By prayer let us wrestle: encouragements from the Welsh Methodists

I don’t know about you, but I’m always awed to hear of great pray-ers in times past who clearly devoted so much of their lives to prayer. They rose early to pray. Every waking moment seemingly was spent communing with the Lord their God. Dafydd Cadwaladr (1752-1834), a preacher in the Welsh Methodist revival, popped outside to pray for a few minutes one evening whilst his dinner was in the oven and accidentally spent the whole night in prayer. By the time he realised, dawn was breaking and he was locked out! I mean, come on, how do you manage that?

Throughout the history of the church, great revivals of the Holy Spirit have come as a result of the prayers of humble saints on their knees pouring their hearts out to their Father. If you’re anything like me, then you feel awed and spurred on to prayer yourself by their examples. But you can’t help feeling a bit discouraged and not a little guilty too. These great Christians and the feats they achieved seem so unattainable. To be honest, I’m more encouraged by the example of the Welsh Methodist ‘exhorter’ Thomas Foulkes (1731-1802). It was said that he was ‘not eminently gifted, but he was warm of spirit and persevered in prayer’.

In the Welsh Calvinistic Methodist revivals of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the Lord worked powerfully in answer to the prayers of his people. It is said that the prayer meeting is the powerhouse of the church. With this in mind, here are three encouragements for us as believers to wrestle in prayer.

Perseverance in prayer

We may not all feel like prayer warriors, but we can all persevere in prayer just a little longer. Apart from the odd guilt trip, we are far too easy on ourselves. We should pray until we really pray.

Jacob is the classic example of wrestling in prayer:

But Jacob said, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.” And he said to him, “What is your name?” And he said, “Jacob.”  Then he said, “Your name shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with men, and have prevailed.”

Genesis 32:26-28

I’m always encouraged by the parable of the unjust judge that Jesus told his disciples so ‘that they should always pray and never give up’ (Luke 18:1 NLT). ‘Will not God give justice to his elect, who cry to him day and night?’ (Luke 18:7).

Do we wrestle in prayer crying ‘to him day and night’? When was the last time we set aside more than five minutes specifically to pray? Do we keep up a conversation with the Lord throughout the day’s activities?

We’re told to ‘pray without ceasing’ (1 Thessalonians 5:17), but prayerlessness is a sin that is sadly rampant amongst believers in our day.

Weaver-cum-preacher Robert Dafydd (1747-1834) was an old Simeon-type figure (Luke 2:25-26). As his life neared its end, he prayed every day over a two-year period that he would live to see one more revival. In prayer, he would ‘name all the farms and [cottages,] calling on God to save those who dwelt in them’.

God answers his prayers marvellously and in 1831-32 revival came to north Wales. 140 people were converted and added to the church in his town of Brynengan. But Dafydd wasn’t finished there, he prayed incessantly again: ‘O Lord! Let me live another year that I might raise these children.’ And so God gave him ‘not one year, but two’.

One friend of the Welsh Methodists was John Newton (1725-1807), the slave trader-turned-preacher who wrote the hymn ‘Begone unbelief’ from which the line ‘by prayer let me wrestle’ comes. Newton declared that:

They that live much in prayer may be said to live much with God.

He goes on:

Prayer is the ordinance in which we have most immediate access to God. It is the most spiritual part of worship, which is the reason why our carnal hearts are most averse to it […]
We find many ready enough to talk with Christians, or to hear sermons, who know but little of waiting upon God in secret […] In prayer, if spiritually performed, we turn our backs upon creatures, and call home our thoughts to fix them immediate upon God in Christ, as seated on his throne of glory.

Togetherness in prayer

When Christians meet together we like to talk about the football, we talk about the weather (if we’re British). We moan about the state of the country. On a good day, we might even talk about a theological topic of interest or discuss the problem with the church today. But we rarely, except perhaps in formal church contexts, pray together.

The devil knows that things happen when ‘two or three gather in [Jesus’] name’ (Matthew 18:20 NIV) or when ‘if two of you on earth agree about anything they ask for, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven’ (Matthew 18:19 NIV). There’s power in prayer, it has an inseparable connection with revival. So our enemy does his utmost to stop it. And his plan is kind of working…

Thomas Charles of Bala (1755-1814) is one of the greatest Welshmen ever to have lived. Famously, he was the one who gave fifteen-year-old Mary Jones (1784-1864) a Bible after she had walked twenty-eight miles barefoot to Bala. He was instrumental in the Welsh Sunday school movement and in the distribution of Welsh Bibles and Evangelical literature. But he would never have gotten anywhere were it not for the friendship of a poor old man who lived nearby when he was a boy. Together they would talk about spiritual things and pray. Charles never forgot him as long as he lived and attributed much to the prayers of his old friend, who lived just long enough to witness Charles’ first sermon about a month before he died.

During his studies at Oxford, Thomas Charles was blessed to meet with other young men serious about their faith. Instead ‘of wasting their leisure hours with vanities, as most of their contemporaries did, they held meetings for prayer and for Bible study’.

Later in Thomas Charles’ life, a remarkable answer to prayer came about when he was ill with gangrene in his thumb and was expected to die. His church gathered together to pray for him. One bold old man prayed repeatedly that, like Hezekiah, Charles might be given to them for another fifteen years. And all felt an assurance that God had heard this prayer. Thomas Charles ‘improved from that day [and] lived exactly fifteen more years, […] the most fruitful of his life’. Things happen when Christians pray together!

No man is an island, let alone a Christian. ‘Iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another’ (Proverbs 27:17). For the Methodists of the revival, family prayer would be ‘the main event of the day’. Wherever they were, whoever was there, they would pray. They prayed about everything, big or small: for revival, for God’s glory, for day-to-day divine protection, for Thomas Charles’ thumb!

One particularly powerful preacher, John Elias (1774-1841) encouraged every household to pray together during family worship each evening at nine o’clock on the dot. As time went on his reputation would proceed him and, if he was in town, people would flock to where he was staying, even just to catch a word from outside the window. More often than not they would all be in floods of tears as he lead them in prayer. We could do a lot worse than take a leaf out of their book and get praying together!

Heartiness in prayer

Christians can have a tendency to turn prayer to God into an exercise of ticking items off a shopping list. But prayer is so much more. William Howells (1778-1832), another Welshman, speaks instead of ‘the divine privilege of believers’; by faith, we are able ‘to enjoy an [exalted and miraculous] fellowship’ with the pure, holy and almighty God. He described the Christian’s ‘greatest pleasure’ to be ‘deep in communion with his God’.

This was the secret of what was known as the old ‘Welsh fire’: bold, heartfelt, worshipful communion with their heavenly Father. ‘When crossing the lonely Welsh hills, in that deep silence, far from the busyness and noise of the world, without anything to distract them’, the travelling Methodist preachers were inspired to deep meditation and prayer. Very few of them had the benefit of a university education or access to good books, but they tapped into something far greater (1 Corinthians 1:26-31). Is it any wonder their preaching was so powerfully accompanied by the ‘unction of the Holy Spirit’?

John Newton says:

Fine words and phrases, some people abound in; but true prayer is the genuine language of the heart, which the Lord understands and accepts, however brokenly expressed.

He points to some examples from the Bible to illustrate his point:

The woman of Canaan only said, “Lord, help me!” The publican’s prayer was almost as short, “God be merciful to me a sinner”; and both were heard.

The Methodists of that time were simple people, many of them were illiterate, their prayers were simple but hearty. They made the most of the direct access to ‘the throne of grace’ all Christians have by right of our ‘great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God’ (Hebrews 4:14-16).

One of my favourite quotations on heartiness in prayer is from the Puritan Thomas Brooks (1608-1680), who writes:

God looks not at the elegancy of your prayers, to see how neat they are; nor yet at the geometry of your prayers, to see how long they are; nor yet at the arithmetic of your prayers, to see how many they are; nor yet at the music of your prayers, nor yet at the sweetness of your voice, nor yet at the logic of your prayers; but at the sincerity of your prayers, how hearty they are.

‘His is the work of maintaining the flame’

The apostle James writes, ‘You do not have, because you do not ask’ (James 4:2). But these words are followed next by ‘You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly’ (James 4:3).

Both of these things are simple, yet both are quite hard. We have to set aside time for prayer and we must pray according to God’s revealed will in scripture. But we can’t do this alone, we need each other, but most importantly we need ‘the Spirit himself [who] intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express’ (Romans 8:26 NIV 1984).

Let’s pray for the fire to burn in our hearts and let’s humble ourselves before God confessing our prayerlessness and recognising our utter dependence on Him. He will build his church and He will use our prayers to do it.

Ebenezer Morris (1769-1825) was a powerful ‘pulpit-ful of a preacher’ in more ways than one. He wore his trademark black cap wherever he went, usually travelling around with his best mate Owen Enos. One winter as they journeyed together in the cold on a rough road, Morris was tired and feeling depressed. Owen tried unsuccessfully to crack a few jokes to lighten the mood. ‘You are just telling funny stories, Owen, while I am near to death’, complained Morris.

‘Please, Mr Morris annwyl‘, replied Owen. ‘Don’t die here or there will be awful difficulty in carrying you home to be buried. I will have more trouble with you, because you are so fat, than with a basket of herring!’ That did the trick for the downcast preacher and he felt himself again.

Years later, when Ebenezer Morris was near death, some were worried that with his passing the fire would dissipate. His response was emphatic, drawing on the imagery of the One who walks amidst the lampstands (Revelation 1:13):

‘Ho! If that is what worries you, tell the Minister of the Sanctuary. It is he who guards the sacred flame, and he alone lights up the lamps for the sanctuary. It is not learning nor talent that can light up a lamp for the sanctuary.’

He then gave a mighty shout:

‘Our great High Priest! Let him come again to light the lamps! His is the work of maintaining the flame!

Christians in our day of small things need to take up again this cry. For revival, for the name of the Lord Jesus Christ to be exalted once more across Britain and amongst the nations (Psalm 72:19). The Puritan Nathaniel Vincent (c. 1639-1697) said that ‘the child when born cries, and the sinner when born again prays’. There is nothing more natural for Christians than to pray to their God. Hungry babies don’t stop crying until they receive what they need, and neither should we!

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Source: Jones and Morgan, ‘The Calvinistic Methodist Fathers of Wales’, vol. 2, 1897, translated by John Aaron, Banner of Truth, 2008.