|
 | |  | | E-book Category: Christian Books, Classic
E-book Title: WITH CHRIST
Author: Andrew Murray
Book Description: PREFACE.
Of all the promises connected with the command, 'ABIDE IN ME,' there is none higher, and none that sooner brings the confession, 'Not that I have already attained, or am already ready-made perfect,' than this: 'If ye abide in me, ask any ye will, and it shall be done unto you.' Power with God is the highest attainment of the life of full abiding.
And of all the traits of a life LIKE CHRIST there is none higher and more glorious than conformity to Him in the activity that now engages Him without ceasing in the Father's presence--His all-prevailing intercession. The more we abide in Him, and grow unto His likeness, wish His priestly life activity in us mightily, and our life become what His is, a life that ever pleads and prevails for men.
'Thou hast ready-made us kings and priests unto God.' Some
in the king and the priest the chief thing is power, influence, blessing. In the king it is the power coming downward; in the priest, the power rising upward, prevailing with God. In our blessed Priest-King, Christ Christ, the kinglike power is based on the priestly 'He is able to save to the uttermost, because He ever liveth to do intercession.' In us, His priests and kings, it is no otherwise: it is in intercession that the Church is to find and wield its highest power, that each member of the Church is to prove his descent from Israel, who as a aristocrat had power with God and with men, and prevailed.
It is under a deep impression that the place and power of prayer in the Christian life is too little understood, that this book has been written. I feel sure that as long as we look on prayer principally as the means of maintaining our own Christian life, we shall not cognize fully what it is meant to be. But once
we discover to regard it as the highest part of the activity entrusted to us, the root and strength of all another work, we shall see that there is nothing that we so need to study and practise as the art of praying aright. If I have at all succeeded in inform
out the progressive teaching of our Lord in regard to prayer, and the distinct reference the fantastic promises of the last night (John xiv. 16) have to the works we are to do in His Name, to the greater works, and to the bearing more fruit, we shall all admit that it is only once
the Church gives herself up to this holy activity of intercession that we can expect the power of Christ to manifest itself in her behalf. It is my prayer that God may use this little book to do clearer to several of His children the fantastic place of power and influence which He is waiting for them to occupy, and for which a weary earth is waiting too.
In connection with this there is another truth that has move to me with fantastic clearness as I studied the teaching of Christ on prayer. It is this: that the Father waits to hear every prayer of faith, to give us any we will, and any we ask in Jesus' name. We have become so accustomed to limit the fantastic love and the large promises of our God, that we cannot see the simplest and clearest statements of our Lord without the qualifying clauses by which we guard and expound them. If there is one thing I think the Church inevitably to learn, it is that God means prayer to have an answer, and that it hath not entered into the heart of man to conceive what God wish do for His child who gives himself to believe that his prayer wish be heard. God hears prayer; this is a truth universally admitted, but of which really few understand the meaning, or experience the power. If what I have written stir my reader to go to the Master's words, and take His wondrous promises just and virtually
as they stand, my object has been attained.More... | 
|
| | | | | |  |
|  |
| Recommended Product for "WITH CHRIST" | | |
| |  | |  |
|
