Adolph Saphir

“ You believe the supremacy of the Father, and that His glory is the end of all things as well as the joy of His chosen; you believe the universal character of Christ's kingdom, and the promise given to Him, that the heathen are His inheritance, and the uttermost ends of the earth His possession; you believe that the Spirit alone can open the eyes of the blind, and turn men from idols to serve the true and living God; you believe that the Church of Christ is intrusted with the commission to preach the gospel to all nations ”

“ God expects you to ask them in faith. These petitions are nothing else but the creed converted into prayer: I believe in God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. But let us look now at the same blessings in another light—their effects on us. Do we take a royal view of the power, transforming and elevating, of the love of God, and the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ? We are to be light in the Lord. Have we any lofty conceptions of the light which we may possess? Children in malice, we are to be men, strong, mature, many-sided, fully-developed in knowledge and spiritual understanding. ”

“ It is in intercession that the Christian most fully enters into his glorious liberty. Then he is not a servant, but a friend, to whom God has revealed His plans and purposes; as Jesus intercedes above, he intercedes below; He fulfils the measure of prayer, for Christ and the Church are one. And while his heart is filled with love, the wings of faith carry him beyond all difficulties and storms of time, so that, calm, collected, and hopeful, he looks forward to the victory of God's holy cause upon earth. ”

“ Christ rejoices in His union with His believers. Christ rejoices in every manifestation of spiritual life, of love, of patience, of self-denial which He beholds in His people. Christ rejoices in the prospect of receiving us to Himself. Christ rejoices even when he is afflicted in our afflictions, for He knows why He has commanded us to glory in tribulation also. Do we seek the greatest, the highest joy, to have Christ's joy fulfilled in us?
Perfect love of God, perfect peace of God, perfect joy of God, such are royal thoughts and petitions. ”

“ He not merely teaches and influences us to pray, but He is prayer, the fountain and source of all prayer as well as the foundation and basis of all answers to our petitions. He is the Word in this sense also. From all eternity His Father heard him, heard Him as interceding for that world which, created through Him, He represented, and in which, through Him, divine glory was to be revealed. In the same sense, therefore, in which He is light and gives light, in which He is life and resurrection, and therefore quickens, Jesus is prayer. ”

“ That His disciples may pray in Christ's name, as one with Him, as standing in a filial relation to God through Him, this is the high end of the incarnation and of the sufferings of the Son of God,—this is the glorious fruit of His resurrection and of the Pentecostal gift. For prayer is not one among many manifestations of spiritual life; it is not even enough to say that it is the first and most important. It stands by itself, and pre-eminent. It is the manifestation of our personal relation to God; it is the essential and immediate expression of our filial relation in Christ to the Father. ”

“ Are you not separating yourself from the very love of God, from the mind and heart of Jesus, from the pure river, which is to make glad all lands, from the sympathy of the angels, from the expectation of the saints who have entered into their rest, from the truest energy of the Church on earth? ”

“ And what is our prayer for victory over sin? are not "these things written, that we sin not?" Is not He able to subdue all things within us and around us, so that we are more than conquerors?
Let us learn from the example of the apostle Paul the true grandeur of Christian prayer. Starting with full assurance of the free grace of God in Christ Jesus, accepted in the Beloved, and clothed with His righteousness, he seeks and obtains the fulness of the blessing of the gospel of Christ. He rejoices in God, though he has no confidence in the flesh. ”

“ To be anxious for souls and yet not impatient, to be patient and yet not indifferent, to bear the infirmities of the weak without fostering them, to testify against sin and unfaithfulness, and the low standard of spiritual life, and yet to keep the stream of love free and full, and open—to have the mind of a faithful shepherd, a hopeful physician, a tender nurse, a skilful teacher—requires the continual renewal of the Lord's grace. ”

“ If He died for us while we were enemies, if we were saved by His death, much more being saved shall we now live by His life. He who loved not His life, but gave it up for our life, shall He not now treasure up with ever-watchful care and never-failing tenderness the objects of His dying love, the very travail of His soul? ”

“ When he appears before the Father, he appears not merely as a creature in humility, as a sinner in contrition, as a suppliant, full of wants and weakness, but he appears as one with Christ, possessed of the spirit of the Son of God, a royal priest, seeking the Father's glory, longing for the Father's kingdom, and supplicating in Christ's name the fulfilment of God's promises concerning the Church and the world. ”

“ In the battle of Amalek Israel conquered as long as the hands of Moses were lifted up in prayer. In the Book of Jeremiah the power of Moses the lawgiver, and Samuel the great reformer, is spoken of as so great, that only the exceeding weight of Israel's sin was too heavy an obstacle to be removed by them; and in the Book of Ezekiel we read of the potent influence of the prayer of Noah, Daniel, and Job; Daniel, that eminent saint, man greatly beloved, being alive at the very time when God thus spoke of him. ”

“ Or are we rather like unto a house, scantily lit up, imperfectly illuminated, in which many chambers are scarcely ever used, in which some are dark and unswept, and others again purposely left untenanted and unvisited? If our eye is single we shall be transparent—the whole body will then be full of light. ”

“ We are to be renewed daily after the image of Christ. We mourn over our weakness and sinfulness. Let us start every day with the conviction that we have nothing, that all our resources are spent, all our strength exhausted, yesterday's manna consumed. ”

“ Sympathy has, in like manner, its eternal origin in the Son of God. The Father loved and pitied us, but the mind, which was in the Son of God, was to humble Himself, and to take upon Him our nature, to learn obedience, and to be made perfect through suffering ”

“ What gave occasion to the expression of this desire was the circumstance, that the Saviour had been praying before His apostles. Doubtless, as they listened to the prayer of the Lord, the only-begotten of the Father, they felt that never man spake unto God as this Man; that in Him the filial spirit of prayer had found its perfect expression; that He was the true High Priest, who entered into the very presence of God. John the Baptist had taught his disciples to pray, for the object of all God-sent teachers is to bring souls into communion with God. ”

“ Pray especially for the ministers of the gospel, that they may set forth the love of God to the conversion of many souls. Pray for them that they may not shun to declare the whole counsel of God, so that they may present every man perfect in Christ Jesus. ”

“ And if such was the spirit and power of intercession before Christ came, and before the spirit of sonship was poured out, how much more ought we, the body of Christ, to be characterised by the spirit and power of intercessory prayer. Intercession is the distinguishing mark of the Christian. The penitent, the inquirer, pray for their own personal safety. The accepted believer prays for others as well as for himself; he prays for the Church and for the world. Nearly all the exhortations given in the Epistles are to intercessory prayer, for all saints and for the spread of the gospel ”

“ And he asks for himself and the Church to be filled with all the fulness of God, to grow in all things into Christ; that love may abound yet more and more, that we may be sincere and without offence till the day of Christ, being filled with the fruits of righteousness, which are by Jesus Christ unto the glory and praise of God.
The Church is indebted to the apostle Paul for his marvellous labours, more still for the Epistles, which, according to the wisdom given unto him, he has written ”