This is some more of Frank Hunting's early writing nonetheless still very relevant. I have a complete study of his on how to have an effective daily quiet time which I will post when time permits. Please read post on this blog about Frank Hunting. He was a wonderful mentor and Christian teacher to our family and many others.
Geoff Thompson
Literature Committee of Churches of Christ in Australia, 1957.
PROVOCATIVE PAMPHLETS--NUMBER 33
SEPTEMBER, 1957
SEPTEMBER, 1957
SOURCE OF POWER
By
F. C. HUNTING
The Holy Spirit is the source of power for the Christian. "Ye shall receive power when the Holy Spirit is come upon you." Acts 1:8. And the early disciples proved that up to the hilt as a study of the book of Acts will show. The Holy Spirit, indwelling in His fulness, is essential if we are to give entire satisfaction to Jesus, our Lord. How do we receive the Holy Spirit? Every Christian is born of the Spirit, but not every Christian lives in the power and fulness of the Spirit. John 3:5. Rom. 8:9.
When we make Jesus Lord of our lives we shall receive the Holy Spirit in His fulness. For Jesus said: "He shall glorify me." John 16:14. When our lives are lived in obedience to the will of Jesus we shall be Spirit-filled. "And we are His witnesses of these things; and so is also the Holy Spirit whom God hath given to them that obey Him." Acts 5:32. The Holy Spirit is given for the doing of God's will here and now. We have a choice. Which do we want? To live partly for God, serving Him where and when it is convenient, or do we want Him to take over our lives from the moment we get up to the moment we go to bed. On the decision we make at this point will depend the degree we are filled with God's Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit in His fulness is given to those who ask for Him. "How much more surely will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to them that continue to ask Him?" Luke 11: 13. (Williams trans.) How we need to learn to persist in praying, and never more so than in asking for the Holy Spirit. It is surprising how little we actually do ask God for.
God's great servants have been Spirit-filled men. Billy Graham says: "My only claim to power is the Holy Spirit. Without Him whatever I do is of the energy of the flesh, and will be burned up before the judgment seat of Christ. I don't care how big the crowds are and how big the reported results are; it is all sounding brass and tinkling cymbal' unless I am
filled with the Holy Spirit." John Sung, who won thousands of his Chinese countrymen to Christ, and who inspired thousands of others to go out and do the same, and who brought revival and new life to scores of Chinese churches, for days battled through to a death to self and surrender without reservation to Jesus. From that titanic struggle he rose a new man to preach and live in the power of the Spirit. After Jesus had that tremendous clash with Satan for forty days in the wilderness, it is written: "And Jesus returned in the power of the Spirit into Galilee." Luke 4:14. Go through Luke's gospel and read the number of times the word "power" is attributed to Jesus' word or miracle or ministry. The Holy Spirit is the secret of power for you as a Christian. Seize every opportunity you can to learn or study or read the books which can help you discover what it means to be a Spirit-filled Christian.
YOU WIN THE BATTLE HERE OR FAIL.
Jesus said: "When you pray, you must go to your most secret place, shut the door, and pray to your Father in secret." Matt. 6:6. (Williams, trans.) Daniel opened his windows three times a day to pray. Daniel 6.10. Jesus prayed all night, early in the morning, and many times when the crowds were pressing Him He withdrew to pray. Luke 5:16; 6:12; 9: 28. The apostles resolved: "we will go on devoting ourselves to prayer and the word of God." Acts 6:4. "With one mind they were all continuing to devote themselves to prayer." Acts, 1:14. (Williams trans.)A "Quiet Time" in which you learn to pray, commune with Christ, listen to Him for daily orders, soak in the Word of God, is indispensable to the life of God in us. Because of this I am going to give you, a suggested plan for keeping your Quiet Time each day of the week.
SUNDAY
Repeat four times, slowly, deliberately.
I believe God is with me.
I believe God is guiding me.
I believe God is working through my prayers.
THE WILL OF GOD--Nothing more, nothing less, nothing else.
God speaks to men through His word. He will speak to you. Pray for Him to do so before you begin reading. If you are willing to do His will, He will speak.
Think of yourself, of your prayers, as a channel to other people for God's Holy Spirit to do in them what God wants. Practice this--over and over.
Be still, wait--unhurried. LISTEN. Write down what you believe God wants you to do this day. Check over at night.
MONDAY
Bless the Lord O my soul
And all that is within me, bless His holy name.
Do this for three minutes.And all that is within me, bless His holy name.
Be still and know that I am God.
Hint from Dr. Scroggie. Have a simple, practical effective method. Plan your field of meditation. You may elect to meditate, perhaps for a month, upon some of the great texts of the Bible; or you may choose a Psalm, say 23, or you may select John 14, 15, 16, 17, or 1 Corinthians 13 or Hebrews 11. If you plan on a big scale you cannot take verse by verse, and word by word, as you
would on a similar scale. Variety is necessary for the maintenance of interest.
Learn to spend big chunks of time interceding, this day for loved ones and friends.
Give God His say--LISTEN.
We are often afraid of guidance because:--
of what we may need to give up, a change in our way of life,
the need to admit our wrongs,
fear of what men may say or think,
idols we may need to relinquish,
of what we may be shown about ourselves.
These mean failing in real surrender What about it?
TUESDAY
For three minutes THINK AND THANK.
"If anyone is willing to keep on doing God's will, he will, know" John 7:17. (Williams trans.)
Hint by Graham Scroggie. We must have time and the time must be fixed. There should be a quiet place. To derive the fullest benefit from the season of meditation you must close the doors of your mind to everything else. In your study you may prefer, instead of verses and chapters, to take a book, say John's Gospel, or Mark's or Ephesians, or I Peter, and read these over and over, until like rain they saturate your thirsty soul.
Compile prayers, lists. e. g. one for sick folk, one for missionaries, one for the young people of the church, one for your preacher, deacons, Bible school teachers.
Let the lists grow slowly as you are led. Use one or two lists each day, according to size,, you may find it easier to go through them in two or three sessions.
Become still. Listen. Wait.
If God prunes away dead fruit from your life it is that you may bear fruit--fruit that lasts. Get a vision of what Christ may be in your life. Think of what you would do, what you would be like, if Christ has His way with you.
Jesus can make me that person.
I have not thought of a thing beyond His power to accomplish in my life. Don't be paralysed by your fears and failures and sins. Be the person Christ can make you through affirming your faith in His power to do so.
WEDNESDAY
For three minutes--Thank and Thank and THANK. Just for today, think how you can make people happy.
And ye shall call upon Me, and ye shall go and pray unto Me, and I will hearken unto you. AND YE SHALL SEEK ME, AND FIND ME, WHEN YE SHALL SEEK FOR ME WITH ALL YOUR HEART. Jeremiah 29:12, 13.
Hint by Dr. Scroggie. The next attitude is a right attitude of soul. Time and place will be of little avail if the spirit is wrong. There should be stillness within. Stillness, yes, and expectancy. He who expects nothing will get nothing. It is the eager soul that will be made glad. If we will expose all our soul to the Holy Spirit we will have many a thrilling surprise.
Use your prayer list for today. Make no mistake, true intercession is hard work. We must stick at it until we get through to God.
Ask God to show you ways He may use you today. Ask Him to show you blockages which prevent Him using you. WAIT. LISTEN.
THURSDAY
Meditate on this long enough for it to soak in. Rejoice in the Lord always. In nothing be anxious; but in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving (do this, give thanks) let your requests be made known unto God. Philippians 4:4-6.
That I may know Him (Jesus) and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings, becoming conformed unto His death.
Before reading your passage, slowly, deliberately pray:--LORD, show me Thyself in Thy Word.
In our intercession we must pray in faith. Instead of seeing people as they are--see them as Christ can make them, surrendered to Him filled with His Spirit seeking first His Kingdom.
"If I regard iniquity in my heart the Lord will not hear me." Is this why my prayers go for nothing? Is this why I will not truly seek guidance? Will you clear the decks and--LISTEN.
FRIDAY
"All things go on working for the good of those who keep on loving God." Rom. 8:28. (Williams trans.)
Praise Him for blessings.
Praise Him for lessons learned in failures.
Praise Him for fresh beginnings.
Praise Him for all the things which work for our good.
"Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness . . ." Are you? In all things? Be honest before God in this.
Hints by Dr. Scroggie, Concentrate. Be the time long or short, we must be unhurried. Be quiet, concentrate, expect, don't hurry. We don't do this to prepare for an address or lesson, but to nourish and build up one's own soul. "I need Thee O! I need Thee."
Become still before God. Remember, however you may feel, He is with you, Take each person to Him. Do it slowly, deliberately. You may need to go back again and again to affirming the presence of God with you--despite how you feel.
The acid test of our yieldedness to God is--will we wait long enough for Him to speak?
SATURDAY
Give four minutes to praying this into your system: O God, Thou art my God, I seek THEE, I hunger, I thirst for THEE, It is Thee, THEE, THYSELF I want. I love Thee. I praise Thee. I adore Thee.
Let it be JESUS. Seek Him, for Himself. Let your desire be: I would see Jesus.
Before reading your Bible pray:
| "LORD, speak to me that I may speak O lead me, LORD, that I may lead O teach me, Lord, that I may teach O fill me with Thy fulness Lord." |
Intercession is the highest form of Christian service--and as hard as it is high. A thousand things will come to prevent you interceding. When you are resolved to take time to intercede, beware of these:--
worrying around a situation or person.
strain--carrying the person or situation.
striving--praying as though you had to do what only God can do.
discouragement--giving up, the only real failure in prayer. Unbelief in God to do what He says He will.
Be still, no haste, no hurry in the soul, no worry in the mind, no requests. Let God envelop you. Write down any thoughts which may come to you. Practice this, boldly doing what you believe God is guiding you to do--until you unerringly recognise God speaking in your thoughts.
You may make mistakes sometimes--if you are honest you will admit them, recognise the self in them and do not do them again, and trust God to overrule an honest mistake.
THIS IS A MUST.
"Take time to be holy" says the hymn. And we must, sometimes by violence, take the time for this "Quiet time" each day with God. One famous Christian won't have his breakfast until he has been alone with God. Very busy men take time off their sleep. In the morning to get alone with God before their day begins. Resolve on a time, half an hour, an hour is better. Let nothing take it from you. Probably the hardest fight of your Christian life will be to continuehaving your daily "Quiet Time" alone with God.Yet not even a Quiet Time in the morning is enough. Some of us are learning that we need to practice what Dr. Laubach calls the "Game With the Minutes." Throughout the day we are training ourselves to pray "without ceasing." First thing in the morning, getting dressed, washed, ready for work. Throughout the day going to work, any chinks of time when we have nothing special to do, or when on routine jobs, we pray. Pray for the people you meet or work with. Pray for the people on your lists, or whom the Holy Spirit brings to mind. Don't let this become a duty, a task, a chore. Let it be a game, an adventure, something exhilarating. Prayer of any sort used to be an irksome duty, it is now becoming something I want to do, look forward to, find joy and blessing in doing. Get hold of Dr. Laubach's little book, "Prayer, The mightiest force in the world." and practice the fresh and invigorating suggestions he makes for praying. I, who, two or three years ago, thought it impossible at my age to train my mind to grasp at the minutes and use them for prayer, and who let hours and hours of every day go without ever thinking to "flash" prayers up to God, can testify to a revolution in the whole thought life and prayer life of a day. And the way an almost constant stream of negative, or self-sympathetic stream of thinking and reacting is being changed is nothing short of miraculous. If one who is at the stage when one's mind usually becomes "set" and "rigid" can have his whole prayer-thought processes changed, what, will not happen in the minds and lives of young people whose minds
are, so much more flexible and impressionable and responsive? You could help raise up a new generation of praying "giants"--and believe me this world needs just that.
DO THIS TOO.
We are not a generation of Christians greatly noted for "acting in the word" God has spoken to us. (James 1:22). Jesus has told us to get together in twos and threes for prayer, to find that He is present and that things we agree upon are granted us by God. (Matt. 18:19, 20). Why don't you, with some other consecrated Christians, take hold of this promise, and practice it, and stick at it, and work away at it, until you wrest from it its secret of power and God is amazingly answering your prayer prayed in the name of Jesus.In the day when Christians were turning the world upside down and were winning people in amazing thousands to Christ, among other things, prayer was a secret of their success. They knew how to pray and they came together as a church to pray. "And when they had prayed, the place was shaken where they were assembled together; and they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and they spake the word of God with boldness. And with great power gave the apostles witness of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus: and great grace was upon them all." Acts 4:31, 33. They prayed this way before Pentecost, they prayed this way when Peter was thrown into prison, the church at Antioch was at prayer when Barnabas and Saul were sent by the Holy Spirit as the first missionaries, the apostles knew the power of prayer so they declared, "we will give ourselves continually to prayer, and to the ministry of the word." Acts 6:4.
God wants a new generation of praying people, and it looks as if He may need to start with younger Christians who are willing to discover the power that can be released through prayer. Perhaps you, or the young people of your church may determine to give the lead in this.
THE TOUGHEST BATTLE GROUND OF ALL
Most Christians would say that it is hardest to be Christian at home than anywhere else. We can be nice outside but nasty at home, we can be gay with others but gloomy at home, we can be courteous to friends but catty to loved ones, we can save up all our growls for home consumption and all our laughter for outside consumption. Many of us feel that if we really are Christian at home then we are Christian. For us it is harder to be Christian at home than anywhere else.The standard we ought to accept for ourselves at home--and indeed everywhere--is the standard of Jesus. Jesus was absolutely loving, absolutely pure, absolutely unselfish, absolutely honest. Let us make the standard of His life the standard of our lives. We may never get quite there. We may never be able to say at the end of any week or even of any day, "I have been absolutely loving today" or "I have been absolutely unselfish", but we can keep growing towards these standards, and we can increasingly see how far short we are falling--and we can do something about our short comings.
Common faults (are they not sins?) we have are self-sympathy, critical and negative thoughts and words, resentments, all sorts of selfishness, and often assuming or demanding that other people in the home have a right to do certain things for us.
Some people have found that they needed to take the four absolutes and use them to cheek over their lives. If they have been honest and have not dodged they
have been staggered at the numerous ways they are selfish, or dishonest, or unloving. Now it is one thing to discover all the ways one may be impure in thought or word, or dishonest, or unloving, or unselfish; it is another thing to be set free from these things. There is only one way that I know of. It is to take what we are to Jesus.
He breaks the power of cancelled sin. He makes it possible that sin shall not have dominion over us. There is no sin in your life nor mine that Jesus cannot deliver us from. When you and I have temper there, is usually some self, the cause of the temper we will not die to, or there is something we will not call sin and yield to Jesus.
Jesus' formula for getting free from besetting sin is amazingly simple when you are resolute enough and humble enough and honest enough to work it. It is this, "If we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanseth us from all sin." 1 John 1:7. "If we walk in the light as He is in the light." There is no darkness with God, none whatever. There must be none in us. All darkness in us is sin and all sin produces darkness. There are several things which me can do about the sin in our lives. We can refuse to admit it is sin. People for instance won't admit that their shyness or self-consciousness, or their resentment or their prayerlessness is sin. We excuse our shyness by saying it is our temperament to be shy, failing to see the pride and self lying behind shyness. We excuse things like our prayerlessness by saying we are too busy, we haven't time for long praying. We have the time but we give it to less important things. We blame others for our temper, saying they provoke us. We blame the way others have treated us for our resentment or hurt feelings. And in this way we dodge the fact that they are sin.
But if we are humble enough, and honest enough to admit they are sin--and then take them to Jesus for Him to cleanse us of them, "the blood of Jesus Christ cleanseth us from all sin." I know, for I am a sinner who has been set free from the power of sins which I thought would have dominion over me till the day I died. There is however one thing we must do. We must repent of our sins. That means we hate the sin in us as God hates it. Why do men stagnate or die spiritually? Because they cease repenting. Some of us have learnt that we need to go to God throughout the day repenting of the self, and the sin in the self, which all sorts of circumstances and reaction to people bring out in us. Always when we truly repent God gives us a fresh start, we are cleansed from that sin through the blood of Jesus, we walk in the light with God.
Jesus is a victorious Saviour. This is not a lovely theory to be admired or preached upon. It is a fact to be enjoyed by people like us. Jesus is to abide in, us. He lives in us and through us. Sin is the one thing which breaks our relationship of abiding in Jesus. So either we die to the sin that is within us or the sin will kill the life of Christ within us. My choice is that the sin shall die. So, it is Jesus within us that makes us unselfish. We have no love, but Jesus is all love. We shall love if He is abiding in us. We have no trouble with any of the things a Christian ought to be if Jesus has made His home in our hearts through faith. (See Ephesians 3:14-21).
Jesus is declared to be "the Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world" John 1:29. This becomes an actual experience as we actually admit our sin, repent of it, and ask Jesus to cleanse us of it. The big problems in our homes is to be loving, unselfish, to eradicate in ourselves all the things that cause disharmony. We
must not look at the things in others which cause friction or trouble, but at what in ourselves causes friction. The test comes: Will we sincerely look or ask God to show us, what in us causes disharmony, what in us is selfish, what in us is unloving. Will we admit it, will we repent of it, will We ask Jesus to take it from us?
One of the hardest things most of us ever do is to say, "I was wrong, will you forgive me." "I am sorry, it was my fault." Yet if we do repent, if we genuinely want to be free from our share of the disrupting things in our home a real change will always be working, and the love and joy Jesus brings will be filling our homes.
Graduated from the Federal College of the Bible in 1933. After graduating, he served the churches at Blackburn and Prahran, Victoria. then followed three years as Youth Director for our New South Wales churches. On the expiration of that term he served the church at Ann St., Brisbane for a period, and has been with the Dawson St. church, Ballarat, Victoria, for the past eight years.
Provocative Pamphlet, No. 33, September, 1957
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