Getting Hold of God

After the death of D. L. Moody, a Presbyterian by the name of J.
Wilbur Chapman became the best known American evangelist before the rise
of Billy Sunday. In 1911, Chapman was on an evangelistic preaching tour in
Shrewsbury, Wales. A large hall was rented for the planned ten day
crusade. For three days the crowds were sparse and there was no response to Chapman’s
invitations for salvation. In desperation, he asked to meet with the
local pastors and leaders for prayer and counsel to find out if anything could
be done to stir the hearts of the people. His appeal to these ministry
leaders was met with a tepid response. Chapman left the meeting deeply discouraged.

Unknown to Chapman, an American Presbyterian missionary from India
by the name of John Hyde was in that meeting of ministers. He was on
furlough and visiting a fellow missionary friend in Shrewsbury. Hyde had been
working in India for 20 years and gained the nick-name “Praying Hyde” because of
his remarkable commitment to intercessory prayer. When he received a burden
of prayer, all else was forgotten. He would go days without food or sleep,
devoted to intense prayer. His prayers radically changed the climate of northern
India. Everywhere he went, revival fires burned.

Although John Hyde had only intended to hear Chapman preach one
night, after that pastor’s meeting and feeling the chilly spiritual
climate, he changed his plans. He immediately went to work in prayer, interceding on
Chapman’s behalf saying, “I cannot leave a brother minister to bear this
burden alone.” Day and night, unseen by anyone, Hyde prayed for God’s touch
upon Chapman, that God’s power would crush the spiritual indifference, and
that souls would be birthed into God’s kingdom. At the next meeting, Chapman
writes,
“Almost instantly the tide changed– the hall was packed, and my first
invitation meant 50 men for Jesus Christ.”

The crusade ended being very fruitful. Chapman had learned of John
Hyde’s intercessions on his behalf and asked to pray with him before he
left. Chapman says that Hyde entered the room, closed the door, dropped to his knees
and for five minutes did not utter a word. Hyde turned his face up to God, then turned the fountains of his great heart
open.  Chapman adds, “I felt the hot tears running down my face.  I knew that we had entered into
the presence of God.”  With upturned face, down which the tears were streaming, John Hyde said two words: “Oh
God!”
There was silence again for another five minutes. Then Hyde put his arm around
Chapman’s shoulders and Chapman writes,

“There came up from the depths of his heart such petitions for men as I
have never heard before, and I rose from my knees to know what real
prayer was.” (Copied)

“John Hyde, the Apostle of Prayer,” says Francis A. McGaw,
“was reared in a home where Jesus was an abiding guest and where the
family in that home breathed an atmosphere of prayer.” John’s father,
Dr. Smith Harris Hyde, was himself a man of prayer . . . John Hyde surpassed
his distinguished father in the holy exercise of prayer and left India an
indenture in the praying records. He was in India only nineteen years, but what
glorious years! What inspiration others got from this wrestling Jacob! Some knew
the more intimate seasons that Hyde had with God.  God knew John Hyde;
John Hyde knew God. Again I say, there is all the difference in the world between knowing the Word of God and knowing the
God of the Word. John Hyde’s “homing instinct of the soul” led him to the
prayer closet. That was his habitat. There he soared; there he listened;
there he heard; there he grew; there he wept; there he developed spiritual
muscle . .
. John Hyde had a prayer harbor where his soul delighted in the Lord and
where the Lord delighted in him . . . Listening by John’s door, men heard him
weeping, even as Jesus wept over Jerusalem and even as the Apostle Paul wept for
the stubborn sinners of his day.

No Bible school can teach us this art of tears. Hyde knew those “groanings
which cannot be uttered.” . . . He would stay on his face before God
until the answer came clear.  Even if he had to stay alone for as long as forty hours, yet he would not let God go until
he knew the yea or nay of the Spirit in the matter for which he sought God .
. .
.(From, “Revival Praying,” by Leonard Ravenhill)

Prayer –
protracted prayer, groaning prayer, fasting prayer, weeping prayer,
speechless
prayer – belongs to those initiated in a spirit of prayer, that is, into
“praying in the Holy Ghost.” To the uninstructed, terms like these mean
“works.”  But praying friend, faint not;
such critics may yet learn. In the language of Horatius
Bonar it may be said of protracted, groaning, speechless prayer, “It is
the way
the Master went. Should not the servant tread it still?”. . .

. . . I believe
most of us will need the tears wiped from our eyes when the books are
opened at
the judgment bar of God, and our personal prayer record is read. By a
strange
paradox those who pray most, feel they pray little. This much is sure:
No man
who prays, struts! . . . .

Has the blessed
Spirit toned down His operations? With reverence we ask, “Did God close
down
His production lines after the Spirit had come upon Wesley, upon Finney,
and
such men? Were those leaders spiritual
freaks? Were
they oddities of grace, eccentrics who were a little off in their
spiritual
operations?’ These days we are spiritually so subnormal
that to be just normal
(according to
the New Testament pattern) seems to make us abnormal .
. .

. . . In prayer we
need holy men, for the holy
men are bold, reaching out in the Spirit and feeling the tug of divine
yearnings. Like their Master, holy men also know strong crying and
tears. Would
to God our Bible schools would give a special period each year to
training men
in prayer.

Satan fears prayer
and offsets it at every angle. At every opportunity he stalls the
impulse to
take part in it, for he has felt the smart of men who pray in the Holy
Ghost .
. . In the book of Acts we read that demons cried, “Jesus I know and Paul I
know.” Because Paul
knew
how to pray in the Holy Ghost, hell rocked in fury. Bloody Mary is said
to have
feared the prayers of John Knox more than the tramping feet of armies.
Has the
devil less intelligence than that queen? Ah brethren, in this kind of
praying
most of us feel like worms (Isaiah 41:14) – a blessed experience if it
is not
mock humility . . .

The early church
prayed; every revival church has prayed; every participant in revival
prayer
has known travail. Though there are some tearful intercessors behind the
scenes, I grant you that to our modern Christianity, praying is foreign.