HOLY HANDS - THE FIRST ESSENTIAL IN PRAYER

HOLY HANDS — THE FIRST ESSENTIAL IN PRAYER

My feeling on hearing your Bochim read aloud was, that it was premature. If an act of insubordination to the Spirit of God has been committed, there can be no expectation of help from God until it has been repudiated. The first essential in prayer is “holy hands”. “I will ^[p. 65] wash mine hands in innocency: so will I compass thine altar” (Psalm 26: 6). If there be manifested weakness, as we see in the days of Joshua, when there was unjudged evil in the camp, the crying to God is discountenanced by the Lord until the evil has been cleared away. The Lord says, “Wherefore liest thou thus upon thy face? ... Up, sanctify the people” (Joshua 7: 10 - 13). “If I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not hear me” (Psalm 66: 18). Before we draw nigh to God we have to cleanse our hands and purify our hearts. I am certain that prayer is often proposed, and especially public humiliation, as a plea of postponement, or a cloak to the conscience to escape a surrender or a self-judgment, which practical righteousness would insist on. I think in any case of discipline that the name of the Lord should be first vindicated, and the one in error subjected to the proper treatment, before the assembly can be in a condition for prayer and humiliation. They cannot appear before the Lord before the first, and they certainly have not sought or pursued the true services of love toward the erring one until the second has been done. The right and true aim of discipline is cure; the question is what will promote cure. Will a hasty glossing over or indifference effect a cure? I desire to secure the honour of the Lord in His house, and the good of my brother. I cannot obtain the one or the other by indifference; nay, on the contrary, the course of action which secures the one procures the other. If I have true love, it is not to postpone divine treatment or discipline, but to adopt it in order to effect the restoration of my brother. Having first subjected him to divine treatment, then let there be united confession and prayer. You can recall when a grievous case of sin occurred amongst us, that the sinning one was first put away, and then there was a general meeting of humiliation and prayer, and eventually he was restored. Surely restoration is most blessed, but how can you restore unless you first admit the failure, and then, if the restoration be true, it is in proportion to the gravity of the failure — a great restoration where there has been a great failure. Surely the good of our brother we seek, and thus let us join heart and hand to seek to promote it in the only way in which God will help us.