Why Pray?

Exactly 50 years ago, the great nation of France suffered one of the worst defeats in military history. In the spring of 1940, when the daffodils and the dogwoods were in bloom, the Nazi panzers of Adolf Hitler crushed the French army in just three weeks. This defeat was a terrible shock. France was thought to have the best equipped and best trained army in the world. Why was she crushed so quickly and how was she humiliated so utterly?

The answer is very simple. The key to the French catastrophe was communications. You see, back in 1940, the French army did not use radio communications. They relied upon couriers on motorcycles to relay messages and information from the front lines to headquarters and back again. That system had served them well in the First World War, when the front lines were static, and you knew where the enemy was.

But when the Germans invaded France in the spring of 1940, they unleashed a whole new form of warfare called the blitzkrieg - the lightning war. They poured across the border in tanks and armored vehicles, supported by dive bombers that rained death from the sky. In a flash, the German columns thrust deep into France, penetrating, in some cases, a hundred miles in a day. The French army was thrown into utter confusion, and in the midst of this crisis, their communication system broke down.

The French motorcycle couriers found that they were being overrun by the Germans. They were unable to get to their headquarters behind the lines. Sometimes they got there only to find the Germans waiting there for them! And when they did get through to headquarters, the situation at the front had changed so much in the meantime, that their orders and their information were completely useless. The French high command, operating in a communications vacuum, were paralyzed. The French army was like a body with the head cut off. The troops at the front awaited orders that never came through. They didn’t know what to do or where to go, so they were simply overrun by the Germans. The French were defeated in just three weeks because their lines of communication collapsed in the crisis.

Now the church of Jesus Christ is at war. The enemy is strong, and he appears to be on the move, especially here in New York. Just this week, Time Magazine’s cover story was entitled “The Rotting of the Big Apple.” Everywhere we turn, we are besieged with evidence that indicates that crime and evil are running wild in our city. Drugs and violence abound in the streets. Innocent little children are being gunned down, even while asleep in their beds, victims of this invasion of evil. Tension is at a boiling point between the races in our melting pot city. Organized crime has virtually taken over many industries and unions.

People and politicians wring their hands and wonder what to do. Let’s hire more police to take back the streets, they say. Let’s set up more neighborhood watchdog groups, they cry. Let’s hire more prosecutors. Let’s build more prison and incarcerate more criminals, they say. Let’s improve our schools, say others. Let’s raise taxes so that we can offer better social services. Let’s build more low income housing.

But these suggestions are no more effective than putting bandaids on cancer. The problem with our city is a problem that is rooted in the heart of man. The violence, the crime, the drugs, the hate, are just symptoms. When you go to a doctor, he doesn’t treat the symptoms, to make the symptoms go away, he treats the disease, or else he’s just a quack.

The only doctor that can save our society now is the church of Jesus Christ. Because it is only the church that has the answer to the problem of man’s sinful heart. The heart of man is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked, the Bible says, and only the church has the remedy to that. Only the church has the answer to the meaninglessness that makes people turn to drugs or violence or pleasure or money in the vain hope of finding something worth living for. And the answer is Jesus Christ. The gospel - the good news about Jesus - is the only remedy for man’s sin.

So we’re in a war. There is a crisis at our very doorstep. The enemy is on the march. And prayer is our line of communication with headquarters. If we fail to pray, we’ll be overrun. We’ll be defeated as surely as France was defeated by Germany in the Second World War. I believe that things have gotten so bad in our city, and in the cities across our nation, because the church of Jesus Christ has forgotten how to pray.

You can have a Christian concert and you’ll get 500 people there. Call a worship service and you’ll get 150 people to show up. Have a fellowship dinner, and 75 will be there. But call a prayer meeting, and you’ll get 10 if you’re lucky. Because Christians today have forgotten how important prayer is. They have forgotten something that the early church knew - that when the people of God gather to pray, Satan turns tail and runs.

A great man of God named Samuel Chadwick wrote

“Satan dreads nothing but prayer. His one concern is to keep Christians from praying. He fears nothing from prayerless studies, prayerless work, prayerless religion. He laughs at our toil, mocks our wisdom, but trembles when we pray.”

Another man of God, William Cowper, wrote

Restraining prayer we cease to fight

Prayer makes the Christian’s armor bright

And Satan trembles when he sees

The weakest saint upon his knees.

In the book of Acts, we find the church in crisis. In Acts 4, the enemies of the church had become alarmed. The Gospel was spreading through the city like wildfire. The church was growing. The apostles, led by Peter and John, were preaching powerful messages in public places. They were healing people of their diseases. They were releasing them from their sin in the name of Jesus.

So what did the authorities do? They arrested Peter and John. They threw them in the slammer. Then they hauled them up before the Sanhedrin, which was the religious and civil court of the Jews. They told them to shut up. They issued a gag order on the church. They made all sorts of threats of what would happen to them if they continued to preach. Then they let them go.

And where did they go? Did they go home? Did they leave town? Did they run away and hide? No, they went to church. They gathered the church together and they had a prayer meeting! And look how they prayed…

Acts 4:23-31

Notice the two things that they did in this crisis. They told God about what the enemy was up to, and they asked Him to send reinforcements. When we pray, we need to tell God about what the enemy is doing. Satan is called the Accuser of the brethren, because he’s always ratting on us. He’s always slandering us to God, especially when we sin. Instead, what we ought to be doing before God is ratting on Satan. We ought to be drawing the attention of the King of Kings to the wicked schemes and the evil activity of Satan.

Why should we do this? Because we think God doesn’t already know? Of course not! We need to do this in order to let Satan know that we know what he’s up to, and to let Him know that we’ve told God about it.

But even more important, we need to pray that God would send us reinforcements. You notice in Acts 4 that the church didn’t ask God to end the battle. They asked Him to help them fight better in the battle. If God had blown the whistle and called a halt, Satan would not have been defeated. He would have been left holding a lot of territory right there in Jerusalem. Kind of like if they sign a peace treaty right now in the Middle East that leaves Saddam Hussein still in control of Kuwait.

But God wants to see a resolution to the issue. He wants us to win people over from the enemy’s camp to our side. He wants us to advance onto the enemy’s territory and take ground. If the battle has been called off, we can’t do that, can we?

So often, when we get into a tight spot, we ask God to bail us out. We cry out “Oh God, take away these nasty things that are happening to me. Get me out of here!” That’s not what the church did. They just asked God to give them the courage and the boldness, the strength and the power, to fight the good fight in that tight spot, so that they would win the victory for Jesus Christ. That’s powerful praying!

Now we’ve got an opportunity this week to take some ground back from the enemy. You think the timing of this Crusade is an accident? You think it’s just a coincidence that this happens at a time when the attention of the whole country is turned toward the terrible problems of New York City? You think it just happened that churches all across our community of every ethnic background - black, white, Hispanic, Oriental, are working together in joy and harmony at the very time our city is seething with racial unrest? We’ve got a chance to show the city and the nation that Jesus Christ is the answer!

But we’ve got to pray. Satan’s out there. New York is his turf and it has been for too long. Don’t look on this Crusade as an automatic success, just because Billy Graham is going to be here. Billy Graham himself is nothing but an instrument that God uses. We’ve got to pray.

A lot of Christians are going to go to the Crusade just to be entertained. They’re going to go and occupy a seat that would have been better occupied by a person who needed to hear the Gospel. If you go to the Crusade this week, bring somebody with you. Go to be involved, as a counselor, as a choir member, as an usher. Above all, go and pray. As you drive along the Parkways, with your eyes wide open, pray. If you get stuck in traffic, pray. Pray that the traffic would be because so many people are going to the Crusade. As you walk in from the parking lot, pray. And if you don’t even get into the Coliseum, because it’s too crowded, don’t be upset - rejoice! And just keep praying.

There’s a war on. Got to stay in touch with headquarters.