Reuben A. Torrey teaches us how to pray
How to Pray is the work of the American evangelist Reuben A. Torrey who, at the beginning of the 20th century, was in the hands of God the instrument of numerous revivals throughout the world.
A firm and straightforward man with gruff manners, captivating crowds with his irrefutable logic and the solid scriptural foundation of his teachings, Torrey always refused to allow his biography to be written for fear of diverting to the benefit of the man something of the glory which belongs only to God. We will therefore limit ourselves to saying that, having received a Doctor of Theology, he was consecrated at the age of twenty-two in a Congregationalist church, then left for Germany after four years of ministry in order to complete and complete it. deepen his studies. There he was seduced for a time by the new theology as well as by the appearance and scientific pretensions of modern criticism. However, he soon recognized that the ancient and simple, absolutely evangelical conception of Christianity was the only one which changed life, which brought full satisfaction to the intelligence and the heart, and which was effective in triumphing over sin. He himself summed up his message by saying: “I preach four great truths:
- I preach the entire Bible, from the first to the last page, accepting everything and rejecting nothing,
- I preach the doctrine of the atonement, that is, salvation by the power of the blood of Jesus Christ,
- I preach that the Holy Spirit is a person,
- I preach the power of prayer. »
On his return from Germany, he founded a Congregationalist church in Minneapolis, but seemed called to the ministry of evangelist rather than that of pastor (Ephesians 4 v. 11) and organized meetings in this city for six years in large halls and theaters. This work earned him the affection of the famous evangelist Moody who called him, in 1889, to direct his Bible Institute of Chicago. Five years later, a major Chicago church placed him at its head. Already flourishing, it took on a splendid growth in its hands. While carrying out these two activities simultaneously, he devotes five months each year to major evangelization tours during which hundreds of souls enter into the life and joy of the Lord. In 1898, a small group of Christians began meeting at the Institut Biblique on Saturday evenings from nine to ten o'clock to pray. Their numbers gradually increase until three to four hundred people are gathering each week to ask God for a great worldwide revival. This burden became so heavy on the hearts of Dr. Torrey and a few others that after this meeting they continued, in a small group, to pray to God until late at night. One night, Dr. Torrey found himself, within this small nucleus, praying to God to send him to preach the Gospel around the world so that thousands of souls would give themselves to Christ in China, Japan, Australia, in New Zealand, Tasmania, India, England, Scotland, Ireland, Germany and America itself. This prayer might seem insane from a man placed at the head of an important church and also director of a biblical institute, but the Lord would not be long in justifying it. Less than a week later, the answer came, as extraordinary as the prayer itself. After a prayer meeting at his church, Torrey was approached by two strangers who, on behalf of the United Churches of Melbourne, invited him to undertake a revival campaign there. For several months they had been sent in search of a man capable of leading such a campaign and they said they were now convinced that they had found in Torrey the servant that God had chosen. Seized by such a prompt response, Torrey hesitated, objecting to the impossibility of abandoning his responsibilities in Chicago, but the response was categorical: “You will come. We will bring you there through prayer. » Sure enough, after a few months, Dr. Torrey received a telegram asking him to cable his response. On this answer, affirmative, would depend the eternal destiny of nearly a hundred thousand souls! In April 1902, Dr. Torrey and his companion, the singer Charles M. Alexander, began this mission in Melbourne. In four weeks, eight thousand souls gave themselves to Jesus Christ. For six months they moved from town to town until all of Australia was evangelized and the Australian Church sanctified all over again. But the seed of an even greater harvest was to be sown among this population exulting in the joy of salvation. Torrey had already published the present work which brings together a series of familiar instructions intended to introduce prayer meetings and in which a wonderfully expressive but unfortunately untranslatable phrase appears several times: "To pray through". This expression evokes the drilling of a tunnel or the slow work of a tool which pierces a steel plate. “To pray through” is to pray with that tireless perseverance which wears away the obstacle, with that irresistible power which carves a passage through the mountains of difficulties, until reaching the other side, the pure azure of the communion with God, where all answers are made possible. A Melbourne lady who read this book was struck by the power of the expression and began to gather her friends into prayer circles determined to pray in this way. The movement spread across the city and soon there were more than seventeen hundred of these circles in Melbourne. Soon after, this lady returned to England and brought back the history of the prayer groups. The idea was adopted with enthusiasm and soon England and Ireland were also dotted with it. In 1904 there were three thousand Christians throughout the world whose daily prayer was “Awake thy work, O God.” » This is certainly the chief secret of the wonderful revival which broke out in Wales and of the great movements of the Spirit which produced genuine Pentecostal revivals throughout the world about this time. Little by little, invitations reached Dr Torrey and this is how he actually traveled to China, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Tasmania, India, then England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, to finally reach America, exactly the plan he had drawn up in that prayer in the early hours of a certain Sunday morning! We will now understand why it seemed appropriate to us to inaugurate with this work the series of publications of the Prayer and Revival Mission, the aim of which is to help by all means to the emergence of a revival. , even more urgently necessary in our time than it could have been fifty years ago. At the beginning of the 20th century, a free and abridged French translation of this work had already been published in Switzerland by Pastor E. Thouvenot, but the three published editions have long been out of print. We wanted to create a new text here, as close as possible to the original, of which we reproduce the repetitions and accumulations of arguments. Please accept our apologies. We do not claim to be a literary work, but we wanted to respect the very form of expression of Dr Torrey which, if it is imbued with the genius particular to the English language, is even more marked with the seal of the Spirit which inspires the author. Indeed, rather than writing an in-depth study on prayer, this book aims to provide Christians, from the Word of God, with powerful motives which incite them to pray with faith and perseverance, according to the very line of God's plans. We believe that God can once again use this book to arouse, this time among French-speaking Christians, a movement similar to those he has already aroused throughout the world. This is the prayer we pray as we put it into the hands of the public. “PRAYER AND REVIVAL”.