How They Prayed, Vol. Three: “See What I can do in answer to a praying people!”

However other things have been attended to, the work of calling on the Lord has been my great and chief personal business. During the early part of life, however, though thoroughly given to this exercise, I had no settled arrangement with regard to the number of times for this duty to be attended to each day. But, a good number of years ago, I fixed it as a rule, that I would never pray less than a set number of times, chiefly in private, every day, God being my helper as long as I lived. And though since that resolution was formed, many years of hard labor have passed away, yet this duty has ever been attended to most carefully. But oh, how much to God I owe for His gracious help therein! And, thanks be to Him, I can look back on this with a happy degree of humble gratitude. Of a truth, I can say, I would far rather have it said that Henry Breeden was a man given much to mighty prayer, than that it should be gazetted that he was worth his unnumbered thousands of this world’s wealth.”

The Welsh Revival was a revival, among other things, of prayer. Evan Roberts was mightily used of God in this revival and his biographer says of him: “Now, as the message gripped his soul, he gave himself to prayer as never before; and with the Holy Spirit’s guidance day by day his faith was strengthened. As he worked he prayed, and God came and filled his life. He was very practical, and soon got the secret of ‘praying without ceasing.’ He learned the sweetness of the abiding Christ through prayer, and prayer became a habit in his busy life.”
Many contemporaries of Evan Roberts attempted to discover the reason for the power and effect of that revival and had to attribute it to prayer. Campbell Morgan writes thus:
“In the name of God let us cease trying to find it! At least let us cease trying to trace it to any one man or convention. You cannot trace it. And yet I will trace it tonight. Whence has it come? All over Wales―I am giving you roughly the result of the questioning of fifty or more persons at random in the week―a praying remnant has been agonizing before God about the state of this beloved land, and it is through prayer the answer of fire has come.
“You tell me that the revival originates with Evan Roberts. I tell you that Roberts is a product of the revival. You tell me that it began in an Endeavor meeting where a young girl bore testimony. I tell you that was the result of a revival breaking out everywhere. . . . It is a Divine visitation in which God―let me say this reverently―in which God is saying to us: ‘See what I can do without the things you are depending on; see what I can do in answer to a praying people; see what I can do through the simplest, who are ready to fall in line, and depend wholly and absolutely upon Me.’

These quotations have been taken from How They Prayed Volume Three which is published by Harvey Christian Publishers and is available in their Online Christian Bookstore.