Michael Haykin on Benjamin Francis Part 3

See here

Part III. Benjamin Francis and prayer

In the archives of Bristol Baptist College there is an unpublished manuscript that records a precious friendship. It was between Benjamin Francis, whose ministry we have been exploring in Parts 1 and 2, and fellow Welshman Joshua Thomas (1719-1797), who was pastor of the Baptist cause in Leominster for forty-three years.

The manuscript is actually a transcript, drawn up by Thomas, of letters that passed between them from 1758 to 1770.

Questions and answers

The practice of Francis and Thomas appears to have been for one of them to mail two or three queries periodically to the other. Then, some months later, the recipient mailed back his answers, together with fresh questions of his own.

The recipient made comments on these replies, the new questions were answered, and both comments and answers were despatched along with new queries, and so on. All in all, there are sixty-eight questions and answers in two volumes – fifty-eight in the first volume, the remaining ten in Volume II.

Only once during the years from 1758 to 1770 was there a noticeable gap in correspondence. That was in 1765 when Francis lost his wife and his three youngest children.

It is noteworthy that at the beginning of the correspondence the two friends sign their letters simply with their names or initials. However, as time passes, their mutual confidence and intimacy deepens, and they begin to write ‘yours endearingly’ or ‘yours unfeignedly’ (even ‘yours indefatigably’ or ‘yours inexpressibly’!).

It was in October 1762 that Thomas first signed himself ‘your cordial Brother Jonathan’ and, in the following February, Francis replied with ‘your most affectionate David’. From this point on this is how the two friends refer to each other.

Instructive

The questions and their answers are extremely instructive, revealing the areas of theological interest among mid-18thcentury Calvinists. For instance, the question is asked: ‘When may a Minister conclude that he is influenced and assisted by the Spirit of God in studying and ministring [sic]the word?’ (Query 5).

Queries are raised about the eternal state of dead infants (Query 17, 22); how best to understand the remarks in Revelation 20 about the millennium (Query 18); and whether or not inoculation against smallpox, the dreaded killer of the 18thcentury, was right or wrong (Query 45).

A good number of the queries relate to what we would call ‘spirituality’. In 1763, for example, Francis asked Thomas: ‘Is private fasting a moral or ceremonial Duty? and consequently is it a duty under the gospel?’ (Query 43).

When Thomas sent his response, one of his questions in return was: ‘What are the best means of revival, when a person is flat and dead in his soul?’ (Query 47).

Other similar questions were asked: ‘How often should a Christian pray?’ (Query 44, by Francis); ‘When may a Christian be said to be lively and active in his Soul?’ (Query 48, by Francis); ‘Wherein doth communion and fellowship with God consist?’ (Query 55, by Thomas).

Let us look more closely at the questions and answers that relate to prayer.

Teach me to pray!

‘How often should a Christian pray?’ To this very vital question posed by Francis, Thomas has an extensive answer.

He deals first with what he calls the ‘ejaculatory kind’ of prayer – prayers that arise spontaneously during the course of a day’s activities. He then considers prayers offered during times set apart specifically for prayer (what a later generation of Evangelicals would call ‘the quiet time’).

Addressing his friend as ‘my Jona-than’ (a reference to the bond of fellowship between the Old Testament figures David and Jona-than), Francis confesses:

‘I wish all our Brethren of the Tribe of Levi were so free from lukewarmness, on the one hand, and enthusiasm, formality and superstition on the other, as my Jonathan appears to be.

‘I am too barren in all my Prayers, but I think mostly so in Closet prayer (except at some seasons) which tempts me in some measure to prefer a more constant ejaculatory Prayer above a more statedly Closet prayer, tho I am persuaded neither should be neglected.

‘Ejaculatory prayer is generally warm, free, and pure, tho short: but I find Closet prayer to be often cold, stiff or artificiall [sic], as it were, and mixt [sic] with strange impertinences & wandrings [sic] of heart.

‘Lord teach me to pray! O that I could perform the Duty always, as a duty and a privilege and not as a Task and a Burden!’

Smoke on a windy day

In another of Francis’ comments we find the same honesty and humility: ‘How languid my faith, my hope, my love! how cold and formal am I in secret Devotions!’ (Remarks on Thomas’ answer to Query 48).

These remarks surely stem from deep-seated convictions about the importance of prayer. Francis would undoubtedly have agreed with Thomas that a believer’s ‘Great and chief delight, his meat & drinke [sic], the life of his life’ is his ‘closet prayer and communion with God’ (Query 48).

Francis’ frank remarks also arise from his belief that because the Lord had led him to Christ at a very young age – and, in his words, ‘overwhelmed me with Joy by a sense of his Love’ – he should be more eager to pray out of a sense of gratitude.

Instead, he confessed, ‘A stupid, indolent, sensual or legal Temper sadly clog the Wings of my Prayers’ (Remarks on Queries 7-8, Volume II).

Thomas sought to encourage Francis by reminding him that ‘closet prayer [is like] the smoke on a windy day. When it is very calm the smoke will ascend and resemble an erect pillar, but when windy, as soon as it is out it is scattered to and fro, sometimes ’tis beaten down the chimney again and fills the house.

‘Shall I not thus give over? Satan would have it so, and flesh would have it so, but I should be more earnest in it.’

Francis sought to pray to God twice daily, but confessed that he had difficulty in following the discipline of a set time for prayer because he was away from home much of the time.

He also admitted that he had taken up ‘an unhappy Habit of Sleeping in the Morning much longer’ than he should. And this cut into valuable time for prayer. He did not try to excuse such failings.

How much has changed since Francis’ day – and yet how much remains the same! We have the same struggle with sin and poor habits that hinder our praying and devotion.

Answered prayers

In 1767 Thomas asked: ‘How may one know whether his Prayers are answered or not?’ (Query 2, Volume II). Thomas gives six brief answers:

‘By the removal of the evil pray’d against, or the reception and enjoyment of the good pray’d for.

‘By the peculiar and extraordinary circumstances that may attend the removal of the evil or the reception of the good: as the success of Abraham’s servant etc.

‘When one does not receive the Blessing pray’d for, but receives another, perhaps not thought of by him, yet more seasonable, needful and useful.

‘When he is assisted by the Spirit to pray, to pray in Faith, and to wrestle with God. His Prayer will then be answered, whether he perceives it or no, or whether he lives to see it or no, yea tho’ he does not receive the particular good he prays for.

‘When God meets, that is, revives and relieves him in prayer, that is a speedy way in which God answers the Prayer of his People. “I will not remove thy sore affliction, Paul, tho thou hast intreated me thrice; but my grace shall be sufficient for thee to bear it”. Thus God sometimes answers a Prayer with a Promise, but not the immediate Blessing.

‘In general one may conclude that God answers his Prayers, when he is made more Holy and resigned to the will of God, and enabled to persevere in all the Duties of Religion, and to rejoice in the God of his salvation.’

Fervent prayers

The last of these six answers is especially important. It displays the mature realisation that four of the most important things for which we can pray are: (1) growth in holiness; (2) unreserved commitment to God’s sovereign will over one’s life; (3) perseverance; and (4) a heart of joy in God.

When Francis died in 1799, it is noteworthy that what his close friends remembered most, in regard to his devotion, were his ‘fervent prayers’. Given what has been noted above, this would have surprised Francis, who felt his prayer life to be so full of faults and failings. This surely indicates that often a man is not the best judge of his spiritual strengths and weaknesses.

Michael Haykin on Benjamin Francis Part 2

See here

Part II: Loving Christ

As mentioned in the first part of this three-part article on Benjamin Francis, it is disappointing that none of his sermons have survived. Describing his preaching, his son-in-law Thomas Flint (d.1819) emphasised two things: Francis was always firm in expressing his doctrinal convictions but was also a compassionate preacher, who often wept openly for his hearers.

Possibly the closest we get to hearing what some of his contemporaries termed his ‘melodious voice’ is in the circular letters he drew up for the Western Association of Calvinistic Baptist Churches.

Baptist associations

Associations of churches in geographical areas had been a feature of Calvinistic Baptist life since the denomination began in the mid-seventeenth century. By the last half of the eighteenth century these associations were in the habit of holding annual meetings that usually lasted for two or three days.

At these meetings, representatives of the various churches (usually the pastor and one or two elders) would meet for times of corporate prayer and fellowship. And there would also be occasions for the public preaching of the Scriptures.

A poem that Francis penned, entitled ‘The Association’, sought to capture the ideals that informed these yearly gatherings.

Thee, bless’d assembly! emblem of the throng

That praise the Lamb in one harmonious song

On Zion’s hills where joys celestial flow,

The countless throng redeem’d from sin and woe;

Thee, bless’d assembly, have I oft survey’d,

With sweet complacence, charmingly array’d

In robes of truth, of sanctity and love,

Resembling saints and seraphim above…

The sacred page thy only rule and guide,

‘Thus saith the Lord,’ shall thy debates decide;

While charity wide spreads her balmy wings

O’er different notions, in indifferent things,

And graceful order, walking hand in hand

With cheerful freedom, leads her willing band …

In thee, the guardians of the churches’ weal,

Whose bosoms glow with unabating zeal,

With balmy counsel their disorders heal,

And truth and love and purity promote

Among the sheep, Immanuel’s blood has bought.

In thee, impartial discipline maintains

Harmonious order, but aloud disclaims

All human force to rule the human mind,

Impose opinions and the conscience bind.

Circular letters

No doubt this gives an idealistic picture of these annual meetings, yet it shows us what one eighteenth-century Baptist saw as the ethos of these assemblies.

For Francis, they were times when wise advice could be sought and given; when God’s people could be free to discuss, in love and without bitterness, non-essential issues on which they disagreed; and when the sole binding force on the conscience was Scripture alone.

Most importantly, Francis saw in these gatherings a visible symbol – in his words, an ’emblem’ – of the unity and joy that would fill believers when they were in heaven, worshipping Christ the Lamb.

Each of the churches in the association was supposed to send a letter to the annual meeting informing their sister congregations of their spiritual condition, newsworthy items and prayer concerns.

Also, at some point during the meeting, one of the pastors would be chosen to write a letter to all the churches in the association on behalf of the association itself. He may actually have been chosen before the annual meeting, giving him time to ponder what he wanted to say on behalf of the association.

The letter would be read to the delegates, ratified, and then printed and sent out as a circular letter after the meeting.

Genuine faith

The Western Association, which had existed since 1653, gave Francis the privilege of writing this letter no less than five times – in 1765, 1772, 1778, 1782 and 1796. In these letters Francis touches on a number of themes.

He speaks, for instance, of the challenges of poverty and affluence among his readers. He mentions the danger of dead orthodoxy and discusses the nature of genuine faith. He presses home the need for a Christianity in which the heart is vitally engaged.

He treats of the various disciplines of the Christian life. And he seeks to nurture a concern for unity in the churches to which he is writing.

But there is one theme that comes up again and again: the beauty of Christ and the passion that should be ours in serving him. In the final analysis, it was this passion for Christ and his glory that underlay all the evangelistic and pastoral labours of Benjamin Francis, mentioned in Part I.

Live daily on Christ

In the circular letter of 1772, for example, Francis addresses those of his readers ‘who are sickly and feeble in the spiritual life’ and who have become ‘almost strangers to closet devotion, deep contrition for sin, earnest wrestling with the Lord in prayer, heavenly affections, and sensible communion with God’.

He encourages them to ask themselves these sobering questions: ‘Will you call this the religion of Jesus? Is this the fruit of his love and crucifixion?’

Without a ‘living faith in Jesus Christ’, Francis reminds his readers, ‘our orthodox notions’, church attendance, and outward morality will ultimately avail for nothing.

Consequently he urges upon his readers their need for ‘a spiritual sight of the awful perfections of God, of the adorable glories of Christ, and of the ineffable excellency of divine and eternal things’.

They also need to beware of resting their salvation on their performance as Christians and their faithful attendance on ordinances. ‘Constantly rest in Christ alone’, says Francis, making use of one of the central watchwords of the Reformation, solus Christus, Christ alone.

He encourages his readers to ‘look for every blessing … in and thro’ [Christ,] the infinitely prevalent Mediator’. Building on this exhortation, Francis urges his readers to ‘live daily on Christ as your spiritual food, and seek hourly communion with him as the beloved of your souls’.

Spirituality for all

It should not be forgotten that all of this counsel was being given to men and women who were farmers, labourers, shopkeepers, croppers and weavers; people who spent much of their time simply ‘getting by’.

Yet Francis rightly believed that such were capable of living out their daily lives as ‘the sincere disciples and intimate friends of Jesus’.

In other words, his advice was not for a select few who had leisure to spend in spiritual pursuits. It was advice for men and for women who had much to occupy their time. But such was the glory of eighteenth-century Evangelicalism – the spirituality that was promoted in its ranks was for all.

An inexhaustible fountain

The 1778 circular letter, which is mostly concerned with the nature of genuine faith, has a similar emphasis. In a section that deals with the differences between assurance and faith, Francis exhorts his readers:

‘Place then your entire confidence in Christ for the whole of salvation: let the declarations and promises of the gospel be your only warrant for believing in him: and consider your purest principles, happiest frames, and holiest duties, not as the foundation, but the superstructure of faith.

‘Let not your sweetest experiences, which are at best but shallow cisterns, but Christ alone, be the source of your comfort, and constantly live upon that inexhaustible fountain.’

For the believer, Christ alone is the source of salvation and he alone gives the strength for the Christian life. The final sentence alludes, of course, to Jeremiah 2:13. There, the Lord rebukes his people for forsaking him, ‘the fountain of living waters’, and living instead on the water drawn from ‘broken cisterns’ of their own devising.

Inspired, no doubt, by such New Testament passages as John 4:10-13 and 7:37, where Christ states that he is the source of ‘living water’ that quenches spiritual thirst, Francis identifies the ‘fountain’ of Jeremiah 2 as Christ.

Ardent love

Francis’ Christ-centred spirituality continued to the end of his life. In a letter written on 6 November 1798, only a year or so before his death, he declares:

‘O that every sacrifice I offer were consumed with the fire of ardent love to Jesus. Reading, praying, studying and preaching are to me very cold exercises, if not warmed with the love of Christ.

‘This, this is the quintessence of holiness, of happiness, of heaven. While many professors desire to know that Christ loves them, may it ever be my desire to know that I love him, by feeling his love mortifying in me the love of self, animating my whole soul to serve him, and, if called by his providence, to suffer even death for his sake.’

Michael Haykin on Benjamin Francis Part 1

This is from Evangelical Times and can be found here.

Part I: The irrepressible evangelist

Benjamin Francis was the youngest son of Enoch Francis (1688-1740), one of the most respected Welsh Baptist ministers of his day and an extremely gifted evangelist. But Francis hardly knew his father, for he was orphaned at the age of six.

God may well have used his father’s death to draw him to Christ, for Francis was later convinced that he experienced God’s saving grace when he was but a boy. When he was fifteen he was baptised at Swansea. Four years later he began to preach.

Study at Bristol

He soon became conscious of a need for further training. Far too many Baptists of that era scorned theological education, calling it going ‘down to Egypt’ for help. The young Francis, though, believed differently.

He went to the Bristol Baptist Academy, the only Baptist ministerial school in that day. There he found a vibrant evangelical Calvinism yoked to ardent evangelism. Francis’ studies at Bristol ran from 1753 to 1756.

When he first arrived, his knowledge of English was so slight that he could not even give thanks for his food in the language. Bernard Foskett (1685-1758), the principal of the academy, was convinced that Francis should be sent back to Wales because of the language barrier.

However, the tutor at the school, Hugh Evans (1713-1781), who was himself a Welshman and had been converted under the preaching of Enoch Francis, spoke up for Benjamin and persuaded Foskett to let him stay. Eventually Francis obtained a good enough knowledge of his adopted tongue to preach in English with the same ease as in Welsh.

It was this experience that underlay advice he gave to a nephew many years later in 1796: ‘Be sure to learn the English Grammar, and always endeavour to speak and to write grammatically. Early and constant practice will render speaking, writing, and spelling correctly, easy and familiar to you’.

Trials in ministry

After his graduation, Francis spent a brief period preaching at the Calvinistic Baptist work in Chipping Sodbury, Gloucestershire. Eventually, in 1757, he moved to Horsley, where he was ordained the following year.

He was twenty-four years of age. The church consisted of 66 members. Most of them were poor artisans and cloth-workers who were unable to provide financially for his support.

Francis would later describe the financial circumstances of most of the congregation as ‘extremely indigent’. Not long before his death, he remarked that his congregation was for the most part ‘poor, plain, and have not had the advantage of literature’.

He had no alternative but to find other means of monetary support. He reared pigs, grew his own vegetables and fruit, ran a school (like many other Baptist ministers of the day), and even tried his hand at business. The latter, unfortunately, was a complete failure.

Domestic sorrow

Along with these financial problems, Francis also went through a long series of domestic trials. His first wife and three of their children all died within the space of three months in 1765.

He was married again a year later, to Abigail Wallis. They had ten children, of whom they buried seven! Francis, though, drew much comfort from the genuine piety that a number of his children exhibited as they were dying.

For example, Hester, one of the children from his second marriage, was dying at the age of eleven in August 1790. She said to her mother: ‘My soul is as full of joy as it can contain — the Lord is become my salvation — the gates of heaven are open to me, and I shall soon be there’.

Her parting words to her father were: ‘I love you, but I love Christ more’.

These were deep trials, which could have easily embittered Francis or plunged him into melancholy. By God’s grace, however, he remained joyful in the midst of his sorrows.

Horsley

An evident witness to this joy was his irrepressible evangelism. We are told that he delighted in ‘telling poor sinners the unsearch-able riches of his compassionate Redeemer’.

During his time at Horsley, Francis had the privilege of baptising nearly 450 persons who had been converted through his ministry. At the time of his death the number of members in the church had risen to 252.

The meeting-house had to be enlarged three times during his ministry, so that by the early nineteenth century the church was one of the largest in the British Calvinistic Baptist community.

It is noteworthy that Francis attributed much of the success that attended his preaching to the church’s Sunday prayer meetings, held at six o’clock in the morning and before the afternoon service.

Fifty or sixty would come to the Sunday morning prayer meeting, while at the afternoon prayer meeting, the vestry would literally overflow with people.

Indefatigable

It is also noteworthy that his indefatigable preaching and evangelism were not limited to Horsley. His son-in-law, Thomas Flint (d.1819), drew up a biographical sketch of Francis within a few weeks of his death in December 1799.

In it he details some of Francis’ itinerant ministry. To grasp its extent one needs to trace his preaching circuit on a contemporary map and remember that in the eighteenth century travel to a town but twenty miles away was a significant undertaking.

Flint wrote: ‘He was the first means of introducing evangelical religion into many dark towns and villages in all the neighbourhood round [Horsley]. For many years he made excursions monthly into the most uninstructed parts of Gloucestershire, Worcestershire and Wiltshire; besides visiting his brethren, and strengthening their hands in God.

‘In the course of his route through Worcestershire, which he regularly attended from about 1772 to 1784, it appears he had preached in Cheltenham 130 Sermons, at Tewkesbury 136, at Pershore 137, and at Upton upon Severn 180.’

Extensive labours

Flint’s narrative continues: ‘His manner was to set out from home on Monday morning, and return on Friday evening, after taking a circuit of 90 miles, and preaching every evening. In Wiltshire, on the other side of Horsley, he established a monthly lecture at Malmesbury which he supplied from 1771 to 1799, so that he preached there 282 sermons, and for the latter part of the time he reached as far as Christian-Malford where he had preached 84 Sermons.

‘He extended his journey frequently as far as Devizes, 30 miles from home, where he preached 56 times, and oftener to Melksham, Frome, Trowbridge, and Bradford, at each of which four places he had preached 90 Sermons.

‘At Wotton-under-edge, seven miles from Horsley, he kept up a monthly lecture for thirty years and preached there 394 times. At Uley, five miles distant, he maintained another stated lecture for many years, and had preached 350 Sermons there.’

In addition to these extensive labours, he regularly preached in places as far away as London and Dublin, Portsmouth and Plymouth, and undertook repeated preaching tours of his native Wales.

His preaching

When it comes to Francis’ literary remains, we do have some poems that he wrote and a number of elegies. Subjects of the latter included John Gill, the doyen of eighteenth-century Calvinistic Baptist theology, George Whitefield (1714-1770), the great evangelist, and the ‘seraphic’ Samuel Pearce (1766-1799).

There is also a two-volume collection of his hymns in Welsh, entitled Aleluia. Only a few of these hymns have been translated into English. But it is disappointing that given his extensive preaching, not one of his sermons appears to have been preserved.

When Thomas Flint came to describe his preaching, he emphasized that Francis was always concerned ‘to declare the whole counsel of God’, even when he preached for other denominational bodies. While he was firm in expressing his doctrinal convictions, he was also a compassionate preacher, one who often wept openly for his hearers.

Possibly the closest we get to hearing the tone of his preaching are in circular letters he wrote for the ‘Western Association’, the Baptist Association to which his church belonged. Next month, we shall look at some of the themes of those letters.

Haykin on Learning to pray

In the keeping of Leominster Baptist Church, Herefordshire, there’s an unpublished manuscript that records a precious friendship of two men: Joshua Thomas (1719-1797), who for 43 years was the pastor of this church; and his fellow Welshman, Benjamin Francis (1734–1799), the pastor of 42 years at the Baptist work in Horsley, Gloucestershire. The manuscript is actually a transcript, drawn up by Thomas, of letters that passed between the men from 1758 to 1770.

Francis and Thomas would mail two or three questions periodically to the other. Then, some months later, the recipient would mail back his answers, together with fresh questions of his own. These answers were commented on, new questions were answered, and both the comments and answers were mailed back along with new queries—so on and so forth. All in all, there remain 68 questions and answers in two volumes. The manuscript is entitled “Queries and Solutions of Joshua Thomas and Benjamin Francis of Horsley 1758-70, being the answers of one to questions posed by the other on matters of theology, church government, preaching.”

The questions and answers are extremely instructive as to the areas of personal theological interest among these mid-eighteenth century Calvinists. In fact, a good number of the queries relate to what we would call “spirituality” and some to prayer, which I will focus on below.

 

LORD, TEACH ME TO PRAY!

“How often should a Christian pray?” To this vital question posed by Francis, Thomas has an extensive answer. He considers prayers that arise spontaneously during the course of a day’s activities—and then “closet prayers” offered during times set apart, what our later generation of evangelicals often calls “the quiet time.” In response to Thomas, Francis confesses to his friend:

I am too barren in all my prayers, but I think mostly so in closet prayer (except at some seasons) which tempts me in some measure to prefer a more constant spontaneous prayer above a more statedly closet prayer, though I am persuaded neither should be neglected. Spontaneous prayer is generally warm, free, and pure, tho short: but I find closet prayer to be often cold, stiff, or artificial, as it were, and mixed with strange impertinences & wanderings of heart. Lord teach me to pray! O that I could perform the duty always, as a duty and a privilege & not as a task and a burden!

In another of Francis’ comments we find the same honesty and humility: “How languid my faith, my hope, my love! how cold and formal am I in secret devotions!” These remarks surely stem from deep-seated convictions that both of these men had about the vital importance of prayer. As Thomas remarked: “[The] great and chief delight, his meat & drink, the life of his life” is his “closet prayer and communion with God.”

Francis’ frank remarks also have their root in the belief that because the Lord had led him to seek Christ at a very young age he should be more eager to pray out of a sense of gratitude. But he confessed:

The more spiritual, divine & disinterested any duty is, the more opposition there is in sinful nature to it. I have sometimes wondered at the opposition, or at least disinclination I find in my wicked heart too often unto prayer, as if it were to perform some very painful service, and also at the vile excuses that offer me their enchanting couch to rest myself upon. I can follow you and even outstrip you in all your complaints; only that my negligence in this solemn duty may be much more appreciated than any in you, since the Lord, I hope at least, inclined me to seek him very young, & overwhelmed me with Joy by a sense of his Love. . . . It is but comparatively seldom that I am enabled to pour forth my whole soul to God in prayer according to my desire. A stupid, indolent, sensual or legal temper sadly clogs the wings of my prayers. . . . True prayer has humility, faith and love for its ingredients, and it is for want of having these graces in their lively exercises that I pray not more frequently, more fervently.

Thomas sought to encourage Francis by reminding him that

closet prayer [is like] the smoke on a windy day. When it is very calm the smoke will ascend and resemble an erect pillar, but when windy, as soon as it is out it is scattered to and fro, sometimes ’tis beaten down the chimney again and fills the house. Shall I not thus give over? Satan would have it so, and flesh would have it so, but I should be more earnest in it.

Francis sought to pray to God twice daily, but he confessed that his difficulties with following a discipline of a set time for prayer stemmed from his being away from his home on itinerant preaching journeys. He also admitted that he had taken up “an unhappy habit of sleeping in the morning much longer” than he should have. And this cut into valuable time for prayer. He did not try to excuse such failings.

How much has changed since Francis’ day—and yet how much remains the same: the same struggle with sin and poor habits that hinder our praying and devotion!

 

ANSWERED PRAYERS

In 1767, Thomas asked of his friend, “How may one know whether his Prayers are answered or not?” Francis has six brief answers:

1. By the removal of the evil prayed against, or the reception and enjoyment of the good prayed for.
2. By the peculiar and extraordinary circumstances that may attend the removal of the evil or the reception of the good: as the success of Abraham’s servant etc.
3. When one does not receive the blessing prayed for, but receives another, perhaps not thought of by him, yet more seasonable, needful & useful.
4. When he is assisted by the Spirit to pray, to pray in faith, and to wrestle with God. His prayer will then be answered, whether he perceives it or not, or whether he lives to see it or not, yea though he does not receive the particular good he prays for.
5. When God meets, that is, revives and relieves him in prayer, that is a speedy way in which God answers the prayer of his people. “I will not remove thy sore affliction, Paul, though thou hast entreated me thrice; but my grace shall be sufficient for thee to bear it.” Thus God sometimes answers a prayer with a promise, but not the immediate blessing.
6. In general one may conclude that God answers his prayers, when he is made more holy and resigned to the will of God, and enabled to persevere in all the duties of religion, and to rejoice in the God of his salvation.

The last of these six answers is especially important. It displays the mature realization that four of the most important things for which we could pray are: (1) growth in holiness; (2) unreserved commitment to God’s sovereign will over one’s life; (3) perseverance; and (4) a heart of joy in God.

When Francis died in 1799, it is noteworthy that what was remembered by his close friends in regard to his devotion were his “fervent prayers.” He would have been surprised!