, and Redeemer. Of His love to them, or theirs to Him, He said little or nothing till the last night of His life. Then He opened up to them the mystery of His loving them with a divine love-of His giving His life for them, of the Father's love resting on them, of their loving Him and keeping His commandments. The disciples had not followed Him with any such aim; it was Christ who had, by His divine love, in the course of His three years' training, attached them to Himself. It is this intense, personal, living attachment to Christ that prepares us for receiving the Holy Spirit, and brings us that pentecostal power without which the Church cannot hope to conquer the world.
Detachment comes only through a new and stronger attachment. As a Christian sees that, though he knows so little of his Lord's love, the Lord is ready to lead him on to it in a way that he does not know. He becomes willing to turn away from everything that can occupy the heart, and to yield himself, in patient obedient discipleship, to the influences of his relationship with his Lord. He learns to know that that love can master him. The love of Christ asks and claims the whole heart and life. If we are really to appeal to our churches to follow in the footsteps of the pentecostal Church, and to claim her power and blessing, we must encourage them to enter the school in which Christ trained His disciples. When the love of Christ becomes everything to any of us, and we yield ourselves to His love, demonstrated in dying for sinners, that love wail teach us, it was constrain us, to part with all for this pearl of great price. Detachment from the world, attachment to Christ, are the secrets of pentecostal blessing.
Closely connected with this love, as another element of preparation for Pentecost, was the brotherly love which Christ had taught them. He not only bound them to Himself, but also to each other. Christ always dealt with individuals. He calls His sheep by name. He knows and meets the needs of each. But His work does not end there. He makes each one a member of His Body. The divine life is a life of love. He leads us into a life of love; He calls us and His Spirit enables us to love each other as He loved us. His own love dwells in us, and binds the Body into a living whole. This supernatural and divine love is to be the Church's power to convince the world of her divine origin. The union this love gives brings strength to each member, multiplying the strength of all by the aid derived from the whole Body. It was this love that often made men say, "See how they love one another." It was this love, in the unity of the Body, that made weak men and women strong to conquer.
This love was cultivated in close fellowship, both in Christ's lifetime and after the Spirit came. It is this fellowship of love that is often sadly lacking in a congregation or a society. A hundred men contribute to the same collection for mission work, and partake of the same Holy Supper, and yet know nothing of the interchange of mutual love and spiritual fellowship. When we begin to seek Christ's Spirit in earnest for our mission work, or when we think that His first movings are felt, let us remember that there is no place where the Spirit works so surely as when we are gathered together with our brothers in the name of Jesus. To speak together of that name and love has more to do with our spiritual life than we think. To give ourselves to encourage the weak, to instruct the ignorant, to warn the erring, by telling what Christ is to us, is one of the surest means of drawing down the presence of the Lord. This builds the separate members into one body, rouses the hope of all and prepares them for that blessed outpouring of the Spirit which is indispensable if we are to witness for Christ in power.
Faith was one of the chief lessons needed for the pentecostal mission work of the first century and of ours. Christ directly taught His disciples about faith; then indirectly He talked about it in their presence, He instructed them as to the conditions and the power of faith. More than that, He impressed upon them the place faith must have in their life and work.
We know what faith is. From the first simple faith that hears a promise and believes God's Word, to the faith that enters into full and conscious union with our Lord and abides in Him and does the "greater works," faith is always one of the first conditions of the power of the Spirit's working. The pentecostal Church received and maintained her blessing and power, did her work, endured her sufferings, and triumphed-all through faith.
Faith is such a simple thing that many think it an easy thing. As the power to overcome the world, and cast out Satan, and bring men out of darkness into God's light, it is no easy thing. It implies renunciation of self, crucifixion to the world, ceasing from the wisdom and power of man, and depending on God alone. We speak of faith missions, in which faith in some of its special aspects is especially prominent. We need to emphasize the real truth that all mission work is to be faith work. If this is to be so, we must begin at the beginning, and seek not only to have the Word mixed with faith in them that hear but to have all our work and prayer mixed with faith too. "By faith Abel offered unto God a more excellent sacrifice than Cain..." (Heb. 11:4)
...
When Christ ascended to the throne, was the preparation complete? Not yet. One more thing was needed to finish the work. Even after the disciples had been trained by Jesus for three years, after they felt the mysterious influence of His death and were breathed into by the mighty power of His resurrection life, although they had the wonderful revelations of His new life for forty days and watched Him ascend from the earth to heaven-they still needed something. It was the ten days of continued, united prayer and supplication. I hardly know a passage in Scripture which presents prayer in such a wondrous light. God had done all that was needed; Christ had finished His work for His disciples and in them; but Pentecost still had to wait ten days for their prayers. Prayer put the finishing touch to the work of preparation. Prayer expresses a complete and continuous turning away from earth and arising into heaven, an opening of the whole being to God, and abiding in Christ. Such prayer proved that those men were indeed prepared vessels for God's Holy Spirit.
... If the pentecostal Church is an example, and it cannot be without the pentecostal era being repeated, prayer must again be the key that opens the windows of heaven. Prayer must be preached and practiced as the first and the last duty of a church that hopes to have the power of God seen in its work. The ten days' continued prayer teaches a simple lesson, yet so difficult to master: that what little prayer does not obtain, much earnest believing prayer, continued long enough, will bring down. We have said that the early Church availed herself of no power which we cannot utilize. We have seen what some of these powers are: the power of separation from the world and true self-sacrifice, of intense attachment and devotion to Jesus, of love and fellowship making us one with the saints around us, of faith, and of continued prayer. These things made the disciples ready to receive the promise of the Father and be the fit instruments for the Holy Spirit's mighty work in witnessing for Christ to the uttermost parts of the earth.
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I will not comment much on Murray's words, except to summarize as follows. Murray's five "powers" I would describe as:
- Holiness - "the power of separation from the world and true self-sacrifice"
- Intimacy with Christ - "intense attachment and devotion to Jesus"
- Unity among believers - "love and fellowship making us one with the saints around us"
- Faith
- Continued prayer
Note that I use the word holiness in its original sense of "being set apart," by which I mean pretty much what Murray describes, as opposed to the more common (though no less challenging!) definition of "purity of life".
This chapter is really significant to me, because Murray essentially summarized my own thoughts about the goals of our prayer mobilization efforts (all borrowed from IHOP), then added faith, and refocused them on receiving the power necessary to complete the task of world evangelization.
Near the end of the book, Murray talks a lot about the Student Volunteer Movement watchword, "The evangelization of the world in this generation", and how it was doomed to failure unless a radical change occurred in the Church of that generation. Of course, it did fail, though the contributions of the SVM are not to be minimized in any way. I bring it up only to note that ours is still a generation with the realistic possibility to finish the task, but if it were dependent only on the Church in the western world, everything that Murray wrote would still be 100% true of us.
