And with that part of our church membership that does believe in prayer theoretically—and thank God I believe it is still the vast majority in our evangelical churches—even they do not make the use of this mighty instrument that God has put into our hands that one would naturally expect.
As I said, we do not live in a praying age. We live in an age of hustle and bustle, of man’s efforts and man’s determination, of man’s confidence in himself and in his own power to achieve things, an age of human organization, and human machinery, and human push, and human scheming, and human achievement; in the things of God this means no real achievement at all.
I think it would be perfectly safe to say, that the church of Christ was never in all its history so fully and so skillfully and so thoroughly and so perfectly organized as it is today. Our machinery is wonderful, it is just perfect; but alas it is machinery without power; and when things do not go right, instead of going to the real source of our failure, our neglect to depend upon God and to look to God for power, we look around o see if there is not some new organization we can set up, some new wheel that we can add to our machinery. We have altogether too many wheels already.
What we need is not so much some new organization, some new wheel, but “the Spirit of the living creature in the wheels” whom we already posess.
from The Power Of Prayer by R. A. Torrey (1856-1928)
