When Harry Emerson Fosdick wrote his classic book on prayer, over 50 years ago, and gave it the title, The Meaning of Prayer, he began his exploration of this important religious subject by surveying what he called “the naturalness of prayer.”

“Prayer is a native tendency with all men,” wrote Fosdick.  Then, in scholarly fashion, Dr. Fosdick proceeded to marshal evidence from all sorts of sources to prove that “man is a praying animal.”  He cited the work of anthropologists who testified that they found primitive tribes all over the world, in various stages of development, worshipping all sorts of gods but invariably engaging in some form of prayer.  He referred to the common practice of prayer among the devotees of the major religions of the world: Christianity, Judaism, Mohammedanism, Buddhism, and Hinduism.

He quoted Thomas Carlyle’s remark: “Prayer is and remains the deepest impulse of the soul of man.”  He served up one of the important conclusions from William James definitive study of the varieties of religious experience, where James wrote: “The reason why we pray is simply that we cannot help praying.” And he cited that well known and moving example of Abraham Lincoln, when he was bearing the heavy burdens of the Presidency during the Civil War, testifying that, “I have been driven many times to my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had no where else to go; my own wisdom and that of all around me seemed insufficient for the day.”

Then, Dr. Fosdick, proceeding from his basic presupposition of the naturalness of prayer, observed that for the most part, man, the praying animal, neglects the exercise of prayer, his native endowment, and uses it only in haphazard and spasmodic fashion.  Tragically it is only when men are at their wits end; when sick, in danger, or despair, that they call upon God and solemnly offer prayer.

This is a sad situation, Dr. Fosdick observed, and he offers up his wonderful little book on The Meaning of Prayer as an eloquent appeal to every person to lay hold on this natural tendency which lies deep in each of us – “not allowing it to remain merely a tendency becoming nothing more than a selfish, unintelligent, occasional cry of need, but to understand it, and to discipline it into a well trained habit which will yield up untold spiritual treasures.”

The choice before us Dr. Fosdick demonstrates in his famous parable of a father and his two sons: “One son looked upon his father as a last resort in critical need.  He never came to him for friendly conference, never sought his advice, in little difficulties never was comforted by his help.  He did not make his father his confidant.  He went to college and wrote home only when he wanted money.  He fell into disgrace, and called on his father only when he needed legal aid.  He ran his life with utter disregard of his father’s character or purpose, and turned to him only when in desperate straits.  The other son saw in his father’s love the supreme motive of his life.  He was moved by daily gratitude so that to be well pleasing to his father was his joy and his ideal.  His father was his friend.  He confided in him, was advised by him, kept close to him, and in his crises came to his father with a naturalness born of long habit, like Jesus, who having prayed without ceasing, now at last bows in Gethsemane.  Is there any doubt as to which is the nobler sonship?  And is not the former type a true picture of our relationship with God when we leave prayer to be a merely instinctive and untrained cry of need?” (Fosdick — Ibid)

There is a new book on prayer by Jacques Ellul, a French lawyer and lay Bible scholar in the Reformed Church of France.  The book bears the title, Prayer and Modern Man.  This book begins by the author categorically stating the exact opposite of Dr. Fosdick’s basic presupposition of the naturalness of prayer.  This French lawyer layman says that prayer is no longer a natural tendency for men and women of this age.  “The man of our times does not know how to pray,” writes Jacques Ellul, “but much more than that he has neither the desire nor the need to do so.  He does not find the deep source of prayer within himself.  I am acquainted with this man.  I know him well.  It is I myself. . . The fact is that modern man is praying less and less, and even the most earnest Christians have a certain hesitation, a certain difficulty in praying . . . People read the Bible less, meditate less, pray individually less and less. . . There is a growing mistrust of liturgies, of collective prayers and rites, a feeling of invalidity in public prayer, of the difficulty of truly praying together.”  (Ellul — Ibid)

Why has prayer ceased to be a vital and valid practice for modern man?  Ellul traces it to the radically changed world in which we live.  The advances of science and technology have so medically transformed man’s existence that prayer has been phased out as a means of procuring what man needs and wants.  Time was when men prayed for food, for rain, for healing, etc.  Now, men have provided for themselves something better than prayer for obtaining food and health and even rain.  Man has come of age.  Man has advanced from an economy of scarcity to one of plenty.  He can produce enough food and to spare for all the earth’s inhabitants.  Prayer was an exercise in spiritual begging and modern man is no longer a beggar.  Before the discovery of miracle drugs and modern surgery, prayer was often the only hope of rescue for the sick and afflicted.  Now the sick and their troubled relatives have something better than prayer.  They use that instead of prayer.  Modern irrigation methods and cloud seeding have phased out prayer meetings as a viable option to end a killing drought.

Now you might conclude from these observations that Jacques Ellul is advising modern man to stop worrying about the withering up of his ancestral tendency to pray.  Since progress has laid on the scrap heap an ancient superstitious tool, let modern man stop flagellating his soul with guilt feelings about no longer feeling the urge to pray.  But such is not the case with Jacques Ellul.

It is not authentic Biblical prayer that has been done in by scientific man’s desacralizing of society, says Ellul, but unworthy, low, superstitious forms of pre-Christian prayer that lingered on among man.  We ought not to mourn over the modern man’s loss of faith in prayer as a begging to get what man wants, or as a means of securing wealth, success, power, or military victories.  All of that kind of prayer should have been done in long ago.  For such prayer is, as William Stringfellow has branded it, “sheer sorcery.”  If it remained for the advances of science and technology to deal the deathblow to such a quasi-religious faith – then let stouthearted Christians give thanks for the liquidation of this dragon of false religion.

Listen to Ellul: “It is prayer which has been truned into an efficacious means that is fading out.  We might even say that it is being made ridiculous by technology. . .  What is doomed is that kind of prayer for success. . .  In reality it is God who condemns it through the medium of circumstances.” (Ibid)

So, Ellul in our time is calling modern man to return to the fundamental and only absolutely valid Christian use of prayer, namely: prayer as fellowship with God, as the superlative means of communion between the human and the Divine Spirit.  This French layman challenges modern Christians who are neglecting their prayers today because prayer seems out of place in the modern world to remember their Lord’s command to seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness and trust God to supply them all those other things necessary to sustain His own, such things as health and shelter and food and clothing.

Ellul confesses that he finds the sole reason for modern man to continue to pray in the Biblically recorded commandment of our Lord: “Watch and pray.”  So, when we do not feel like praying, when we get no answer to our prayers, when there seems to be nothing encountered but void in our prayers, when we are going through those long, dry periods of the soul, we must continue to be faithful with our habitual recourse to prayer in response to our Lord’s command to each disciple: “Watch and pray.”

But what is accomplished by such difficult, duty-done prayers?  For one thing, faith is kept alive however low the flame may burn upon this altar of our hearts.  The prophet Habakkuk in, a dismal time when God seemed to have forsaken his people and to be prospering all the ventures of the ungodly, vowed that he would not drift.  He said, “I will take my stand upon the watch-tower and wait to see what God will say to me.”

Soran Kierkegaard reminds us that when we pray we all have the tendency to think “that the important thing, the thing we must concentrate upon, is that God should hear what we are praying for – but in the true, eternal sense, it is just the reverse: the true relation in prayer is not when God hears what is prayed for, but when we, who are praying, continue to pray until we become the ones who hear what God wills.”

The second thing that takes place in such prayer is that we begin to better understand ourselves and our situation.  Our motives are sorted out and refined.  Our relationships to others are revealed in clearer, more objective lines as we lift them up into the holy light of God’s presence.  “Prayer is a mirror,” says Ellul, “in which we are called to contemplate our spiritual state.  Since it is a real encounter with God, we can in prayer see ourselves as God sees us.” (Ibid)

But third, and most important of all, such prayer becomes, in Fosdick’s fine phrase, “a battle ground of the soul” – where the real issues are fought out and settled – where decisions are reached in that unseen empire of man’s soul which determine destiny in the outside world – for character of men and women, for families, churches, industries, and nations.  Through this sort of prayer something from beyond enters into and transforms this world.

David Livingston, the Scottish missionary explorer, was a stout hearted, courageous man.  He, more than any other person, was responsible for opening up the dark continent of Africa to the outside world and breaking the back of the slave trade.

Livingston had a quality about him which the Arabs called “baraka.” “In the most improbable circumstances he had the power of enhancing life and making it appear better than it was before.  His mere presence seems to have conferred a blessing on everyone that met him; even the Arab slavers felt it and helped him when they could.” (Alan Morehead – The White Nile”)

Stanley, the newspaper correspondent who went out to Africa and found Livingstone when the whole world thought he was dead or lost, was impressed by this quality of “baraka.”  Prof. Coupland has said of Stanley’s brief companionship with Livingstone, “It was the supreme experience of his life. He had come close to moral greatness, and he was startled, captivated, and subjected by it.”  (Ibid. p. 126)

Those who were longest the closest to Dr. Livingston knew that one of the strongest habits of his daily life was prayer – and it was to, or through, this highly developed natural tendency of prayer that they traced his quality of baraka (from another better world emerging into this).

Back during the Vietnam War I was talking with a woman who was deeply moved by the tragic events of our time.  She said: “Day after day I sit here and watch the boob-tube war coverage.  I actually see the dead bodies in Vietnam; the Mai Lai massacre pictures, the Lt. Calley trial testimony.  All this cruelty and inhumanity made me doubt that there is a God; a loving Heavenly Father the Christian faith insists is real.  If He really is there and in control why does He permit such carnage, such breaking of the fundamental laws of His justice and His mercy?”

But as I listened I could not help thinking, “But how does one account for your revulsion at this carnage?  Where did you get ideas and feelings of humanitarian behavior between people?  What happened in man’s long evolutionary process from the law of the jungle and the cave man’s brutality to give you your refined sensibilities?”

The most reasonable explanation I can come by is: There is a God, a loving Heavenly Father whose character is justice, mercy, and righteousness, and that knowledge of His reality and delineation of His character was impressed on the consciousness of His prophets and holy men of old, and most completely revealed by One Jesus, called the Christ, whose knowledge of and fellowship with that Eternal One was unique.  And finally all this has been made real in one human life after another through Christian teaching, nature, and fellowship – but become insistent and regnant a power only in those lives where the human divine encounter takes place in that experience we call prayer.

This year in the Women of Idlewild monthly meetings we are going to be focusing on “The Meaning of Prayer.”  We shall be working our way through one of the greatest books ever written on this theme – one of the most complete compendiums of what the Scriptures teach and what the saints of all ages have believed about and practiced in prayer.

But all this will result in just another venture in futility unless each one of us begins to give ourselves to a more faithful practice of private and corporate prayer.

Last May in Miami during the Miss U.S.A. Beauty and Talent contest, the five top contestants were asked to give their answer to this final question:  “If you could talk with anyone in the world for five minutes, whom would you choose and what would you talk about?”

Each of the five finalists had to answer.  Two girls said they would choose to talk with President Nixon; one said, Bob Hope; another, Woody Allen;’ and the fifth said: “I would choose to talk with my Father and tell him how much I love and appreciate him.”

What do you think might happen to you, to your home, your church, your world, if you chose to really talk with your Heavenly Father for just 5 minutes out of the 1440 minutes you have in every day, and then waited for His five minute “talk back?”