Tuesday Prayer: 37

This is my 37th 'Tuesday Prayer' post. One of my missionary heroes is the great J. Hudson Taylor, whose legacy is fantastic, and whose biography is a real challenge. I have the sense that his ministry and mission was backed up by prayer, and so have been challenged by this quote;

“The prayer power has never been tried to its full capacity... If we want to see mighty wonders of divine power and grace wrought in the place of weakness, failure and disappointment, let us answer God's standing challenge, "call unto me, and I will answer thee, and show thee great and mighty things which though knowest not”

Hudson Taylor has a wonderful challenge for us here. He contrasts our common location - a place of weakness, failure and disappointment - with the possibility of what God might do in light of our prayers. This quote, this challenge, is a tantalizing 'if', daring the Church and individual Christians to pray and to join with the King of everything in bringing his rule and reign to bear.

Here, Hudson Taylor quotes Jeremiah 33:3, which might be seen to have a powerful pattern for prayer. It implies that prayer is a two-way thing, wrought with emotion. I wonder if that is true for our prayers. I wonder, also, if the reason that God has to show us these things that we do now know, is because we limit him, because we don't call unto him, because we let our location in weakness, etc, define us more than our relationship to God? Challenging.

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Don't forget to check out the previous posts in the series, featuring quotes from Tom Wright, John Wimber, Richard Foster and Don Carson, the great J. C. Ryle and theologians Alister McGrath and James K. A. Smith. Since then, I've shared quotes from Justin Welby, E.M. Bounds, Vineyard Pastor Ken Wilson, C. S. Lewis,  Norwegian O'Hallesby, Paul Miller, John Piper. Recently, we've heard Matthew Henry, Charles Finney, Andrew Murray, Tim Chester, Vaughan Roberts, Oliver O'Donovan, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and John Bunyan. Then we got rather retro, with quotes from Church Fathers John Chrysostom and Tertullian, before returning to more recent thinkers with Rowan Williams, Mike Reeves and Peter Jackson and Chris Wright and Andrew Case, R. C. Sproul, and (representing a slight change of tack) the Westminster Confession. Recently we considered Karl Barth, and Donald Macleod, Mary Prokes,  J. C. Ryle (again!), Andrew Murray, and last week was Martyn Lloyd Jones.